С. Е. Благоволин · 1966
The reviewer evaluates the 1966 Atlas of the USA, the first volume in the Main Administration of Geodesy and Cartography’s planned series of atlases of countries and world regions, as a possible model for subsequent publications. More than fifty scholars participated in its preparation, consultation and review through cooperation among the cartographic administration, research institutes and Moscow State University’s geography faculty. The reviewer praises this arrangement and recommends planned cooperation and acknowledgment of participating institutions. The 72-page atlas emphasizes socioeconomic geography, drawing chiefly on US statistical sources for 1962–1964 and, where necessary, the 1958 industrial census. The reviewer finds its treatment of industry, agriculture, population and transport detailed and manageable, including unemployment and immigration. Praise centers on maps of population distribution and urban growth, employment, freight flows, industrial sectors, agriculture, economic regions and foreign economic relations. Shared scales for freight flows, concentric rings for large industrial centers, contrasting black, and accompanying tables and graphs are judged effective. Criticisms concern insufficient general geographic maps, inadequate coverage of major cities and their internal structures, and the absence of culture, historical geography and US history. The reviewer also questions ambiguous industrial classifications, especially the combined mapping of aircraft and missile production, and notes uneven historical statistics and the omission of employment change from the manufacturing-output map. Overall, the reviewer considers the atlas a successful contribution to economic cartography, suitable for educational, scholarly and general use, and recommends that subsequent atlases retain its production quality while addressing these shortcomings.
М. Б. Вольф · 1967
This review evaluates the 1966 Soviet Atlas of the United States, the first major economic atlas devoted to an individual foreign country published in the USSR. Of its 59 pages of maps, 42 concern the economy, five population, and nine physical geography. The reviewer assesses the atlas’s cartographic design, thematic coverage, methodological soundness, editorial accuracy, and suitability for different users. Overall, the publication is praised for its high printing quality, clear symbols, appropriate use of choropleth, diagrammatic, and dot-map techniques, and extensive state-level statistics. Its strongest sections are those on industry and agriculture: eighteen industrial maps effectively depict manufacturing structure, energy, oil and gas, while twenty-three agricultural maps provide a broad account of crop and livestock distribution, land use, mechanization, and concentration. Transport and foreign-economic-relations maps are also generally successful. Nevertheless, the review identifies numerous specific weaknesses. Population and transport coverage is too limited; time intervals used for demographic trends are inconsistent; major freight flows are omitted; and some agricultural maps incorrectly represent absolute values by choropleth shading. The map of agricultural specialization contains truncated legend labels and fails to explain the criteria used to define specialization. The attempted mapping of agricultural intensity and capitalist development relies on questionable indicators, excessively precise regional boundaries, and misleading terminology. Regional economic maps largely repeat national-level information, while commodity categories in foreign-trade maps insufficiently distinguish raw materials, semi-finished goods, and finished products. More broadly, explanatory texts and legends suffer from imprecise definitions, ambiguous percentages, terminological errors, and occasional misclassification. The atlas is judged adequate for secondary-school teachers and university students but insufficient for advanced research on the United States. It lacks enough maps of spatial change, detailed large-scale regional insets, comprehensive settlement patterns, regional social and economic differentiation in agriculture, a fuller reference map of populated places, an accurate account of U.S. territorial formation, and examples employing American cartographic conventions. The reviewer concludes that, despite these limitations, the first edition is a valuable teaching and reference resource for detailed study of U.S. economic geography. The proposed revisions are intended both for a future edition and for comparable Soviet atlases of other foreign countries.
Richard W. Stephenson · 1972
Stephenson describes the 1966 Atlas SShA, published by the Soviet mapping agency Glavnoe Upravlenie Geodezii i Kartografii, as a thematic atlas containing 52 plates of colored maps covering physical geography, population, the economy, regions and states, U.S. possessions, and foreign economic relations, with additional city plans of New York and Washington. He judges the maps well drawn and rich in data drawn almost entirely from standard American statistical sources.
