On the Publication of the Atlas of Czechoslovak History

Summary

K. A. Salishchev and I. M. Maergoiz review the Atlas of Czechoslovak History, produced by about 180 authors with nearly 500 scientific and technical contributors. Its approximately 250 maps cover the Early Paleolithic through 1960. The reviewers praise its broad thematic coverage and Marxist interpretation, bringing civil, political, military, socioeconomic, cultural and population history into interconnected representations of historical periods. They emphasize the detailed economic mapping and fine chronological divisions as resources for studying regional development. Comparisons across dates, diagrams showing change within individual maps, varied scales and coordinated colors support the atlas’s historical-geographical presentation. Alongside problems of legibility and overcrowding, they raise two objections of principle: the use of modern place names on maps of earlier periods and the territorial restriction of some themes, which leaves external connections, especially economic ties, insufficiently developed. They regard the atlas’s collective experience as useful for the Soviet Atlas of World History then under development and look forward to a national atlas of Czechoslovakia.