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75 x 54 in. ????????????????????????????????????? . This is a very large’educational map’ (????????????) of the Soviet Union, showing the individual constituent Soviet Socialist Republics. It includes a range of administrative, economic, and geographic information, and the legend also contains symbols denoting hero cities (?????? -?????) and the hero fortress of Brest (???????? -??????????), which held out against German attacks for weeks in the opening phase of Operation Barbarossa. At right in the legend, the numbers and text listed correspond to small Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (?????????????????????????????????????????????), which were quite distinct from the much larger SSRs such as the Kazakh SSR, the Georgian SSR, and the Russian Federative SSR. Among the railways shown are the famous Trans-Siberian Railway, which by this time had several branches, as well as the Turksib (Turkestan-Siberia) Railway. The year after this map’s publication, the Soviet Tenth Five-Year Plan tasked the Young Communist League (Kosomol) with the “construction project of the century, ” the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM). Tens of thousands of young people were mobilized to build the railway, which was built on a foundation laid over many years through Gulag prison labor. The BAM route branched off the Trans-Siberian and ran north of Lake Baikal into eastern Siberia, yet another in a long string of attempts to access and extract the region’s vast resources. As a major infrastructure project and propaganda campaign of the late Soviet period, the railway’s construction reflected the problems of the late Soviet system, including inefficiency and heavy-handedness. The BAM was eventually completed, but at significant financial and political cost, helping to impel the collapse of the Soviet Union. This map was made by the Scientific and Editorial Mapping Department of the Main Directorate of Geodesy and Cartography (????????????????????????????????????? , GUGK for short). The cursive text at bottom indicates that the map was intended for use in elementary schools, and the gromets in the upper corners suggest that it was hung in a classroom. It was originally published in 1971, while the present edition was “signed for printing” on November 20, 1973. It was edited by A. ????? Served as technical editor.

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