Atlas of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic

Summary

The review examines the socioeconomic mapping in the Atlas of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, published in late 1964. Of its more than 220 maps, 93 cover population, the economy, cultural and medical services, and history. The reviewers commend mapping based on actual settlement and land-use areas, judging it particularly appropriate to Georgia's mountainous terrain. They highlight the functional-genetic classification of urban settlements, land-resource maps, the synthetic agricultural map, and the generalized economic map. They also discuss television reception, tourism and mountaineering, and a historical series extending from antiquity to the contemporary period, supplemented by archaeological and architectural monuments. Criticisms concern questionable population-density areas, symbol sizes used for relative values, the absence of rural-settlement typology, strong backgrounds obscuring agricultural dots, and livestock dots distributed across administrative districts without reference to actual grazing areas. Other shortcomings include inconsistent sericulture areas, unquantified industrial reconstruction, omitted freight flows, and the absence of synthetic maps of internal economic regions. Despite these faults, the reviewers highly rate the atlas's scientific content, variety of cartographic methods, and production quality. They regard its publication as completing comprehensive scientific-reference atlas coverage of Soviet Transcaucasia and as a substantial contribution by Georgian scholarship to Soviet geography and cartography.