World Notes SOVIET UNION

As foreign tourists, diplomats and even the locals long ago discovered, it is tricky to find one's way around the Soviet Union. No wonder. In a startling admission last week, a sheepish-sounding Soviet official said the Kremlin has deliberately falsified virtually all maps of the country for the past 50 years on the orders of the secret police. Chief Soviet Cartographer Viktor Yashchenko told the newspaper Izvestia, "Roads and rivers were moved. City districts were tilted. Streets and houses were incorrectly indicated."

According to Yashchenko, the police started classifying accurate maps as state secrets in the 1930s because of "spy mania." Not surprisingly, he said, "we received numerous complaints. People did not recognize their motherland on maps." For years, space photography has enabled the U.S. to make highly reliable maps of the Soviet Union. But, Yashchenko said, it has taken Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost to spur his agency into releasing accurate maps of its own.