Russian Atlas Consisting of Forty-four Maps and Dividing the Empire into Forty-two Provincial Regions, 1792

1792: In 1785, Catherine the Great complained that a general map of the Russian Empire she had requested be produced not only had many errors, but devoted too much space to Siberia, and not enough to newly-acquired lands in European Russia. She instructed Major General P.I. Soimonov, who supervised her personal collection of maps, and who also was one of her lovers, to invite German surveyor A.M. Wilbrecht (Vil’brekt) to create an updated version of Ivan Kirilovich Kirilov’s 1745 “Atlas Russicus.” As the new official state’s geographer, Vil’brekt produced the “Russian Atlas Consisting of Forty-four Maps and Dividing the Empire into Forty-two Provincial Regions,” printed 1792 at the Institute of Mining in St. Petersburg. After the 1793 Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth , a new map of the Commonwealth was added to the atlas. The Third, 1795, Partition was mapped by another German surveyor, Karl Opperman in “New Boundary Map of the Russian Empire from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, Divided into Provinces, Districts and Regions,” finished in 1795, and then back-dated to 1795. Catherine’s son Paul II initiated a second edition of the atlas in 1800. (Steven Seegel: “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands,”  Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012)