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This map shows West Germany and was printed in the USSR in 1988. It describes a country, Germany, that has completely changed its shape and was printed in a country that no longer exists. I bought it in Kiev, USSR, in 1988 at the hieght of General Secretary Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika reforms. The map describes the devision of Europe and is important to me as I had lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain, in Germany and the USSR. The map further describes its time, when you remember that the it was bought in Kiev, then the capital of a Soviet Republic under Communism, just 2 years before the Soviet Union collapsed and the Ukraine became an independant country. Its time is reinforced when it is borne in mind that the map describes the division of Germany, which looked permenant, but in reality only had another 12 months or so to run. The lines on the map look solid and firm, but in fact they were shortly to be proven to be just that, artifical boundaries that could not stand the test of time.