In 1948 Ashgabat was described before the earthquake as lying "on a sloping plain of the Kopet-Dag foothills, stretching seven kilometers from west to east and five kilometers from the railroad right-of-way to the south, in the direction of the mountains." Through the mid-1970s, Ashgabat was a compact city, as shown by the 1974 Soviet military's General Staff map J-40-081.  The village of Köşi, collective farm "Leningrad", airport, and suburbs to the north were outside the city limits.