Whaling in the Soviet Union and Russia information

Russian whaling has been conducted by native peoples in the Chukotka region of Russia since at least 4,000 years ago by native Yupik and Chukchi people, but commercial whaling did not begin until the mid-19th century, when companies based in Finland (then part of Imperial Russia) sent out vessels to the Pacific. It was not until 1932 that modern pelagic whaling began to take off with the purchase of an American cargo ship which was renamed the Aleut, which was the only Soviet factory ship until World War II. After the war, with the need for a stronger Soviet economy and rapid industrialization of the country during the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet whaling took off and became a truly global industry. The first Soviet whalers reached the Antarctic during the 1946–47 season with the factory ship Slava (taken from the Germans as a prize of war) and then underwent a rapid expansion during the late 1950s in which 5 new fleets were added within a 4-year span: Sovetskaya Ukraina in 1959, Yuriy Dolgorukiy in 1960, and Sovetskaya Rossiya in 1961 for the Antarctic, and finally two large fleets (Dalniy Vostok and Vladivostok) in 1963 for the North Pacific. Thus, by the early 1960s Soviet whaling had truly become a global industry, operating in every ocean except the North Atlantic and undertaking voyages that could last as long as seven months each. From 1964 to 1973, the Soviet Union was considered by some the biggest whaling nation in the world.^[1]

Due to implementation of the International Whaling Commission’s International Observer Scheme in 1973, and the subsequent quotas on catch limits of most species of whales the same year, Soviet whaling began a slow decline during this period and from 1978 to 1980 3 of the 4 remaining whaling fleets were retired, largely due to the outlawing of all pelagic whaling except for minke whales in the Antarctic and due to intervention of anti-whaling groups (the Dalniy Vostok fleet was the first ever to be harassed through direct action by anti-whaling groups in 1975). After 1980, only the Sovetskaya Ukraina fleet remained, taking only minke whales in Antarctic waters. Despite strong efforts by the Soviet government to provide adequate funding for this fleet to continue whaling, the international moratorium on whaling issued by the IWC in 1982, combined with the high cost of maintaining this fleet, caused all Soviet whaling to end after the 1986–87 whaling season; the USSR abolished whaling on 22 May of that year. Currently whaling in Russia is practiced solely by the Chukotka peoples of the Russian Far East, who take 136 gray whales yearly on an annual quota provided by the IWC, and also take an occasional bowhead whale as well.^[2]

In 1993 Alexey Yablokov, a former scientist on board the Soviet whaling fleets and at the time an advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin on ecology and health, revealed that the USSR had committed mass falsifications of its whaling data during the period 1948–1973 and had killed nearly 180,000 whales that they did not report, mostly because such catches comprised protected species or ignored quotas or regulations with regards to legal size, females with calves, or catching outside legal hunting areas. The falsified data was somewhat corrected in the late 1990s, but not until 2008, shortly after the publication of former whale biologist Alfred Berzin’s memoir The Truth about Soviet Whaling, was the full, corrected data for both the Antarctic and North Pacific regions revealed (the North Pacific data was almost entirely unknown until the 2000s). According to Charles Homans, a writer for Pacific Standard magazine, the Soviet whaling program represented “the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century.”^[3]