HN Reader

Well, I lived in USSR it's last years (now I live in Ukraine).

What impressed me, maps of own territory was usually intentionally distorted and have lot of mistakes, even when WWII, many Soviet officers used German maps.

At the same time, looking on mass information industry, have seen interest things - when there was not nearly any information about local enterprises and science (except clearly seen propaganda), but in few top magazines we constantly seen not much delayed info about US and Western Europe tech.

Also, existed constant stream of top technologies, bought from West via black schemes.

As example, of such stolen technology, in early 2000s happen scandal, when free press opened info about Cray-Y-MP used by Ros-hydro-meteorology (RosHydroMet) state entity (it appear in financial report of entity, as equipment for which need budget to pay for maintenance), when it was prohibited to sell to exUSSR by sanctions.

Unfortunately, soviets don't seen value in gaming technologies like C64/Atari/NES video accelerators, but copied many professional Western machines like IBM/360,PDP-10, Mips-R1000 (as I hear, up to R4000), 8086/8088, most of 74 series and many support chips (from Intel).

For about 8088 even appeared rumors, it was copied semi-smart - looks like coping team got crystal with defect, and they really decoded microcode, but under pressure of Soviet tops, included in masks definitively non-working part (with defect), so under microscope Soviet clone looks nearly exactly like US original.

As a student in the 1980s, I had several Soviet maps of parts of Asia because nothing of comparable detail was published in the West. Soviet ethnographic maps were incredible and I think they still surpass anything published later. The USSR in general took cultural geography more seriously.

I have a set of 1980’s Soviet maps of the state of Colorado, and they are oddly accurate for the railroads.

Conversely, when my parents visited Moscow in 1975, many locals offered to trade goods to get their Finnish tourist map of Moscow; since it was more detailed than the local maps they had access to.

well, of course you‘d put in so much detail, when you want to be – at least theoretically – able to conduct military strikes, espionage, sabotage, or political interference.

This is neat and all, but obviously was not an advantage or an efficient use of their intelligence resources