West Indies & Panama Canal Map 1967 Regional Print - Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Panama City

This map of the West Indies was issued in Moscow in 1967 by the Chief Administration of Geodesy and Cartography under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, as page 181 of the second edition of their monumental World Atlas, first published in 1954 and substantially revised for this later printing. The atlas was timed to appear during the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, a fact its publishers noted proudly in their own preface, and it broke with earlier Soviet mapping practice by labeling every sheet in both the Russian and Roman alphabets, deliberately widening its readership beyond the Soviet bloc. Mapped in full color with tints marking elevation on land and depth at sea, and reinforced with relief shading for a more three-dimensional feel, the sheet reflects the atlas's stated ambition to represent the ocean floor and coastal geography as accurately as contemporary Cold War-era science allowed.

The sheet spans an unusually wide sweep of the Caribbean, covering Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles and Trinidad and Tobago all on a single page, at a working scale of roughly 1:3,750,000. A separate, more detailed inset maps the Panama Canal at 1:500,000, underscoring just how central the canal remained to global shipping and strategic thinking even two decades after the Second World War. Urban-vicinity insets throughout the broader World Atlas were generally standardized at 1:250,000, a deliberate editorial choice that let readers compare the relative size of cities across completely different regions of the globe. For a Soviet publication produced at the height of the Cold War, the sheet is notably even-handed, mapping the newly independent and colonial Caribbean alike with the same careful, undifferentiated precision.

This map is an interesting pick for a collector of Cold War-era cartography or anyone drawn to the Caribbean's mid-twentieth-century geography. Three other broad West Indies maps sit elsewhere in this collection, dated 1842, 1871 and 1882, all drawn from the nineteenth-century American and British map trade; this 1967 Soviet sheet stands apart from all of them, both in its much later date and in its unusual origin as an official publication of the USSR rather than a commercial Western atlas house. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.