From drawings to accurate maps: third episode of "8 Steps Across the Map of Russia" released

The educational video project "8 Steps Across the Map of Russia" continues its journey through the pages of history. The new third episode has already been published on the website of the National Centre RUSSIA. It is dedicated to the era of Peter I, the emergence of Russia as a maritime power and the birth of the cartographic tradition without which victories in the Baltic would have been impossible. The episode is already available via the link.

The experts in the third episode were Vladimir Bulatov, Senior Researcher at the Department of Written Sources of the State Historical Museum and Candidate of Geographical Sciences; Sergei Mukhametov, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University; Grigory Zubenko and Yevgeny Gorbachevsky, researchers at the Research and Exposition Department of the State Historical Museum; and Natalia Kargapolova, Senior Researcher at the same department.

The new episode is a true visual poem about ships, battles and the tectonic shift that took place in Russia at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. The experts examine the main myth about "creating a fleet from nothing" and show how, in two decades, a country that was only just beginning to master its borders became an empire whose ships dictated its will in the Baltic. Viewers will learn how our ancestors opened a "window to Europe" not only by force of arms, but also through cartography, the training of their own specialists and the introduction of advanced methods for measuring space.

The episode explains that, contrary to the popular image of "Russia before Peter" as a backward backwater, the country already had shipbuilding traditions. The ship "Oryol" was built under Alexei Mikhailovich, while the famous boat, the "grandfather of the Russian fleet", had been bought by his father. The problem was not a lack of ideas, but the fact that they could not be scaled up, as well as the absence of a systematic approach to training craftsmen.

The key metaphor of the project’s new episode is that the main weapon of Russia in that era was not the cannon, but the map. Pre-Petrine drawings were topographical descriptions without precise coordinates and were unsuitable for the sea, while Peter I, inspired by the Dutch school, demanded a mathematical foundation: degrees, latitudes and accurate measurements. He personally took part in compiling maps of the Don and the Caspian Sea — it was then that the Caspian on maps changed from "round" to elongated, as we know it today. The success was so clear that the Russian tsar even received a gold medal from the Paris Academy of Sciences for the accuracy of this map.

The episode ends with the story of the forgotten feat of the Russian Cossack Semyon Dezhnev, who passed through the strait between Asia and America in a small sea vessel and drew up a detailed report that was later lost in the Yakutsk ostrog. This happened 80 years before the expedition of Vitus Bering, whom Peter I, unaware of his predecessor’s achievement, sent to check whether "America had joined Asia". The expedition confirmed the existence of the strait, and today it bears Bering’s name, while the easternmost cape of Eurasia bears Dezhnev’s.

"8 Steps Across the Map of Russia" is a fascinating journey in which each new episode reveals unknown pages of history and shows how space became destiny, and the map became the main tool of the victors.