by Dr. Prof. Sergey Sementsov, North-Western Mapping Centre Company 2016

This unique publication contains high-quality map and plan reproductions displaying St Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad) history through the 20th century. There are 218 map documents and 28 photographic plans and mosaics covering the city itself, its close suburbs and the entire region from the early 1900s to the late 1990s.
Maps and cartographic images make up more than 50 per cent of this large-size (245 x 340 mm) 424-page de-luxe gift book. Other pages contain the story written by architect academician Dr Professor Sergey Sementsov, one of the leading urban planning and architectural history experts of the modern St Petersburg. The book’s publisher is the North-Western Mapping Centre Company, a branch of the Discus Media Cartographers, one of the first new independent Russian map makers (established 1989). Discus Media has also produced a CD on the tramways of St Petersburg.
The mapped history of St Petersburg follows the same dramatic the story as the entire Russian state during the 20th century. The city's growth during pre-World War One decades changed to the disaster of the Revolution and the Civil War, turning to social and urban romanticism of the 1920s. These were followed by cruel social experiments of the Stalin era, the tragedy of World War Two with the unprecedented siege of Leningrad in 1941-1944, post-war reinstatement, fast but astonishingly disproportional development of the Soviet socialism, and its final crash in 1991.
It is remarkable that this book manages to cover the period from the 1950s when the state authorities, led by manias of global secrecy and suspiciousness, forced maps to be converted to badly distorted schematics, while those published already were sentenced to execution by scissors and fire. Some of the biggest libraries and archives managed to save selected maps only by taking them to restricted-access collections, until map recovery became possible after the end of the Communist era. Most of the maps and plans presented in the book originate from private collections and the majority have never been reproduced before. Many of them give details of tram routes.
All maps and images in the book are numbered and a full list of reproductions in English is included in a supplement, but the text is otherwise in Russian.
This rather special publication inevitably comes at quite a high price but for anyone with an interest in - indeed, with a passion for - maps it represents great value!

Russian text. 245*340 mm; 424 pages, 218 map documents and 28 photographic plans and mosaics covering the city itself, its close suburbs and the entire region from the early 1900s to the last 1990s.

Note: Internal map shown left.