Countries that no longer exist: Yugoslavia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and what to do about them

You backpacked through Yugoslavia in 1985, drinking espresso on the Dubrovnik waterfront and taking the night train from Belgrade to Skopje. You crossed into Czechoslovakia in 1989 and walked across the Charles Bridge a month before the Velvet Revolution. You went to Moscow in 1988 with a Cold War tour group and got your passport stamped at Sheremetyevo by a Soviet border guard in a cap two sizes too big for him. You have the photos. You have the ticket stubs. You have the memory of the smell of the platform at the Belgrade train station, and you have an Inturist receipt in a drawer somewhere with “USSR” printed across the top.

Then you sit down at mytravelmaps.org/countries-visited-map to mark your trips on the map, and Yugoslavia is not on the list. Czechoslovakia is not on the list. The Soviet Union is not on the list. None of the three countries you visited still exists. There are seven countries where Yugoslavia used to be, fifteen countries where the USSR used to be, and two countries where Czechoslovakia used to be. The trip happened — but what do you click?

This is one of the most-asked questions we get from older travelers, and the answer is genuinely simple. There is a rule, it is the rule that almost every travel-tracking community has converged on, and it produces clean, defensible counts. This article walks through that rule, then takes you through every major dissolution and merger of the last fifty years so you know exactly which modern country corresponds to each of your old trips. By the end you will have a complete answer for every “but what about…” case we have ever seen.

The rule: you visited the place, not the polity

The rule is one sentence. You visited the place, not the polity. Whatever physical location you actually set foot on, look up which modern sovereign state contains that location today, and count that. The country that issued the passport stamp, the country printed on the ticket, the flag flying at the train station — none of those matter for the purpose of marking a modern map. What matters is the dirt.

Concretely: if you walked across the Charles Bridge in 1989, you visited Czechoslovakia at the time, but Prague is now in the Czech Republic, so you tick the Czech Republic. If you went to Bratislava on the same trip, you tick Slovakia, even though both visits were stamped on a single Czechoslovak visa. If you spent a week on the Dalmatian coast in 1985, you tick Croatia. If you spent a weekend in Skopje in 1980, you tick North Macedonia. If you flew into Sheremetyevo and went to Red Square in 1988, you tick Russia. If you flew into Tashkent on the same Aeroflot ticket, you tick Uzbekistan. The Soviet visa is gone, but the cities are still there and they each belong to a successor state today.

This rule is the one used by the Travelers' Century Club, by NomadMania, by Most Traveled People, and by essentially every other serious country-counting community. There is no competition. Nobody seriously argues that you should mark a country that does not exist anymore — there is nowhere to put a tick. And nobody argues that you should refuse to count an old trip just because the borders have moved since you were there. Travel is about places, not flags. You went; you count.

The corollary is also worth stating: if you visitedonly the predecessor state, and you visited only one location inside it, you only get one successor country, not all of them. A 1985 trip to Belgrade gets you Serbia. It does not get you Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo as a bonus. The pieces are independent now, and you only count the pieces you actually stood on. The same logic applies to a USSR trip that only went to Moscow: you get Russia, not all 15.

The Soviet Union (1922–1991) → 15 countries

The USSR was a federation of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics. When it dissolved at the end of 1991, each of those republics became an independent country, and all fifteen are now full UN member states. The dissolution itself was rapid: the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) declared independence in the spring and summer of 1991 and were recognized by the international community in September; the rest of the union came apart over the autumn; the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords on 8 December 1991 declaring the USSR dissolved^[1]; and the remaining republics joined them in the Alma-Ata Protocol on 21 December.^[2] Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigned as Soviet president on 25 December 1991, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

For traveler purposes, the fifteen successor states group neatly into four geographic clusters:

• The Slavic core: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. If you visited Moscow, Saint Petersburg, or anywhere in the RSFSR, that is now Russia. Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa → Ukraine. Minsk, Brest → Belarus.
• The Baltics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. All three were forcibly incorporated into the USSR in 1940, never recognized as Soviet by most Western governments, and reasserted independence in 1990–1991. If you visited Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius in the Soviet era, you tick the corresponding modern country.
• The Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Tbilisi → Georgia, Yerevan → Armenia, Baku → Azerbaijan. The three of them are often visited together as a regional loop today.
• Central Asia — the Stans:Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. Almaty (then the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan) → Kazakhstan; Tashkent → Uzbekistan; Bishkek (then Frunze) → Kyrgyzstan; Dushanbe → Tajikistan; Ashgabat → Turkmenistan.
• Moldova: the only one that does not fit a cluster. Chișinău (then often spelled Kishinev) → Moldova. Note that the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria) is a breakaway region inside Moldova that is not on the 195 list.

The thing most travelers from the Cold War era do not realize is that a single Intourist trip to Moscow gets you one country (Russia), but a Trans-Siberian Railway trip that crossed multiple Soviet republics gets you several. A 1989 itinerary that went Moscow → Tashkent → Samarkand → Bishkek → back to Moscow visited Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Three countries today for one trip then. Many older travelers find an extra three to five countries in their map this way.

Yugoslavia (1918–2008) → 7 countries

Yugoslavia is the more complicated case because it dissolved in stages over almost two decades. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), the Tito-era state that most travelers remember, came apart between 1991 and 1992 in a sequence of declarations of independence and wars. After 1992, the rump state — just Serbia and Montenegro — called itself the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), then Serbia and Montenegro (after a 2003 constitutional reorganization), and finally split into two separate countries in 2006. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, and is recognized by about half the world. The full sequence:

• 1991: Slovenia and Croatia. Both declared independence on 25 June 1991. Slovenia's Ten-Day War ended quickly with the Brioni Agreement; Croatia's war of independence dragged on until 1995.^[3]
• 1991: North Macedonia. Declared independence on 8 September 1991, peacefully. The country's name was the Republic of Macedonia until it was changed to the Republic of North Macedonia in February 2019 under the Prespa Agreement, resolving a long-running dispute with Greece.
• 1992: Bosnia and Herzegovina. Declared independence on 1 March 1992 after a referendum. The Bosnian War followed; the Dayton Agreement ended it in December 1995.^[4]
• 2006: Montenegro. Voted to leave the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in a referendum on 21 May 2006, declared independence on 3 June 2006, and joined the UN later that month.
• 2008: Kosovo. Declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. Recognized by about half of UN member states. Not on the standard 195 list, but counted by many travelers anyway. We have a separate piece on this in disputed countries.

For the traveler, the rule produces clean answers. Visited Zagreb in 1985 → Croatia. Visited Ljubljana → Slovenia. Visited Sarajevo or Mostar → Bosnia and Herzegovina. Visited Skopje or Lake Ohrid → North Macedonia. Visited Belgrade or Novi Sad → Serbia. Visited Kotor, Budva, or Cetinje → Montenegro. Visited Pristina, Prizren, or Peja → Kosovo (if you count Kosovo) or Serbia (if you do not).

The biggest practical bonus for older travelers: a standard Yugoslav-era beach holiday on the Adriatic almost always counts as Croatia today. The whole eastern Adriatic coast from Pula to Dubrovnik was Croatia inside Yugoslavia and is Croatia today. A second bonus: a 1980s Belgrade-to-Athens train trip that stopped in Skopje and Thessaloniki gets you Serbia and North Macedonia (plus Greece, which never went anywhere). Many older European travelers who think they have visited “one Balkan country” have actually visited three or four.

Czechoslovakia (1918–1992) → 2 countries

The cleanest dissolution in modern history. Czechoslovakia was created from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, survived the Second World War (after a German occupation), spent forty years inside the Soviet bloc, was the site of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended communist rule, and then peacefully split itself into two independent countries on 1 January 1993 in what is universally known as the Velvet Divorce.^[5]

The split was negotiated rather than fought over, the assets were divided roughly two-to-one between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (matching the population ratio), and the new borders followed the existing internal Czech-Slovak line that had been drawn after the First World War. There were no border revisions and no population transfers. If you visited Czechoslovakia before 1993, the rule is obvious:

• Prague, Brno, Karlovy Vary, Český Krumlov, Plzeň, Ostrava → Czech Republic (officially also Czechia, since 2016).
• Bratislava, Košice, Banská Bystrica, the High Tatras, the Slovak portion of any Tatra trekking trip → Slovakia.

A common bonus: many Western travelers in the 1980s did the standard Communist-bloc loop — Berlin, Prague, Bratislava (often as a day trip from Vienna), Budapest. If you did that loop, you have already visited Slovakia without realizing it, because Bratislava became the capital of an independent country a few years after your trip. That single hour on the wrong side of the Danube is enough; the dirt counts.

The two Germanys (1949–1990) → 1 country

The Germanys are the simplest case in the entire article. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were created in 1949 and reunified on 3 October 1990 — technically via the East German states acceding to the Federal Republic, which is why German law treats reunification as continuity rather than a new state. Berlin was a four-power-occupied island inside East Germany; West Berlin was administered by the Western allies, East Berlin by the GDR.^[6]

For the traveler, all of it is now Germany. Visited West Berlin in 1985 → Germany. Visited East Berlin on a day pass through Checkpoint Charlie → Germany. Visited Leipzig, Dresden, or Weimar before 1990 → Germany. Visited Hamburg or Munich at any point → Germany. There is one Germany on the modern map and there is exactly one tick to give for it, no matter how many times the political map of central Europe was redrawn between your visits.

Other mergers and splits

A handful of other countries have appeared, disappeared, merged, or split in the modern era. The complete catalogue for travelers:

• North Yemen + South Yemen → Yemen (1990). The Yemen Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen merged on 22 May 1990. If you visited Sana'a, Aden, or anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula south of Saudi Arabia, you visited Yemen.
• North Vietnam + South Vietnam → Vietnam (1975/1976). The end of the Vietnam War in April 1975 was followed by formal reunification on 2 July 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi are both Vietnam today.
• Ethiopia → Ethiopia + Eritrea (1993). Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia after WWII and annexed in 1962, fought a long war of independence (1961–1991), and became formally independent after a 1993 referendum. If you visited Asmara before 1993, you visited a place that was administered as part of Ethiopia at the time and is now Eritrea — tick Eritrea.
• Sudan → Sudan + South Sudan (2011). South Sudan voted for independence in a January 2011 referendum and became the newest country in the world on 9 July 2011. Visited Juba before 2011 → South Sudan. Visited Khartoum → Sudan.
• Indonesia → Indonesia + Timor-Leste (2002). East Timor was a Portuguese colony, then occupied by Indonesia from 1975, then voted for independence in 1999, and was restored to sovereignty in 2002. Visited Dili before 2002 → Timor-Leste.
• Tanganyika + Zanzibar → Tanzania (1964). The mainland country of Tanganyika and the offshore Sultanate of Zanzibar merged in April 1964. The merger predates most readers' trips to the region, but it is worth knowing that Zanzibar (often sold as a separate destination) is part of Tanzania, not a separate country.
• Sikkim → India (1975). The Kingdom of Sikkim, an independent Himalayan state until 1975, held a referendum that year and was annexed by India. Anyone who somehow visited Sikkim before 1975 (very few) ticks India today.
• Newfoundland → Canada (1949). The Dominion of Newfoundland was a self-governing British dominion until it joined Canada as a province in 1949. Anyone counting trips going back that far now ticks Canada.
• Saar Protectorate → West Germany (1957). The Saar region was a French-administered protectorate from 1947 to 1957, then voted to rejoin Germany. It is now part of the German state of Saarland — tick Germany.
• Hong Kong handover (1997). Hong Kong was a British dependent territory until 1 July 1997, when sovereignty was transferred to the People's Republic of China. It is now a Special Administrative Region of China, which means visiting Hong Kong counts as visiting China for the standard 195 list. (The TCC counts it separately; we do not.)
• Macau handover (1999). Same story. Macau was Portuguese until 20 December 1999, then transferred to China as an SAR. Visiting Macau counts as visiting China.

Name changes that did not change the country

A handful of countries have changed names without changing borders, sovereignty, or anything else. These all count straightforwardly as the same country — the name on your old passport stamp is just a different name for the place that is on the modern map.

• Burma → Myanmar (1989). Renamed by the military junta. Many Western governments and publications still use Burma; the UN uses Myanmar. Same country.
• Ceylon → Sri Lanka (1972). Renamed on adopting a new constitution. Same island, same country.
• Upper Volta → Burkina Faso (1984). Renamed by Thomas Sankara. The new name means “land of upright people.”
• Zaire → Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997). Renamed after Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown. The country had been renamed Zaire in 1971 from its previous name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo — the 1997 change reverted it.
• Swaziland → Eswatini (2018). Renamed by King Mswati III on the country's 50th independence anniversary. Same kingdom, new name.
• Macedonia → North Macedonia (2019). Renamed under the Prespa Agreement to resolve a long-running dispute with Greece, which has its own historical region called Macedonia. The country's name in formal contexts is now the Republic of North Macedonia.
• Cape Verde → Cabo Verde (2013, in English). Not a real rename — the country asked international bodies to use the Portuguese form “Cabo Verde” in English contexts. Same country.
• Czech Republic → Czechia (2016, short form). Czechia is the official short form of the Czech Republic, adopted by the Czech government for international use in 2016. Both names refer to the same country and either is correct.

The complete table: predecessors and successors

A single look-up table for the impatient. If your old ticket says one of the names on the left, the corresponding name on the right is what to mark on the modern map. If your trip visited multiple regions inside the predecessor, you may have multiple successor states to tick — the rule is one tick per modern country whose territory you actually set foot on.

*Kosovo is on the standard list only if you count partially-recognized states — it is not a UN member.

Edge cases and gotchas

A few situations come up often enough that they deserve their own treatment:

I visited “Yugoslavia” in some general sense and I cannot remember exactly where I went.

If you genuinely cannot remember which republic you were in, the most defensible move is to count the federation capital. Belgrade was the capital of Yugoslavia for the entire SFRY period and is now in Serbia. So a vague “I was somewhere in Yugoslavia” counts as Serbia. This is a fallback for the rare case where you have no other information — if you remember the city or even the rough region, count by location instead.

I visited the USSR but I only have memories of “Russia.”

If your trip was entirely within the borders of the modern Russian Federation (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, the Golden Ring, the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok), count Russia and stop. If you went anywhere else — Kyiv, Tashkent, Tbilisi, Riga, Tallinn, Minsk — count those as their modern successor states too. People often forget that a 1980s Trans-Sib trip crossed several modern borders that did not exist at the time.

I visited Hong Kong before 1997 — do I count China?

Yes. Hong Kong is now a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, and visiting it counts as visiting China by the same logic as every other handover or transfer. The TCC and a few other lists count Hong Kong as a separate territory, but on the standard 195-country baseline (which is what My Travel Maps uses), it is part of China. If you visited Hong Kong but mainland China itself, you still tick China.

I visited Crimea in 2010, when it was Ukraine. Do I count Russia?

No. Crimea's 2014 annexation by Russia is not recognized by the United Nations or by the vast majority of UN member states. The General Assembly affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity in Resolution 68/262 in March 2014.^[7] For the standard list, Crimea is in Ukraine, so a 2010 trip to Yalta → Ukraine. The same logic applies to eastern Ukrainian regions occupied since 2022 — the internationally recognized border is unchanged.

I visited East Berlin on a day pass. Do I count Germany twice?

No. Germany is one country today, and you can only tick it once. The distinction between East and West Berlin is a historical and emotional one but not a country-counting one anymore. (NomadMania's 1,301-region system does break Berlin out as multiple sub-regions, so if you want to track that level of detail, you would use NomadMania, not the 195 list.)

The country name on my passport stamp is in Cyrillic and I cannot read it.

If you can read the city name, that is enough — look the city up and find the modern country it is in. The most common Cyrillic-stamp puzzles for older travelers are USSR-era stamps from Moscow (Москва → Russia), Kyiv (Київ → Ukraine), Minsk (Мінск → Belarus), Tallinn (which mostly used Latin script even in the Soviet era → Estonia), and the various Central Asian capitals. A photograph of the stamp posted to a forum like r/passportporn or r/travel will get a reading from someone within minutes.

How to mark your old trips on My Travel Maps

The workflow is straightforward. Open the countries-visited map, look at the table above for any predecessor state your old ticket mentions, and tick the corresponding modern country. The map uses the standard 195-country baseline, which means:

• None of the predecessor states (USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc.) appear on the map at all — they no longer exist, so there is nowhere to click them.
• Every modern successor state has its own clickable polygon. Marking, say, Russia and then separately Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan from your 1989 Soviet trip takes about ten seconds.
• The state of your map is saved to your browser's local storage, not to a server, so you can experiment freely with adding or removing successor states without anything getting committed permanently.

If you are doing a major retroactive update of your map based on this article — many of our users do, after reading this piece for the first time — we recommend going trip-by-trip rather than country-by-country. Pull out the old photo album or the box of ticket stubs, go through one trip at a time, and ask: which modern countries did I physically set foot on during that trip? Tick each one as you go. It is more accurate than trying to brainstorm a list from memory, and it surfaces forgotten stops you would otherwise miss.

Frequently asked questions

What is the official rule for counting historical countries?

There is no “official” rule because there is no governing body for travel counting. But there is overwhelming convergence: the Travelers' Century Club, NomadMania, Most Traveled People, and essentially every informal community use the same rule we have laid out here: count by modern successor states based on the actual location you visited.

Why don't I get to count Yugoslavia as a country in itself?

Because there is nowhere to put a tick. The map shows the countries that exist today, and Yugoslavia does not. The consolation prize is that a single Yugoslav trip almost always counts as multiple modern countries, which usually works out to more ticks than you would have had otherwise, not fewer.

I have a passport stamp from Czechoslovakia. Doesn't the stamp itself prove I visited a country called Czechoslovakia?

Yes — in 1989 the country was called Czechoslovakia and that is what the stamp says. But the question we are answering is “what should I click on a 2026 map of the world,” and a 2026 map does not have Czechoslovakia on it. Use the stamp as evidence that you visited the place; click the modern country (or both, if you visited both halves) on the modern map.

Are East Germany and West Germany really one country now?

For the purposes of country counting, yes. They unified in 1990 into a single sovereign state and the modern map has one Germany. People who want to track the historical experience separately sometimes mark East and West as different sub-regions in a more granular system, but on the standard 195 list, Germany is Germany.

What about countries that might dissolve in the future?

We will rewrite the map and this article when it happens. Catalonia, Scotland, and a handful of other independence movements are real but unresolved, and there is no principled way to count a country that does not yet exist. Until a new state holds a UN seat, the standard list does not change.

How does this rule handle countries that lost territory?

The same way. If the territory you visited is now in a different country, count the country it is in today. The paradigm case is Bessarabia — if you visited what is now Moldova during the period it was part of Romania (or earlier, the Russian Empire), count Moldova. The place is what counts; the borders that overlay it have shifted around the place over time, but the place itself is in a single modern country.

I visited West Berlin but never crossed into East Germany. Is that one country or two?

One. Both halves of the divided Berlin are now part of the Berlin city-state inside the Federal Republic of Germany. You ticked Germany.

The bottom line

One sentence: look at where you actually stood, look up which country it is in today, and tick that. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, North and South Yemen, North and South Vietnam, and a handful of others have all dissolved or merged in the last fifty years. The trips you took are still real and they still count. The dissolutions usuallyincrease your country total, not decrease it, because a single trip to a federation often touched ground that today belongs to several different sovereign states.

The next thing to do is open the My Travel Maps tool with a box of old photos in front of you and go trip-by-trip. We promise the count is higher than you think.