alexpgp | I had been looking for this...

It's one thing to be told that the Soviets had given their rocket test range the name of a village located some distance away from the range's location, quite another to find evidence.

A long time ago, I acquired a "surplus" map of a rather large chunk of the Soviet Union. It had been published by the Aeronautical Chart Service of the US Air Force in August 1949. What intrigued me about the map was the medium on which it had been printed: silk. Just the sort of lightweight item that wouldn't slow a man down in the event he found himself on foot, deep in Soviet territory after having bailed out of his B-52.

The territory shown on the map includes a part of interest to me in Kazakhstan.

I've edited the image to show the Tyura-Tam railroad station, in the lower left-hand corner of the image, and the thriving metropolis of Baikonur, in the upper right-hand corner of the image.

Fortunately, the map never had to be used.

This would have been an interesting addition to my presentation at last October's ATA Conference, but such is life.

Cheers...

UPDATE: In his comment, LJ friend

grosh makes the good point that, at the time the map was printed by the USAF, there was no rocket test range near Tyura-Tam. As has been noted previously in this journal, the official founding of what has become Baikonur took place on June 2, 1955, and the closed military town that was built had no actual public name to speak of. Soon, however, the settlement that grew up near Tyura-Tam began to unofficially be known as Zarya (Dawn).

On January 28, 1958—shortly after Sputnik was launched—the village was officially named Leninskiy (adjectival form of the name Lenin). Three years later, the announcement of the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 identified the launch site as the 'Baikonur cosmodrome.'

In 1966, the village was reclassified as a city and renamed Leninsk. The city was renamed Baikonur in 1995.