I read Tom's review of "How to lie with Maps" book (why did he choose this book? :shocked:) and remembered my surprise when I first saw world maps here, in the US. For some reasons the USSR, or what used to be the USSR, occupied a bigger part of the Eurasia than I used to see. I read before that there is no way to represent the Globe surface on a plane without distortions, and I always planned to do more research some day. Today is this day, and I am going to track my findings here.

All maps distort distance, shape, area, or direction to present a map that meets the users' needs.
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The most popular on the West the Mercator projection has chosen to distort areas.

With the traditional Mercator map (circa 1569, and still in use in many schoolrooms and boardrooms today), Greenland and Africa look the same size. But in reality Africa is 14 times larger!
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To restore the truth, in 1960-s Dr. Arno Peters created (let's skip controversy regarding his authorship)

a new world map that dramatically improves the accuracy of how we see the Earth.
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Which is to say that his maps preserve the areas, and distorts shapes.

According to prominent cartographer Arthur Robinson, the Peters map is "somewhat reminiscent of wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle."
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The Peters map were proclaimed "first non-racist maps", since they, unlike the Mercator maps, didn't give advantage in occupied area to the North America and Europe situated in the North.

In comments, I speculated that the USSR's relative size was distorted for political reasons, but I don't think so any more. Even though this theory is supported by Jeremy Black, a professor of history at the University of Exeter.

Professor Black and others have criticized the NGS in the past for using map projections that exaggerate the size of the temperate latitudes, especially Greenland, Alaska, Canada, and the former Soviet Union. The Van der Grinten projection, which was used by the NGS from 1922 to 1998, became the standard in schools, the news media, and government.

"In that projection, a large USSR appeared menacing, a threat to the whole of Eurasia, and a dominant presence in the world that required containment. It was a cartographic image appropriate for the cold war," writes Black.
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Unless the decisions were made to prefer one projection over another for political reasons, and these decisions are documented, it seems more reasonable to believe that these distortions are simply a side effect -- if another choice was made, somebody else would complain.

I have to admit, though, that the cancer-size USSR does look scary. There is something ugly in proportions. Still not sure how the Soviet cartographers achieved it, but the proportion I got used to was more aesthetically pleasant... and of course, they put the USSR where it belonged to -- at the center of the world.