Sándor Radó’s Atlas of Political Economy

Sándor Radó’s Atlas of Political Economy

While liberal internationalists hoped for a new era of global harmony after World War One, overseen by the League of Nations, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, inspired by the ideas of Marx and Lenin, prompted communist internationalists to develop radical, left-wing geopolitical visions of the world. Geographers sympathetic to socialism and communism, including the Hungarian cartographer Sándor Radó (1899-1981) and British educationalist and Labour MP JF Horrabin (1884-1962), sought to visualise the emerging spatial division between capitalism and communism, the incipient fault lines of the post-1945 Cold War, in maps and atlases intended for a wide readership. These colourful atlases provided a radical left-wing alternative to the propaganda maps prepared by nationalist geopolitical theorists in Weimar and Nazi Germany, notably by Karl Haushofer, and in fascist Italy. For most of the interwar period and World War Two, Radó’s work as a cartographic publisher producing journalistic maps for newspapers and magazines from offices in Berlin, Paris and Geneva served as a cover operation for his primary activity as Soviet intelligence agent, operating latterly in the so-called Rote Kapelle anti-Nazi resistance movement which was known to the British as the Red Orchestra.

Alex Radó (1930) Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. der Imperialismus (Vienna/Berlin: Verlag für Literatur und Politik) / Courtesy of András Trom