Criticism and bibliography. Atlas of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic

G. N. Sarkisyan reviews the Atlas of the Armenian SSR, compiled by the geography sector of the Armenian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geological Sciences with participating institutions and scholars, under A. B. Baghdasaryan's scientific editorship. Issued simultaneously in Armenian and Russian and dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of Soviet power in Armenia, it contains 182 maps on 120 pages covering natural conditions, population and cultural development, the economy and history. Sarkisyan describes it as the second comprehensive national atlas after the Belarusian SSR atlas and the first relatively large-scale atlas of a country with highly complex mountainous relief. He emphasizes practical maps of agricultural climate, phenology, geological hazards and energy resources; the combination of related phenomena on individual maps; and the use of insets, profiles, diagrams, explanatory texts and generalizing maps. The Sevan–Razdan irrigation and energy complex map integrates water management, electricity supply, irrigation and planned measures. His section-by-section assessment discusses relief shading, vertical zonation, industrial and agricultural development, economic regions, and historical maps compiled by S. T. Yeremyan. Population maps document the catastrophic wartime destruction and displacement of Ottoman Armenians and subsequent repatriation. He also notes six new Armenian cartographic fonts. Although strongly approving of the atlas, Sarkisyan questions the placement of historical maps and recommends maps of synoptic processes and labour resources, frost-probability information, and fuller depiction of industrial raw-material bases. He praises the Minsk Cartographic Factory's printing and regards the atlas as an implementation of Lenin's methodological requirements for a Soviet atlas.