Crimea oblast – A.D. Kratkov, 1967

Физическая учебная карта. Крымская область [Physical Educational Map. Crimean Oblast] Colour offset print, issued under the editorship of A.D. Kratkov by the Main Administration for Geodesy and Cartography under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Moscow, compiled in 1965 and revised in 1967. Size (paper): 72 × 84 cm.

The map presents the Crimea not merely as a geographical territory, but as a historically, culturally, and ideologically integrated Soviet landscape. Nature, economy, history, and commemorative culture are brought together in a single coherent image, fully in keeping with the didactic and propagandistic objectives of Soviet cartography in the late Khrushchev and early Brezhnev periods.

At its core is a dense network of “places of interest,” framing the Crimea as a region with a long history interpreted toward a specific end. Antiquity and the Middle Ages are extensively represented—Scythian settlements, Greek cities such as Chersonesos and Kerkinitida, Genoese fortresses, cave towns, and Ottoman remains—but earlier periods are shown primarily as a prehistory culminating in the Soviet era as the peak of the region’s development.

The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) constitutes the moral and narrative focal point. Almost every city—from Simferopol to Kerch, from Sevastopol to Yalta—is associated with monuments commemorating liberation, partisan warfare, mass graves, and heroes of the Red Army. Sevastopol in particular is emphatically presented as a “Hero City,” a sacral Soviet landscape in which military sacrifice, heroism, and loyalty to the state converge. In this way, the map legitimizes not only territorial continuity but also moral ownership.

In addition, the map emphasizes the Crimea as a space of health and recreation within the Soviet Union. Resort towns such as Yalta, Yevpatoria, and Feodosia are linked to sanatoria, palaces, and natural resources (salt lakes, climate), presenting the Crimea as collective property of the Soviet people: a place for recovery, leisure, and the cultivation of the “new man.” This closely aligns with the Soviet ideal of organized leisure and state-controlled welfare.

Cartographically, the map is exemplary of the didactic Soviet map: highly symbolic, rich in pictograms, and supplemented by inset maps showing climate, soils, and vegetation. The emphasis lies not on navigation or precision, but on a systematic understanding of space—how nature, history, and socialist progress reinforce one another. The apparent ideological neutrality of the cartographic form thus conceals a highly directed message.

In 1967, the Crimea was administratively part of the Ukrainian SSR, yet on this map the Crimean Oblast remains a clearly delineated and self-contained unit within the Soviet whole. National or ethnic tensions—such as the deportation of the Crimean Tatars—are entirely absent. The map depicts a purified, harmonious, and wholly Soviet Crimea, in which conflict has been resolved and history has been fixed into a state-sanctioned narrative.

Price: Euro 250,-