United States Government topographers have discovered puzzling new shifts in Soviet maps that seem to indicate a policy of distortion for national security. According to the specialists, Russian charts and atlases, once renowned for their standards of excellence, have been designed in the last few years to shift coastlines, towns, rivers and other major features at random by as much as 25 miles in a seeming attempt at deception. In one of the most unusual cases of such deformations, which has also been detected by West European analysts, Nevel, a transport centre in western Russia, was moved 10 miles from its true location on a lake shore and converging railroad lines were twisted out of alignment to conform. The possibility that the revised map locations are based on new surveys is ruled out by U.S. analysts on the ground that most of the Soviet Union had already been surveyed with a high degree of accuracy.
