With tensions between the UK and Russia having escalated following Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, we are reminded of the not-so-distant past when the old USSR took a special interest in our towns and cities.
Working for the Soviet Union in absolute secrecy, Cold War cartographers pieced together maps of UK towns and cities, including Scotland's capital, using data from a wide variety of sources.
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In one Soviet map of Edinburgh, printed in the 1980s at a time when the nuclear threat was in danger of bubbling over, we gain an idea of the communist super power's intentions.
Just seeing Edinburgh's streets and buildings detailed in the unfamiliar Cyrillic script on a USSR-funded artefact is enough to make your blood run cold.
Key transport hubs industrial targets and places of entertainment, such as Waverley Station, Leith Docks, and Murrayfield Stadium, are marked out in bold, while government and administrative facilities are also highlighted.
Had the Cold War frozen further than it did, the maps would have proved invaluable to the USSR in conducting aerial bombing campaigns and for attacks by land and sea.
However, the maps, which were often far more detailed than Western equivalents of Soviet-occupied territories, weren't always wholly accurate.
They included major discrepancies, including streets and buildings that were no longer there or weren't yet constructed.
It seems the USSR were unaware that Edinburgh's second railway terminus, Princes Street Station, had been demolished in 1970, while on the Fife coast, the naval base at Rosyth appears to have been missed out altogether.
In some of the Glasgow maps, the St Enoch Railway Station - closed in 1966 and demolished a decade later - makes an appearance, while long-since vanished Victorian tenements in the Gorbals are also present.
Further down the Clyde, the Erskine Bridge, completed in 1971, appears alongside the ferry it replaced.
And in Neilston, East Renfrewshire, a defunct railway line is shown to have existed at the same time as the housing development built after it was lifted.
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One man who knows the maps well is historian John Davis, who co-authored The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World.
He told in 2017: “In Neilston there’s a railway line that was electrified in the 1960s but was abandoned towards Ayr. A residential development was added much later.
“Their Glasgow map shows the railway beyond Neilston electrified alongside the new houses - these never existed simultaneously.”
As well as larger cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Soviet regime also published 1:10,000 and 1:25,000 maps of Aberdeen, Dundee, Dunfermline, Gourock, and Kilmarnock.
