The Changing Face of Europe Keeps World’s Map Makers on Their Toes : Communism: While scrambling cartographers see demand going up, professional Kremlin watchers in the West are suddenly out of work.

President Bush on Sept. 2 recognized the Baltic states as sovereign republics. Four days later, the Russian legislature voted to change the name of Leningrad back to the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.

It’s about time, thought the folks at Rand McNally. The world’s largest map makers had made the same moves more than a week earlier for their forthcoming Cosmopolitan World Atlas.

“We took a gamble. We pulled our atlases off the presses on Aug. 26 and made the changes. Right now, we’re feeling pretty good about that,” says Conroy Erickson, head of public relations for the Illinois-based firm.

But it’s not just cartographers who need a crystal ball to do business these days. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the dismembering of the Soviet Union has textbook publishers, map makers, professors and Soviet-watchers scrambling to keep up.

“We have an editorial department now completely comprised of armchair political scientists--everybody offering their opinion on what might happen,” says Chuck Lees of Hammond Inc., another map-making firm.

Hammond wasn’t as fortunate as its competitor. Their new books were already printed when Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia won their independence. That’s the bad news. The good news is that everyone in the industry believes people will soon be spending money on new maps.

While map makers saw a business boom in the new boundaries, the demise of the Communist Party and the old Soviet Union signaled bad news for others, particularly those who made a living analyzing what went on behind the Iron Curtain.

“For the field of Soviet studies in general, about 85% of the profession is out of business,” says Alexander Motyl of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of Soviet Affairs.

“This means the foreign policy people are out of business, except if they’re historians, and the Kremlinologists are gone. Kremlinology is for all intents and purposes dead.”

So is the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs. The folks there saw the handwriting on the Berlin Wall last year, and the Stanford University publication is shutting down this year after its 25th anniversary edition in October.

Things were different but difficult at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, where they had plenty of orders for textbooks but no idea what would go in them. The Austin, Texas-based publisher produces world history books for high schools nationwide, but they couldn’t write history as fast as the Soviet State Council was rewriting it.

The new book was due out in early 1992, but the stunning events across the Atlantic led the publisher to push the publication date back two to three months to allow time for an update, says spokesman Anson Franklin.

“I think it’s a long time since you’ve had anything this dramatic happen,” Franklin says. “It’s incredible. I can’t think of a time since the war in Vietnam when you’ve had things this dramatic.”

Rand McNally’s Erickson agrees. “These are the most sweeping and dramatic changes in the history of cartography,” he says. “And the potential is there for ongoing change.”

The fall of communism was not quite the boon for capitalism some hoped it would be. At the Annin Flag Co. in Verona, N.J., there was no sudden demand for the yellow, green and red Lithuanian number or the red and white banner of Latvia.

“We’ve been making flags for these suppressed nations for some time,” says Dan Connors, director of public relations for the company. “People from the Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania in this country have bought them all along.”

There is one exception, he says, the red, white and blue flag of the Russian Republic. “That one hasn’t been available in, oh, 70 years,” he says. “But again, we’re not getting orders in large numbers.”

The red Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle is probably history, most everyone agrees. “I think we have seen the red flag for the last time,” intones Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee, which raised the flag time and time again at medal ceremonies.

There were no protocol problems at the United Nations, where backbiting and shoe-slamming were staples of the Cold War days. The new independent states were voted in by acclamation. Each delegation assumed its spot in the General Assembly, where they were seated--without problems--in alphabetical order.

Despite all the uproar, the world goes on. Motyl, who heads the curriculum committee at the Harriman Institute, is busy revising courses and texts for the spring semester. Rand McNally is updating its other products.

At Harcourt Brace, a grateful Franklin noted that there was no problem with killing math and reading texts for this school year.

“There, the concepts and changes evolve,” he said. “They change over several years instead of overnight.”