Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling 9780226628998

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RED LEVIATHAN

RED LEVIATHAN The Secret History of Soviet Whaling Ryan Tucker Jones

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by Ryan Tucker Jones All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62885-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62899-8 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226628998.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, Ryan Tucker, author. Title: Red leviathan : the secret history of Soviet whaling / Ryan Tucker Jones. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021029508 | ISBN 9780226628851 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226628998 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Whaling— Soviet Union—History. | Environmentalism— Soviet Union—History. Classification: LCC SH383.5.S625 J66 2022 | DDC 639.2/80947— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029508 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Preface ix

1

Russia’s Whale Problem 1 2

The Whales of Distant Seas 8 3

A Revolution in Whaling 23 4

North Pacific Numbers 39 5

War and Glory in the Antarctic 57 6

Aleksei Solyanik and the End of Area V 74 7

The Kollektiv and the Long Ruble 98

8

The Cetacean Genocide 113 9

Scientists Locate Their Prey 134 10

Whales in the Home 151 11

A Whale Is Not a Fish: Back to the North Pacific 178 12

Greenpeace and the View from the Dal’nii Vostok 190 Conclusion 213 Acknowledgments 219 Abbreviations 223 Notes 225 Index 259

Important locations in this book, including whaling fleet headquarters (in bold), the route of the Aleut’s inaugural voyage, and confrontations with Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd. Map by the author and Anna Sukhova.

PREFACE

It was one of the signature moments of the environmental movement, and one of the turning points of global history. A few long-haired men and women afloat in small rubber inflatables on an open ocean faced a gigantic Soviet whaleship, the Dal’nii Vostok. They positioned themselves next to the panicked groups of sperm whales fleeing the ship, daring the Soviets to fire their harpoons and risk killing the Greenpeace volunteers who had organized and now were filming this dangerous protest. The image was nearly perfectly crafted, as Greenpeace leader Bob Hunter had meant it to be: tiny, helpless individuals pitched against an unfathomably evil, inhuman force; sentient humans, united with sentient whales, versus the unthinking machine of modern bureaucracy and militarism. Hunter summed up the contrast with the horrified observation that the whale oil rendered from the whale carcasses being winched up the stern slipway would go to lubricate intercontinental missiles. “It seemed we were staring into the face of a giant robot,” he wrote, whose “particular obscenity” came from the fact that “here was a beast that fed itself through its anus, and it was into this inglorious hole that the last of the world’s whales were vanishing— before our eyes.”1 Indeed they were. At that moment, in June 1975, only a fraction of the former population of great whales remained in the world’s oceans, and the Soviet catcher boat was hunting down some of the last of them. Even worse, Hunter and others had only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Unbeknownst to the world, the Soviets had been killing tens of thousands more whales than they were reporting to the International Whaling Commission—

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an illegal and dishonest catch that one writer termed the “most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century.”2 It was probably also the most sudden revolution the globe’s oceans have ever experienced. Decades later, when I first read Hunter’s account and saw the powerful pictures of the encounter, I was shaken. Many in the 1970s had the same reaction. Though Greenpeace was not the only organization protesting commercial whaling at the time, its campaign against the Soviets had the single greatest impact on the growing movement to save the whales. The mind bomb Greenpeace released that day eventually helped create enough public pressure to force a global moratorium on commercial whaling beginning in 1986. Millions of global citizens had concluded, rather suddenly, that whales were not monsters, but emotional, intelligent creatures whose destruction was morally abhorrent and signaled deep problems with modern society. They also decided, based on little more than twenty seconds of television footage, that these Soviet whalers were the real monsters. Like many people in the world, I find the mass slaughter of whales to be heartbreaking, and their saving heroic. Whatever dangers the world’s whales face today from ship noise, ship strikes, and marine pollution, what they encountered in the twentieth century was far worse.3 From 1900 to 1999, humans killed nearly three million whales, in every corner of every ocean. Already by the 1970s they had reduced the population of every large species to near extinction. It was, in the estimation of Phillip Clapham, the former head of NOAA’s lab for cetacean research, the “largest removal of biomass in world history.”4 It was also the closest thing to genocide we can observe in the history of human relations with their large mammalian relatives. In less than a century, humans transformed the world’s oceans from places that pulsed with living whales, to nearly empty water. The fact that the large whale species survived at all is a miracle, their twentiethcentury history a testament both to humans’ collective power to destroy, and to reverse course. I wrote this book because I think it essential that we understand this remarkable history. And, looking at Greenpeace’s pictures, I realized there was much more to it than the actions of a handful of environmentalists. I wondered, especially, who were these Russians on the other side of the ship’s bow, looking down at the Greenpeace hippies, firing away at the sperm whale mothers and calves in spite of the protesters? Their role in this episode seemed to me nearly as significant as those of the activists. It demanded a better explanation than militarism, mechanism, and evil. But,

PREFACE

Greenpeace protestors aboard a zodiac holding up a sign saying “no” to the Soviet whaleship Dal’nii Vostok during their second engagement with the fleet. The Russian crew looks on with curiosity. July 1976. Greenpeace/Rex Weyler.

despite the fact that they killed more whales than did any other country after World War II, the Soviet Union’s part in the story has remained entirely hidden. After the Greenpeace encounter, the Dal’nii Vostok made its way back to its home port of Vladivostok, ventured out a few more times, then called it quits. Silence ensued. Why? This book answers that and several related questions. Why did the Soviet Union pursue industrial whaling at such a gigantic scale, even as other countries dropped out of an increasingly unprofitable industry? Why did they kill so many whales above the international quotas they had accepted? Did anyone in the USSR care or try to stop this from happening? Were the Soviets at all moved by the Greenpeace protesters that day in 1975? What was it like for the world’s whales to experience such an unremitting slaughter? Thanks to the opening of former Soviet archives and the dedication of whale scientists in piecing together the scale of the Soviet deception, we can now answer some of these questions. The answers help us understand the fate of the world’s whales, of the Soviet Union, and of the central dramas of the twentieth century. During the years of researching this book, I met former Soviet whalers on several occasions. Two encounters stick out in particular. First, on a

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midsummer’s day in 2016, I joined a group of whalers from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea who gather every year at a small city park notable for a large statue of two fighting bulls. The bulls’ testicles are particularly prominent, and they turned the whalers’ conversation to the culinary qualities of whale testes, which were apparently considerable. Even as cloudbursts erupted, the old men basked in the warmth of jokes and their memories of disasters narrowly averted, larger-than-life harpooners, and the comradery of shared hardship. These men had done well in the Soviet Union. They had survived perestroika and the chaos of the 1990s, if only just. As one whaler explained to me, he had earned good money at whaling, but post- Soviet inflation had destroyed every cent of it. If many now lived in crumbling apartments, they could at least enjoy their grandchildren making modestly successful futures, wealthier than even these ex-whalers had dreamed of becoming. They were gratified, too, by my interest and by the attention of a film crew making a documentary about Soviet whaling.5 This was the respect they felt they deserved. Why had they become whalers, I asked? The spirit of the sea had lured them, they responded. Some said they had just been born hunters. “Read this book of whaling poetry,” one advised me. “There are more answers to your questions in one verse than in all our responses.” As the evening inevitably turned to cognac at a nearby Ukrainian restaurant, toasts were offered to “international friendship,” and the surreal nature of the scene stole in through the beginnings of a headache in my mind. Here I was, chatting amicably with men who had played a central role in one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, whose only reckoning had been the fact that the world had forgotten about them. Others who cared deeply about whales had made darker accusations. As Bob Hunter had asked after his encounter with the Dal’nii Vostok, “What indeed could a nation of armless Buddhas [whales] do against the equivalent of carnivorous Nazis equipped with seagoing tanks and Krupp cannons?”6 Few today would be willing to go as far as Hunter. The whalers at the table with me had massacred nonhumans, and they had done it at a time when few thought it wrong. At least the outside world had recognized the Nazis’ actions as immoral as they were occurring. Soviet whalers were hardly Nazis. But that should not keep us from recognizing the scale of the horror that whales experienced during the age of industrial whaling, which spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. For whales, what industrial whalers— and the Soviets prominent among them— did was a uniquely terrible chap-

PREFACE

ter in their very long history. Few creatures have enjoyed such long-term security as modern whales, streamlined for quick movement and insulated with blubber to outlast long fasts and migrations. They have nearly no predators except for humans. While Indigenous whalers, Japanese shore whalers, and Western sail whalers in the nineteenth century had eliminated or seriously reduced local populations— driving Atlantic gray whales into extinction and nearly doing the same to Pacific gray whales and southern right whales— they had left the world’s largest whales almost entirely untouched. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the world’s oceans were nearly as full of blue whales, fin whales, humpback whales, and others as they had ever been. The industrial slaughter of the world’s whales takes its place alongside the other unprecedented catastrophes of the twentieth century, all of which sit uneasily with the exceptional advances in human knowledge and well-being made during the same time. The Soviet Union was central to many of these stories. A second meeting with Soviet whalers— this time in Odessa, Ukraine— further complicated my impressions of them. Led by two women who had worked in the whaling industry, a crew of veterans dressed in whaling outfits met my plane at the airport and conducted me on a tour of the former Black Sea whaling capital. Their generosity and amiability were easing me into a sense of familiarity when we sat down at a table at the local military veterans’ administration. The group’s leader started into a speech on the merits of Aleksei Solyanik, the legendary whaling captain who had done so much for the city of Odessa. But before she could really get started, someone interrupted her. I hadn’t realized it, but Yuri Mikhalev, one of the scientists responsible for revealing the shocking scale of Soviet whaling, had joined our group. It was instantly clear that this was going to be a different conversation. Mikhalev began by stating that as a scientist, he had to take a more rational point of view about these things. He was not going to agree with our leaders’ warm words, nor with the golden-hued memories of most of the whalers I had met. Mikhalev began a point-by-point, yearby-year recounting of Solyanik’s lies and misdeeds and their catastrophic effect on Antarctic ecosystems. As he put it elsewhere, “Soviet whaling brought whale populations to near-extinction, was unprofitable, amoral and politically damaging for the country.”7 Like a scientific Dostoevsky or some such archetypal Russian truth-teller, Mikhalev closed his eyes, concentrating, feeling the pain of each detail, measuring his story with a quiet, deliberate intensity and at the same time an exhausted recognition

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that nothing could be changed and that similar monstrous actions would likely occur again. Though I was familiar with the figures Mikhalev was citing, I was still awed by the power of his impromptu speech. It was immediately clear why he had been one of the very few brave enough to say these same things to his superiors and the KGB during the height of the illegal catches. But just as interesting at that moment was the reaction of the men and women at the table. They did not dispute Mikhalev’s tale, nor did they seem angered by this discrediting of their professional lives. Instead, they seized the chance to talk to one of the world’s most knowledgeable cetacean scientists and peppered him with questions about the whales themselves. Why were they found in some places and not others? What explained the quick rebound of some species? Why do whales strand? I sensed here the troubled heart of this book. I liked these people who had perpetrated one of the greatest ecological catastrophes the world’s oceans have ever seen. I felt a respect for the fact that whaling had given their lives solid, positive meaning. I shared their fascination with whales. But what I perceived as genocide, they thought of simply as work, and I was amazed at how little their recollections included danger or drama. How had such a momentous piece of the globe’s history taken place so routinely, so quietly? Mikhalev, too, presented challenging contradictions. During later conversations with me in his apartment, he described how his protests over illegal whaling had ruined his career. Soviet bureaucrats closed down his biological laboratory, and his health and marriage suffered. But, even with the end of the Soviet Union, Mikhalev had found justice elusive. He, along with fellow scientists Aleksei Yablokov, Viacheslav Zemsky, Alfred Berzin, and Dmitri Tormosov, had revealed to the world the extent of Soviet illegal whaling during the 1990s. He had expected that other former whalers would follow suit. But now, decades later, where were the confessions from the Japanese, who almost certainly were also cheating, or other European countries which Mikhalev suspected as well?8 What about some reckoning with the hundreds of thousands of whales Americans had killed during the nineteenth century? Instead of increased openness and mutual understanding, the episode had become another of many in which the West cynically and opportunistically embarrassed Russia. Mikhalev told me he was sure my book would do more of the same. And perhaps it does. I won’t deny that I still find shocking and disturbing the triumphant Soviet documentaries depicting the killing of whale

PREFACE

families, the pictures of Soviet whalers taking illegal whales and cavorting over their corpses, or the thousands of pages of archival records drily documenting a genocide. And, as someone who grew up in Oregon and California in the 1980s, I experienced the ocean at the whales’ lowest point, an ocean that had been created by the Soviet Union as much as anyone. The history of Soviet whaling belongs to anyone who looks out to sea and sees nothing. But, as Soviet whalers sometimes asked me and others: what is the difference between killing whales and killing, for example, pigs, which so many people accept without a second thought? Or, thinking more historically, why single out the Soviet Union when other countries had in fact killed more whales? It’s true—while the Soviets killed more than 500,000 whales during the twentieth century and Great Britain killed more than 300,000, Japan had killed nearly 600,000 and Norway nearly 800,000. Others, mostly American whalers, had killed around 300,000 in the nineteenth century, at a time when Russians had killed almost none.9 Australia, Brazil, Canada, Holland, Korea, New Zealand, Peru, South Africa, and others played smaller but still significant roles. Scholars have examined these stories and other critical aspects of humanity’s disastrous relationship with whales in the twentieth century. They have shown how the International Whaling Commission failed to head off catastrophic overcatching, and how the preeminent whalers Norway and the United Kingdom gave up on the industry by the early 1960s; have debated why Japan kept whaling through those decades and even past the global moratorium of 1986; and have explained why the science of counting whales became central to changing global ideas about the environment.10 But, with the exception of biologist Yulia Ivashchenko’s superb research into the industry, and some valuable insights from Bathsheba Demuth, the Soviets, who were crucial to all these developments, have barely been a part of these histories.11 The result is huge holes in our understanding of why humans nearly destroyed whales and why they stopped just in time. So, if the Soviet contribution to modern whale genocide was not preeminent, it had special characteristics. The Soviets killed nearly half their whales secretly, in knowing contravention of the conventions they had signed. They did so in the full knowledge of the impact on whale populations. In fact, no one knew the catastrophic state of whale numbers better than Soviet whale scientists, who sailed with the fleets and tallied the destruction. As others exited the whaling industry, the Soviets, along-

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side the Japanese, helped reduce the world’s whales from imperiled to nearly extinct, doing the hard work of an annihilation that flew in the face of economic rationality. The Soviets were able to do this in part because of a planned economy that resisted market forces. But they also did it for historical reasons that stretched back into earlier eras of global whaling when it was Russians who had been the victims. Furthermore, behind the ex-whalers’ untroubled twenty-first-century nostalgia, I discovered a more complex history of relationship with whales. Some Soviet whalers at the time cried when they heard the sounds of the dying animals. Even in this officially atheist state, some felt the weight of sin as they butchered whale families. All knew that what they were doing was illegal, and most knew that extinction was the likely outcome. These stories also open windows into some neglected but fascinating aspects of Russian history— how Russia has quietly shaped the world’s oceans for a long time; how some of the more obscure parts of the vast Russian Empire, such as Vladivostok and Odessa, were sometimes as important for global history as Moscow and St. Petersburg; how Soviet socialism entertained high hopes of protecting the environment; how Russian scientists made some of the most important contributions to humanity’s understanding of its place in the natural world.12 These histories get to the heart of what it was like to live and work in the Soviet Union, what it was like to be at the forefront of modern industrialized states’ attack on the ocean, and what it was like to touch and smell huge numbers of large, strange, but strangely familiar marine mammals on a scale few have experienced. Finally, this book is about those whales’ lives, too, their cultures, and their families, which were nearly broken by the industrial whalers’ attacks. Their stories cannot be told, either, without the rich data compiled by their killers. The reckless gamble of destroying the world’s whales is entwined with the life of the Soviet Union, the twentieth century’s most daring social experiment. The stern slipway— the key technological piece of industrial whaling—was invented in 1922, five years after the Soviet Union’s creation in 1917. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, four years after the last whale was killed for commercial purposes. Leviathan was slaughtered in the transiting shadow of the Soviet leviathan’s rise and fall.13 So, I hope this book does more than simply condemn, that it provides some understanding of the history of both whales and the Soviet Union. I hope, too, that it offers some light in an otherwise dark tale. Whales did

PREFACE

survive, after all, and they are now coming back in every ocean in the world. The Soviets’ role in that outcome, too, should not be ignored. This book finally tells their story, the story of those whalers looking down on the Greenpeace zodiacs in 1975, who appeared to the activists as faceless monsters, and who— in all their gore, glory, and human contradiction— for a moment held the fate of the world’s whales in their hands.

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Russia’s Whale Problem

Russia is the largest country on Earth. It covers eleven time zones and more than 6.6 million square miles of tundra, taiga, forest, steppe, mountain, and desert. Yet, these impressive facts understate Russia’s importance for the world. Depending on how one measures, Russia also possesses the third- or fifth-longest coastline in the world. Russian lands front a great diversity of ocean environments, from the warm but relatively sterile Black Sea in its southwest to the cold and marvelously fertile Sea of Okhotsk in its northeast, to thousands of miles of gray, icy Arctic Ocean following Russia all the way from Murmansk to Chukotka. As deeply as anyone on the globe, Russia has impacted the world’s oceans. And in all these oceans swim whales. If you visit a Russian coastline today, you may find it difficult to appreciate the country’s maritime heritage. A few years ago, I traveled to the far northern city of Murmansk, located on the Barents Sea near the old trading town of Kola, to see for myself the birthplace of Russian whaling. When the sun finally rose around 9:30 a.m., a soft rain was melting the previous week’s snow. I slipped along icy roads and made for the deep, beautiful fjord I had spied from my hotel window. Though this arm of the ocean wasn’t more than two hundred feet away, it proved difficult to reach. First, railroad tracks blocked my way. Then, as I made my way through crumbling apartment blocks pasted over with new orange exteriors to signal the new Russia, a heavily barricaded cargo port intervened. A whole modern apparatus of military and commercial concrete and steel had arisen on the shoreline since the city had been bombed by the Nazis in World War II. The ocean, meanwhile, had all but disappeared from view.

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After an hour of crunching through the black snow on the side of a busy highway, I saw an opening. There, just before another port began, was a breach, a small window onto the Barents Sea. As I descended onto a sandy beach, I looked around me and saw the most ruined stretch of ocean shore I’d ever encountered. Plastic rubbish and decomposing tires were plotted like mines along the strand, while in the shallow water a ship’s hulk slowly disintegrated. I was shocked to see fishermen gathering at the shore, smoking and readying their lines. Here was a vision of steely exploitation— and also amazing persistence. It was a combination that had appeared on these shores centuries earlier. In some ways, my tortured attempt to experience Russia’s seas mirrored the country’s longer history. Russians often found the ocean frustrating. They were tantalized by its promises of wealth, but stymied by the storms, ice, and especially a lack of the capital necessary to profitably exploit it. Meanwhiles, these obstacles seemed barely to bother foreigners, especially the Europeans and later Americans who often visited Russian oceans— another reason Russians found their oceans troublesome. The oceans may have been, as Peter the Great said, windows to the West, but oceans were also windows into Russia. They, and the whales that lived in them, symbolized many of the things Russians felt they themselves lacked. Russia’s pre-revolutionary whaling history offers numerous examples of these frustrations, as well as many wild schemes designed to right Russia’s relationship with the ocean. And it is this history of failure and resentment that is essential for understanding the motivations that much later drove Soviet whalers to attack the world’s oceans when their chance finally arrived. Along with the glorious deeds of princes and warriors, the first written accounts of Russia also mention its whales. The nineteenth-century historian Ernst Webermann reported that as early as the 800s— the century of Russia’s conversion to Christianity— Moscow’s grand prince received tribute from northern peoples in the form of bear furs, beavers, and “whale skin,” the latter used apparently to make ropes for ships.1 The skin likely came from relatively small beluga whales, the only cetacean that abounded in the ice-choked White Sea. Even more distant from the Russian heartland but also destined to fall under its sway, the inhabitants of the Yamal and Kola Peninsulas also hunted marine mammals, in the much more diverse and productive waters of the Barents Sea, nourished by the last warm fingers of the Gulf Stream.2 Petroglyphs carved in rocks as early as the fourth century show whales at the end of harpoon lines.

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Russians knew of this whaling only through sporadic trade for walrus and sometimes narwhal tusks.3 Early in the 900s, the Arabian traveler Abu Khameda (Ibn Fadlan), who visited southern Russia, wrote that “northern peoples” were catching “polar” (possibly bowhead) whales, and that it was well known that orcas sometimes drove these whales into shallow waters.4 At the same time, Vikings had begun making voyages to the Russian North, not only to trade and raid but also, possibly, to hunt whales.5 An early precedent had been established: the northern seas at the edges of Russian control were full of whales, Russians knew the animals were there, and it was non-Russians who were catching them. Perhaps due to this very general familiarity with whales, early Russian biblical dictionaries provided one translation of the Bible’s “leviathan” as “great whale.”6 A large snake with a broad tail that inhabits some ancient Russian fairy tales, and often blocks heroes’ paths through the ocean, may also be a whale.7 Reflecting influence from the south, too, the Russian word for whale— kit— is taken from the Greek, cetus, and not from the Norsk hwal as it is in most Western European languages (although both cetacean and cetology— the study of whales— do come from the Greek). Ancient Greeks knew far less about whales than did the whaling Scandinavians, and as these word origins suggest, whales remained mysterious for Russians. For one thing, baleen whales’ methods of feeding perplexed them. Lacking teeth, the giants seemed to have no way of capturing prey. One tenth-century Russian poem wondered whether whales, “the mother of all fish,” fed themselves on “heavenly fragrances.” Direct experience was not necessarily more helpful: a medieval Western whaler who cut into a stranded whale’s stomach and found a gray mass of food concluded that it had fed on “internal fog.”8 While inhabitants of the northern Russian town of Novgorod may have conducted some limited nearshore whaling, the first reports of direct Russian use of whales come after the ascendancy of Moscow in the fifteenth century. In the 1500s or 1600s, the Pechensky Monastery on the Kola Peninsula engaged in “maritime hunting,” which included the use of stranded whales and walruses.9 The Russian monks there had the good fortune of living on one of northern Europe’s most productive shores, that of the White Sea, whose long summer days combined with nutrients from several long rivers to produce a rich broth of plankton that supports abundant marine life, including fish and whales. That monks should have been involved with whales is not unusual in the Russian context. Monasteries were of-

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ten granted special commercial privileges by the tsar, and they served as bridgeheads of Russian commercial and territorial expansion in the North. Around the same time, merchants from the British Isles, Holland, and Denmark— those nations at the vanguard of emerging European capitalism— made contact with the Russian North and soon thereafter began whaling in nearby waters.10 Inscriptions left in rocks there include one from a Danish captain who wrote that he had visited the Russian coast twenty times since 1510.11 Russian operations at the time mostly targeted belugas, while foreigners went after larger bowheads. Russian trade was based out of the town of Kola, near the modern city of Murmansk, situated deep within a protected fjord giving access to the Barents Sea to the north. Residents there sometimes constructed their roofs out of whale bones. Russian officials farmed out the whale trade to those, often foreigners, who could pay for the privilege, a system that seems to have discouraged overall catches.12 As they did at the same time in the Baltic and North Seas, Dutch mariners increasingly came to dominate maritime trade in the Barents Sea, including whaling around Novaya Zemlya and the Kola Peninsula. By the seventeenth century, the Dutch had become the globe’s most prolific whalers. At the same time, Russians were for the first time trying their own hand at overseas whaling, around the Arctic island of Spitsbergen (then called by Russians “Grumant”), part of the Svalbard archipelago not far from Norway. The origins of whaling in Spitsbergen are still subject to some dispute, although some think Russians themselves pioneered the hunt there, perhaps as early as the fourteenth century.13 While Russian participation remained modest, British, Dutch, and— to a lesser extent— German whalers led the expansion of the Spitsbergen whaling through the seventeenth century. Catches peaked in 1697, known as the “Great Year,” when nearly two thousand Atlantic right whales met their end in Spitsbergen’s waters.14 The islands played such an important role in the development of whaling that, according to Webermann, Russians long referred to all whaling simply as “the Grumant trade.”15 A profound transition in Russians’ relationship with cetaceans began in the early eighteenth century. That’s when the increasingly powerful Russian state became directly involved in promoting, financing, and controlling whaling. One stimulus came from Tsar Peter the Great, who came to power in 1688 determined to yank Russia into his vision of modernity and to reorient its outlook toward the seas. It was also thanks to Peter that

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whaling became an important part of this transformation. Peter’s “Grand Embassy”— a combination intelligence-gathering tour and diplomatic mission that took the young tsar through Europe from 1697 to 1698— had dramatic effects on his plans. No place made a greater impression than Amsterdam. From stock markets to canals, the Dutch way of life seemed to promise an unusually effective way of organizing society to produce wealth and power. Whaling, too, seemed associated with strength and modernity. It was in Amsterdam, as the historian Alexei Kraikovski relates, that Peter happened to observe the whaling fleet itself returning to port from Spitsbergen.16 Whaling seemed to be a crucial part of this rich, modern state. Peter was impressed. But this was not Peter’s first contact with whales. Five years earlier, during one of his several visits to the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk, Peter had put to sea with an Orthodox archbishop. From their boat, he spotted a beluga whale, which local Pomors sometimes caught with nets. Peter had no patience for such slow, local methods. He grabbed a harpoon, ordered the boat to give chase, and hurled the weapon after the fleeing whale. Peter’s attack was characteristic of his burning impatience, and, as with so many of Peter’s plans, his frantic energy brought no results. The beluga escaped the tsar’s sudden passion— far from the last whale to evade the Russian Empire’s plans.17 There were in fact more rational reasons for the Russian state to encourage whaling. Since the time of Peter’s father, Russia’s autocracy had pursued a mercantilist strategy focused on amassing reserves of silver, then the global economy’s principal monetary supply. Possessed of few marketable international commodities aside from furs, the Russian state was on constant lookout for opportunities to improve its balance of trade. Whale oil, in high demand on the European market, could be exchanged for the silver that was needed to pay for Peter’s never-ending wars.18 This was the flip side of Russia’s whale problem: whales brought foreigners to Russian shores, but also promised the rare opportunity to achieve the state’s international goals. From at least 1700, for better and for worse, whales helped globalize Russia. This is a role the animals would continue to play into Soviet times. Perhaps it was Peter’s well-known thirst for both silver and blood that drew schemers to the idea of Russian whaling. The first came from Holland. During Peter’s visit to Amsterdam, a Dutch citizen, Benedictus Nebel, requested a monopoly on whaling around Russia’s Kola Peninsula. In re-

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turn he would share part of the oil with the Russian tsar. Nebel promised, quite extravagantly, to build twenty-five whaling ships, a fleet that would have then ranked among the largest in the world.19 After a delay of five years, Peter instead gave a monopoly on “blubber and the fat of walruses and other marine mammals” to his court favorite, the legendarily corrupt Alexander Menshikov, in exchange for the payment of taxes.20 This company was part of Peter’s grander effort to put all Russian fisheries into the hands of the state, which in practice often meant letting the various monasteries and villages that had previously operated unimpeded continue their work, but now with the payment of high taxes. Commercial whaling, though, had to be created from scratch. Menshikov was not the man for the job. Better at spending the state’s money than making it, he let shareholders organize the details in the company’s home in Arkhangelsk. The company used its monopoly to control the purchasing of all whale fat products procured by local hunters and then reselling it on the international market, mainly in Germany. From at least 1708, the Menshikov company also began sending out its own ships from Arkhangelsk to the Spitsbergen grounds, usually with both German and Russian co-captains; this pairing was necessary to maintain control over the multinational crew.21 The financial outcome of such risky voyages was somewhat uncertain. The Russian ships successfully killed whales and walruses while there, but heavy expenditures on equipment and labor made profit more elusive. Perhaps, though, private profit was not the main concern. Regardless of the companies’ own gains or losses, whale blubber still brought valuable hard currency on the international market. Not having done enough to boost Russian whaling, Menshikov’s company lost the imperial monopoly in 1721. A series of monopoly concessions followed— some run directly by the state, some by private merchants, some by Russians and others by foreigners. Russians usually lacked the capital necessary to ride out the months and even years without income involved in traveling to distant Spitsbergen and back. Surviving years of poor returns was nearly impossible. Therefore, great hope was placed in foreigners— usually Dutch or German, who had more capital and could perhaps instruct Russians in the art of commercial whaling. Peter ordered at least one foreign company to retain all whale bones, numbering them so they could be reassembled later for display in the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera to teach Russians about whale anatomy.22 Despite these efforts, Russia’s new whaling companies failed. In fact,

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hiring Dutch and Germans helped lay the groundwork for an even deeper resentment of foreign domination of whaling. The foreign specialists hired for the voyages were a mixed bag at best; the most skilled whalers were not for hire, since they were already making a comfortable living in Holland. Those who came to Russia were often drunkards. One had even gone blind from his drinking, which no doubt limited his ability to pilot a ship, much less find whales. Even the sighted, sober ones had no experience in the challenging conditions of the Barents Sea, the White Sea, or Spitsbergen.23 When, by 1728, one company manned by German whaling experts had caught only two whales, Russians began to suspect sabotage. Not only did the foreigners “not demonstrate any effort in whaling,” according to reports, “but on the contrary caused problems, perhaps being instructed by the Hamburg magistrate or by the local whalers to destroy the Russian industry.”24 Russian officials proposed instead sending soldiers’ sons from the Kola Peninsula to whale, since the state wouldn’t have to give them any extra pay. Perhaps more sensibly, the Commerce College suggested recruiting the local Pomors to become commercial whalers— the first of many ideas to use the vast networks of imperial subjects living on Russia’s seashores to enrich the state.25 There is no evidence that these plans succeeded, either, and by 1800 the Russian government had temporarily given up on whaling.26 In Russian as well as in English, leviathan has taken on a dual meaning: it connotes both the grandeur of the whale and the overwhelming power of the modern state. But, for centuries, instead of abetting overwhelming force, whales instead exposed the limits of Russian state power. The animals offered a troubling paradox: Russia’s northern waters were richly blessed with cetaceans, whaling was a source of profit to many modern European nations, the tsar was willing to grant all sorts of support and privileges to those who might catch them; and yet no one at home or abroad could seem to manage it. However, even as the plans of Peter and his successors sputtered to an end, the long reach of the Russian Empire was opening up new possibilities far to the east.

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The Whales of Distant Seas

In 1817, while working for the Russian Empire, the Franco- German poetnaturalist Adelbert von Chamisso stood on a pebbly beach on Alaska’s Unalaska Island holding in his hands a whale. Not exactly a living whale, but an expertly fashioned wooden one that revealed details which Chamisso— by European standards an expert in the subject— had never seen. Chamisso possessed an entire pod of miniature whales, each clearly depicting different species: sperm whales, right whales, humpbacks. Unnamed, “highly experienced” Aleuts (also called Unangan) on the island had carved them for Chamisso.1 They were able to bring these whales to life precisely because they knew how to kill them. Paddling close to the water, feeling every wave beneath them, Aleuts pursued whales from their igax, or skin-covered kayaks, shooting the creatures with poison-tipped harpoons attached to floats, then chasing and impaling them until they died.2 As headgear worn during hunting showed, such close pursuit brought whales in all their variety and specificity deep into the Aleuts’ imaginations. In the Aleutian Islands, one of the world’s most abundant whale feeding and transit zones, the creatures were ever-present companions. Fittingly, when Chamisso wrote his article on whales found around the Aleutian Islands, he gave them Aleut names. Kuliomoch. Abugulich. Mangidach. Agamachtschich. Aliomoch. Tschikagluch. Agidagich. Alugninich. Aguluch.3 A small piece of the Aleut world transported to Russia. Chamisso’s whales invited Russians to think differently about the creatures; for, over the century between the tsars’ retreat from whaling and the Bolshevik Revolution, Russians would come into close contact with some

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This 1816 picture drawn by the Russian artist Mikhail Tikhanov shows an Aleut man hunting a whale (probably a humpback), which appears itself to be hunting, possibly using a bubble-net technique to trap fish. Courtesy of Russian Museum of the Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia.

of the world’s most whale-obsessed humans, including Aleuts, Siberian Chukchis, and others. This was an opportunity to learn new things about whales, and— perhaps— to learn to catch them. The Aleuts’ whales offered revelations because while Russians had been dealing with whales ever more frequently, they still knew little of the creatures. Skeletons such as the one Peter the Great had ordered displayed in his Kunstkamera gave only an indistinct and misleading picture. With skulls shaped like shovels, cetacean bones reinforce monstrous ideas rather than suggest the grace of a living whale in the water. But most Russians had little else to go on, and perhaps for this Russians termed whales chudovishche (monsters). Suggesting a certain ambivalence, though, the name appears not to have been derogatory, since some accounts refer to “beautiful monsters.”4 Even fleeting direct contact with whales did not necessarily reveal the whale’s mysteries. In 1911, the Russian writer K. N. Nosilov, aboard a British whaler in the Russian Arctic, expressed disappointment on seeing a whale harpooned and hauled on board. As he related the experience: It is strange how the whale—which very recently had drawn the curiosity of everyone, which not long ago had heated our blood while fleeing into

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the open, unbridled ocean, which not long ago had shocked us with its appearance swimming next to our boat— now evinced very little interest and appeared much smaller than it had just a few minutes before to these selfsame eyes. . . . Soon the interest in the dead animal completely disappeared.5

How to capture a living whale, when its capture robbed it of life? Russia’s incredible expansion across the globe offered a number of new answers to this question, for even as one hand of the Russian state was pulling away from whaling in Arctic seas, another was giving Russians access to huge portions of the world’s oceans. A century before Peter the Great’s reign, Russia had embarked on the greatest campaign of territorial conquest since Genghis Khan. In 1549, Russians first defeated the remnants of the Mongolian Empire across the Ural Mountains in Siberia. Just sixty-nine years later, in 1618, they had reached the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 miles distant from Moscow. Then, further conquests secured a permanent Russian presence on the Black Sea and the Baltic. In 1741, Russian ships crossed the Bering Strait and alighted upon North America, and by the 1780s, fur traders in search of sea otters had established permanent settlements in Alaska. In the process of gathering up most of northern Asia for itself, Russia had, almost inadvertently, acquired uncounted miles of new coastline. Very soon, those involved in Russia’s conquests noted that many of its new subjects were expert whalers. Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German naturalist who accompanied Vitus Bering on his 1741 voyage, wrote that the Itelmen of the Kamchatka peninsula sometimes caught whales with nets. Thinking like a true Russian mercantilist, Steller wrote that the empire might be able to co- opt this industry and sell whale products to Japan, which was then closed to nearly all trade with foreigners. Whales again seemed to open new trade horizons. Though selling whales to Japan did in fact have a distant future, Steller’s dreams came to naught during what remained of his short life. Instead, it was the sea otter pelts of Kamchatka and Alaska, which Steller also helped publicize, that proved the key to opening Asian markets (only China for the time being) to Russian trade.6 Further north and east, Russians encountered a wide arc of human cultures stretching from Siberia to present-day Washington State that celebrated whalers and developed a complex set of rituals and beliefs around

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whaling— what some scholars have termed an interconnected North Pacific “whale cult.”7 The Chukchi, Iñupiaq, and Yup’ik peoples who lived and traveled across both sides of the Bering Strait were particularly prolific whalers. In fact, no other peoples on Earth relied as heavily on whales for their subsistence and cosmology. A cryptic monument to whales’ central role in Chukchi life can still be found on Yttygran Island. At a site termed by archaeologists “Whale Alley,” dozens and dozens of bowhead whale vertebrae are arranged in long rows, seemingly expressing some kind of religious significance. Stories from both sides of the Bering Strait reveal that whales were ever-present; the land was described as a whale, as were igloos, as were women.8 As the historian Bathsheba Demuth has written, for Iñupiat the whale was “a soul in life, a gift assuring human survival in death, a means to power, a site of communal labor, a set of expectations and ceremonies, a theory of history.”9 For people of the Bering Strait, a whale’s skeleton was anything but an indistinct ghost of the real thing. Instead, it was the ribs of their homes, seen and touched every day. It was the material of their tools, held in their hands, worn by their labor. It was a pathway to the spirit world beyond and the weight of connection to the nearby world of the ocean. Whales were much simpler creatures in the eyes of most Russians: hazily defined monsters, a lure for foreigners, a road to modernity. If imperial expansion offered introductions to new ideas about whales, that was not yet true for the Bering Strait. The Chukchi and Iñupiat violently opposed intervention in their affairs, and they kept Russian imperialism at bay until the early twentieth century. In Alaska, however, Russia managed to subdue the Aleuts and Alutiit (inhabitants of Kodiak Island; Russians usually called them “Aleuts” as well), some of whom killed migrating whales every year from their small kayaks and waited for the carcasses to float to shore. With a technique so full of peril, it’s little wonder that successful whalers were held in high regard. Hopeful whalers would smear onto their hunting tools the fat or even entire fingers from the corpses of their predecessors in order to capture some of their skill and to ward off danger. But, as so many portents of death suggest, Aleuts did not consider whale killing an unambiguous good. They associated killing whales with killing humans, and the successful hunter was regarded with a mixture of awe and suspicion for performing an act that contained more than a hint of evil. Successful whale hunters were expected to later go

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insane because of the crime they had committed.10 It was an honest reckoning with the complexities of killing a creature so obviously intelligent, and also so exceptionally useful. Despite the fact that they killed only a few whales every year and recovered even fewer, whale meat was crucial to Aleut well-being. Whale oil was essential in an otherwise fat-poor diet, accompanying nearly every food on the Aleut menu, while other parts of the whale assisted in construction of skin boats and fox traps. Those Russians living in their Alaskan colonies also frequently ate whales, though the priest Ivan Veniaminov remarked that “in order to eat with relish whale meat and fermented fish heads . . . one must indeed have a particular taste and not too delicate sense of smell.”11 In a cruel irony, whales were also key to Russian imperialism in Alaska. In addition to murder, kidnapping, and co-optation, Russians seized key parts of Alaskans’ subsistence to force them to hunt for sea otters. Nothing was more effective in this strategy than a whale carcass. In 1825 the Russian American Company (the RAC, a joint-stock company with government ties created to run the Alaskan colony) declared that half of all whale carcasses belonged to it and that if Aleuts wanted any part of the rest, they would have to purchase it with money that could be obtained only by working for the Russians. Russians often abused even this meager apportioning, taking the best parts of the whale— the fins, tail, and stomach— for themselves. As whales were so important for both Aleuts and Alutiiq people, they desperately tried to maintain as much of the carcass as possible. “How can one recompense the Aleut for a whale?” asked one colonial administrator. “It is their favorite food, and one cannot deprive a man of food under any circumstances.”12 Yet deprive them they did, while also frequently underpaying and forcing the women to process the Russians’ half of the whale free of charge. Though we don’t have Aleut accounts of this violence, it must have been one of the most resented aspects of the Russian onslaught into their lives. Whales were a useful form of colonial coercion, but Russians wanted more from them. Old dreams of commerce wrung from whale fat resurfaced in Alaska. If Aleuts were such good whalers, couldn’t they be induced to increase their catches enough that Russia could begin exporting whale oil? To this end, Russians saw opportunity in the American whalers who had also recently entered the Pacific. Colonial officials hired an American whaler and brought him to the Aleutian Islands, where he was

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supposed to teach “American-style” whaling to young Aleuts, including constructing ships and boiling blubber. The Aleuts, however, resented the idea. Believing that whales possessed keen intelligence, they were afraid the metal harpoons would scare the whales away.13 Thus, this experiment met the same fate of its eighteenth-century predecessors, and Aleuts returned to hunting with poison arrows. But Russian entanglements with American whalers had just begun. Even as Russian whaling ventures in the Pacific were failing, Americans began an all-out assault on the same whales. Having sequentially destroyed whale populations off Chile, on the equator, and around Japan and New Zealand, in the 1830s they turned to the North Pacific Ocean off Alaska and Siberia. Russian officials tried to prohibit American whalers from hunting near the Pacific colonies, to no avail. In 1847, the Americans entered the Sea of Okhotsk, a semi-enclosed body of water bounded by imperial Russian lands but effectively empty of any state control. It was not empty of whales, for though the Sea of Okhotsk is a place of dense fog and few trees, its turbulent currents mix the nutrients energized by long summer days and nourish the food webs supporting some of the world’s largest populations of baleen whales. Especially around the Shantar Islands, in the western part of the sea, American whalers found abundant right whales, bowheads, and gray whales— all attractive targets. Because the Sea of Okhotsk was so far from any other place of provisioning, and the sea was ice free for a very short time, many whalers adopted the practice of overwintering on shore. There they encountered very few Russians, but many Koryak, Gilyak, Tungus, Evens, and Evenks, people who made their livelihood fishing for salmon and herding reindeer. The Americans traded guns, alcohol, and tobacco for the food. Edible parts of whales, which the Americans commonly discarded since they could not sell them, also found a warm local reception. Koryaks dipped pieces of gum in whale oil, while Tungus ate chunks of blubber like pieces of cake. These same locals often informed the Americans when and where whales would appear, and after a few years of contact, some seemed to have picked up American techniques of harpoon whaling. At times, their hospitality could be extraordinarily generous. When the Nantucket ship Phoenix wrecked on uninhabited Elbow Island in 1858, local Tungus ferried fresh food to the castaways throughout the winter, even lending them dogs, sleds, and snowshoes to help with hunting.14 By the 1850s, hundreds of American ships were visiting the sea and its shores every year.

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Remains of a whale at Cape Levashova, Sea of Okhotsk, 2017. Photo by Anton Gorelov, courtesy of Google Earth.

One hundred and fifty years later, I made my own voyage to the Sea of Okhotsk, to see this place so crucial to Russia’s whaling history. Although I was close to the ocean, living in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, getting to the water again proved difficult. Dragging my father along, I crammed into a sweaty minibus and weaved through a landscape of snowy volcanoes to reach the historic hamlet of Bol’sheretsk, a few miles from the Sea of Okhotsk. It was 2005, and with its population melting away, Bol’sheretsk felt like a place now quietly rewinding its history to again become empty tundra. That night, at the town’s last remaining restaurant, we fell in with some local administrators, a group of slick Moscow bureaucrats remanded here for reasons unclear. They had the same thought about me, and asked a bit suspiciously why two Americans had come to their town, still officially closed to foreigners. I told them that I had come to see the Sea of Okhotsk— an idea they found incomprehensible. But by 2 a.m., ten shots of vodka into our new friendship, the men suddenly came to a characteristically generous Russian decision: not only would they drive me to the ocean that minute, but it was absolutely imperative that we all have a night swim in the freezing water together. Halfway there, as the driver drunkenly swerved through the night, I sobered up, rethought the plan, and headed back to the hotel. The next day, my father and I trudged about five miles over soggy tundra, afraid at any moment that we might get arrested. About midday we arrived at Cape Levashova, to a quietly beautiful

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scene of endless gray sand beach, churning waves muffled by fog, distant volcanoes, and the cries of gulls. On that visit, my father and I took our own small place in a long history of Americans going where they shouldn’t, and being received with both suspicion and unearned hospitality. But there’s a larger story tied to Sea of Okhotsk whaling that should not be missed: whalers also opened up vast new worlds for the people who had long called these shores home. To take one recorded example, in 1860, two Americans deserted from their whaleship and spent the winter with a group of Evens. They fell in love with two local girls, named Pelagia and Anna. When the Americans signed on with another whaler the next season, they hid the girls from their parents and took them to the Hawaiian island of Maui. The Russian consul in Honolulu investigated, but the girls claimed they had come willingly and, though they were exchanging letters with their family back in the Sea of Okhotsk, that they had no desire to return.15 Their American men soon disappeared for other parts of the whaling world, and there the girls’ archival trail goes cold. Did they find Hawaiʻi’s eternal springtime to be all they wanted, or did they in time come to miss the deep melancholy of the Okhotsk fog feeling its way through the green tundra and into the snowy hills? The multicultural “devious zig-zag world circle” of nineteenth-century sail whaling posed many such questions, to many different people.16 While the few Russians living on the Sea of Okhotsk often welcomed American contact, the “Yankees’” “unbridled willfulness” infuriated Russian imperial authorities.17 One fear was that Americans would harass and harm Russia’s colonial subjects, which they sometimes did. Another was that they were destroying the natural world. “The Americans are everywhere in the Shantar Islands now,” lamented one Russian naval officer. “If they are not exactly at home, it is as if they have conquered this place; they burn up and cut down the forest, kill the wild birds and whales.”18 The governor general of Eastern Siberia complained not only that the Americans were harming Russian interests, but also that they were “year to year . . . exterminating the whales and fish that are the only food the Aleuts and Koryaks.”19 Outrage at foreign incursions and a duty to protect the interests of their non-Russian subjects would long motivate Russian— and later Soviet— whalers. The latter motivation was paternalistic and self-serving, to be sure, but it expressed an important truth: many of the oceans that Yankee whalers plundered like free gifts were in fact the longand carefully tended fields of others. In 1830, the American newspaper the

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Nantucket Inquirer celebrated whaling as “that war which causes no grief; the success of which produces no tears— war with the monsters of the deep.”20 But this was dead wrong. Even if discounting whale suffering, when whales died, so often did the humans who depended on them. This is precisely what happened when American whalers turned to the bowheads of the Bering Strait in the 1850s, so destroying the population that thousands of Yupiit and Iñupiat died of starvation and disease.21 Banning Americans from Russian seas was an attractive idea, but in practice it remained impossible. Instead, Russians in the far reaches of the empire hit upon what they felt was an ingenious solution: to attempt, one more time, to establish a Russian whaling industry. Being based in Alaska, much closer to the whaling grounds than New England, Russian ships would quickly become profitable. The workings of capitalism and comparative advantage would, in a welcome reversal, disadvantage the Americans and force them back home.22 Again, Russia’s imperial expansion lent a hand. After a war with Sweden, in 1809, Finnish- speaking areas had become part of the Russian Empire, and its citizens were both proficient mariners and comparatively well capitalized. In 1851, administrators agreed on a shared venture between the RAC and a Finnish joint-stock company out of Turku, Finland. The Russian-Finnish Whaling Company (RFWC) was to be the closest the Russians would come to a successful whaling industry prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. But before establishing a base in the Pacific, the first RFWC ships had to travel a long way. After rounding South America’s Cape of Good Hope, they called in Honolulu to pick up supplies and the customary cosmopolitan crew of whalers, including Americans, Portuguese, and Native Hawaiʻians. Then the ships sailed north for the Sea of Okhotsk and Alaska. Conditions on board were far from ideal, but not so different from those on most whaleships at the time. As one Swedish sailor reported: Sailing under continuous rain, the deck was like a pigsty: with oil, ash, fat, and water, you can imagine it. . . . Because of the smoke, you are as black as a stoker, and soaked through, frozen to the boat. God grant only to keep us in good health until this is over and we are back home.23

In 1853, east of Kodiak Island, the ship Turku caught its first whale, a right whale. The animal put up a fierce resistance, smashing a hole in one of the pursuit boats and then thrashing around for nearly two hours before dying.

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The Swedish Finnish whaler Otto Lindholm, destined to become a major figure in the histories of whaling and the Russian Far East, patched the hole in the boat with his jacket. He was inspired, so he said, by the Alutiiq skin boats the men had seen in Kodiak.24 In general, however, the hunting was disappointing. Mostly the crew encountered quick and elusive humpback whales, rather than the right whales they were after. Aleuts provided some assistance to the RFWC. In addition to teaching Lindholm how to save a boat from sinking, several shipped aboard the whalers. Once again, the Russians hoped the Aleuts might learn to become commercial whalers.25 However, the RFWC did not benefit the Aleuts, even though it was supposed to. Colonial officials imagined the new company would share parts of the whales with the Aleuts, giving them meat for food and sinews for boat construction. The RFWC would keep the baleen to provision the growing international market for this plastic-like substance, as well as, of course, the oil.26 In addition, displaying an attitude far different from that of the heedless Americans, the RFWC’s charter mandated that it had to turn over every tenth whale to the RAC, “in consideration of the fact that the hunting of whales in colonial waters will cause unavoidable losses for the native inhabitants.”27 To ensure compliance, a RAC agent shipped on board the RFWC ship Turku. Finally, the RAC also requested that six hundred gallons of whale oil be kept for local use in the colonies, with rendering to be done at Japonski Island, near Sitka. In practice, though, the RFWC proved reluctant to part with anything that could be sold.28 Meanwhile, the RAC worried that whaling too close to shore would scare away valuable sea otters.29 Herein lay some fundamental contradictions which the Russians never managed to solve: the RFWC was supposed to be at the same time a commercial venture, an arm of Russian foreign policy, and an essential part of social policy toward Alaska Natives. In the end it accomplished none of these aims. Events outside the company’s control also played their part in prejudicing the RFWC’s chances. In 1853, just two years after the Finnish whalers’ first voyage, the Crimean War broke out. Pitting Great Britain and France against Russia, the conflict made RFWC ships easy targets for these accomplished navies. The Turku was whaling in the Sea of Okhotsk when word of hostilities reached it. Its crew looked around nervously at the huge numbers of foreign ships all around them— eighty-two within sight at one time— any of which might turn out to be an enemy. Instead of waiting for attack, the Turku’s crew started defecting en masse. Their expert German

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Left: Otto Lindholm, a Swedish Finnish whaler and adventurer in the service of the Russian Empire. Courtesy of Alexander de Haes-Tyrtoff and Wikimedia Commons. Right: The seal of the Russian-Finnish Whaling Company, showing nineteenth-century sail whaling in action.

harpooner led the way, finding a compatriot ship whose captain he knew. There was nothing to do but make for a safe harbor, so the Turku went first to Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, then, when that port was besieged by the British and French, to Kodiak Island, where the crew buried all its whaling gear in case it was captured; and then finally to Sitka in July 1855. The time in Sitka was disastrous. Starved of provisions, many of the Turku’s crew came down with scurvy and died soon after arrival. Many of the sailors requested release from Russian service in order to continue on to San Francisco and back to Hawaiʻi or Finland. Fear of the Tlingit, who had attacked Sitka earlier that year, gripped everyone in the colony, and no one went out without a gun. Lindholm reported several armed encounters with the Tlingit, and his itchy trigger finger probably killed several.30 But even those ships that weathered the war never made whaling work. The real reason was that other war— the war between humans and whales. American whalers had already so destroyed the valuable bowhead, right, and gray whale populations of the North Pacific that no one could make a profit from them anymore. Americans began leaving the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1860s. In 1862, the Russian-Finnish Whale Company decided to liquidate. The RFWC had an important afterlife, however. One of its employees, Otto Lindholm, had seen the cetacean riches of the Sea of Okhotsk first-

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hand and still sensed opportunity there. So he decided to set up his own whaling venture on the Pacific. Russian accounts emphasize his patriotic motives, but this is doubtful. Lindholm, who had been born in Finland and spent almost no time in European Russia, was less interested in enriching Russia than in enriching himself. The whaling crew that he assembled was even less Russian than Lindholm— in 1864 he gathered a party of “17 Russians, 3 Finns, 2 Americans, 1 Irishman, 1 Portuguese, 1 Hawaiian, 1 Caroline Islander, 2 Negroes from South Carolina, 50 Yakuts and Tungus” and set up a whaling camp at the Sea of Okhotsk’s remote Tugursk Bay.31 Lindholm’s most important partner was a Tungus man named Gregor, whose expert knowledge of the Far Eastern forests saved Lindholm’s life on several occasions.32 This was the way to whale in its classical wooden age: gather labor from the corners of the globe and find a spot where no one would stop you from killing anything you saw. There was one other important factor assisting Lindholm’s success. He had a scientific bent, and he intently studied the relationships between currents, plankton, and several species of whales, in the process uncovering their seasonal migration routes and helping explain why the Shantar Islands were so abundant with marine life.33 His published papers on whales represent Russia’s first scientific contributions to international cetology. He also tried to spread this knowledge more broadly among Russians, urging someone to gather the monstrous whale skeletons littering the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and to send them back to St. Petersburg. This was an idea Peter the Great would have applauded, and it was a serious step toward refashioning Russians’ relations with whales.34 If Lindholm’s motivations were primarily scientific, he had also been influenced by his many encounters with the new cetaphilic nations of the Russian Empire. Science, multiculturalism, and a certain distance from state control— these factors helped Americans kill thousands of sperm whales, right whales, gray whales, and bowheads in the nineteenth century. Add superhuman strength and stamina (some described Lindholm’s manic activity as “satanic”), and these factors aided Lindholm as well.35 For several years his crew killed, cut apart, and boiled down the whales of the western Sea of Okhotsk, sending the oil and baleen off to San Francisco and Honolulu. Lindholm’s largest victim, a gigantic seventy-foot-long bowhead whale, died quietly protecting its calf, and the youngster, too, became raw material for the tryworks. The men also gathered and sold tons of baleen that Yankee whalers had wastefully discarded on shore. In one year they addi-

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tionally slayed more than seventy bears that came to scavenge the whale carcasses. Whalers of that era often exacted a horrifying toll on wildlife of all kinds, not just whales.36 Noting that the whales’ behavior and migratory patterns were changing as they responded to human persecution, in 1870 Lindholm moved his station further south to Nakhodka, closer to present-day Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan. His company grew enough that in 1877 he was able to purchase a steamship in order to pursue the dwindling numbers of whales further north into the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Without any real possibility of regulating his or others’ whaling, though, Lindholm suffered the same fate as the Americans. He was driven out of the business by his own success, and by the late 1880s his ships were harvesting seaweed instead of whales to sell to Japan and China.37 Already the equivalent of a millionaire today, Lindholm retired to the new Russian city of Vladivostok, a port that would soon take its place as the most important center of Soviet whaling. Today, Lindholm is celebrated as a one of the founding fathers of the city, the businessman-adventurer who unlocked the riches of the sea for Russia. As “the first Russian whaler in the Far East,” he helped establish the Pacific as the center of the Russian whaling industry.38 There’s some truth to these honorifics. Other private Russian entrepreneurs followed in Lindholm’s wake, pursuing whales in the Sea of Japan and around Korea, though their ventures did not last long. And in some ways Lindholm’s best qualities mirrored those of the late Russian Empire itself. The empire’s spirit of experimentation— in the arts as well as in commerce and science— stand out as a bright flash of inspiration in a country often thought to be eternally repressed by a suffocating autocracy. Russia in Lindholm’s time freed its serfs while giving the world Pavlov’s dog, Mendeleev’s periodic table, Dostoevsky’s mad genius, Chekhov’s urbane humanity, and the longest railroad in the world, the Trans- Siberian. And, despite a turn toward nationalism, Russia’s relations with its conquered subjects retained a flexibility that was rapidly disappearing in the racialized America of Chinese exclusion laws and Jim Crow. At the same time, Russians began to realize that the empire’s growth was pitching it into an ecological crisis. Intellectuals and peasants alike hotly debated the “forest question,” lamenting the disappearance of Russia’s abundant woodlands and wondering how to stop it.39 In response, shortly before its demise, the Russian Empire would create some of the

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world’s first nature preserves, called zapovedniki. Many were located in the Russian Far East, the empire’s most important whaling region. There was no “ocean question” in Russia. But some recognized that oceans, like forests, were not inexhaustible. In 1840, scientists established conclusively that Steller’s sea cow, discovered on Vitus Bering’s 1741 voyage, was gone forever.40 That gigantic manatee was among the first victims of what scientists now call “the Sixth Great Extinction,” one of humanity’s opening salvos against large animals everywhere. In Alaska and the Far East, the Russian-American Company established increasingly effective measures for conserving fur seals and sea otters, species that had teetered on the brink of their own extinction. Lindholm urged that Russians should extend similar protection to the whales of the Sea of Okhotsk.41 Still, Russians’ efforts at conservation were bedeviled by their inability to patrol their coasts. Through the early 1920s, Japanese, Canadian, and American sealers still poached North Pacific waters, even taking the rare sea otters Russians were trying desperately to conserve. By this time, the classical era of sail whaling was hurtling to a close. Despite its simple technologies of wood and sail, it had effectively destroyed its foundations. True, fast, elusive rorquals like blue whales or fin whales still swam the world with little to worry from humans. Sperm whales, the toothed whales famous from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, had suffered huge losses— humans had killed an estimated 300,000 of them around the world— but probably a million or so remained.42 All around the world, however, big, slow whales had nearly vanished. Humans, mainly Americans, had reduced Pacific gray whales from around 24,000 to a remnant population of 2,000. Atlantic gray whales were entirely extinct. Bowheads in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, along with right whales in the North Pacific and Southern Hemisphere were nearly so. Not since some combination of climate change and Pleistocene humans had attacked the mammoths of North America had large animals disappeared from Earth in such numbers. Never before had it happened in the oceans. Almost none of this was the doing of Russians. At the same time, they had possessed a front-row seat for the carnage in some of its most reckless theaters. True, not many Russians at the time mourned the loss of whales for the whales’ sake; Lindholm was exceptional in his calls for protection. But many Russians did resent the repercussions of whales’ eradication for their own lives and their empire’s well-being. In 1898, the Far Eastern

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writer and explorer A. Ya. Maksimov penned a short story that expressed a crystalizing late imperial Russian attitude toward whales and whaling. In his simply titled “Kitoboi” (Whaler), a Vladivostok whaler, Savelii Nikitich Zaitsev, takes a crew to sea in search of prey. Joining him for the first time is his fourteen-year-old son. Zaitsev is desperate, having killed very few whales, since Far Eastern seas had been emptied by “American whalers who had managed to kill or disperse the whales that had gathered to mate or rear their young.”43 The environmental irresponsibility of these “uninvited guests” forces the simple Russians to take inadvisable risks. When Zaitsev finally sights a whale, he ignores the gathering dark clouds on the horizon and pursues the animal anyway. The crew manages to kill the creature, but is left with no time to escape a terrible North Pacific storm that tosses the small ship through the night. One by one, each member of the crew dies from exposure. Finally, Zaitsev’s own son slips beneath the waves. Zaitsev himself is the only survivor and returns home bearing the terrible news to the boy’s mother.44 Imperial expansion had offered Russians many kinds of new knowledge about whales, but what they learned most was an old lesson: the ocean and the foreign whalers it brought meant ruin. Of course, these ideas were not entirely accurate. While they rightly faulted foreigners for their ecological irresponsibility, Russians were themselves becoming more prolific whalers. They had learned much about whales— had pondered and cared about what they meant to Aleuts and Chukchi, had begun to apply the methods of Western science to them, had begun, metaphorically, to put some flesh on the whale’s skeleton— but had mostly focused on the killing. If Chamisso had admired his lifelike Aleut models, the fictional Zaitsev’s vision had so narrowed that he sacrificed everything to kill that whale. That was another part of Lindholm’s legacy: his cosmopolitanism and curiosity about local whale knowledge pointed backward to an age of whaling then entering its death flurry; his interest in science beckoned forward to a time that would elevate numbers and technical expertise above all. The dangerous tensions and their tragic consequences for the world’s whales would soon be on full display, right in Lindholm’s home city of Vladivostok.

3

A Revolution in Whaling

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was born in violence, and spawned even more. It was also made in service to some of humanity’s most utopian ideas. The Bolsheviks insisted on the equality of the sexes, the end of colonial and racial oppression, and— of course— the end of economic exploitation. They also believed that through reining in private enterprise and by using science to guide economic activity, their new state would avoid the ecological destruction that capitalism had everywhere wrought. The Bolsheviks paired these ideals with an unshakable belief that modern industrial technology represented the only vehicle for their attainment, the only force powerful enough to release humans from the brutal necessities of poverty.1 Vladimir Lenin led the new Soviet society along a winding course toward these ideals through civil war and tactical retreats, such as the 1920s freemarket period of the New Economic Policy. His successor, Joseph Stalin, applied more ruthless means toward a thorough reorientation of Soviet life toward industrial production. Set against Russia’s enduring poverty, such ambitions provoked difficult tensions and called the Soviet people to heroic feats. The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg described, with a hint of ambivalence, this great historical transformation and the workers performing it: “They knew what they were doing— they were building Leviathan.”2 Soviet workers would also kill leviathans, using that same combination of industry and idealism. In this way and others, Soviet whaling would bear the imprint of the revolution and its values. In fact, the Bolsheviks found whaling particularly amenable to revolutionary ideals and an effective vehicle for advertising the new

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Russia. But dreams launched from Moscow did not land unaltered in the distant Russian Far East. The revolution was not the same everywhere across this vast land. From the famous writer Vladimir Arsen’ev to the Soviet Union’s first whale scientist, Boris Zenkovich, Far Easterners brought their own values to Soviet whaling. The region shaped the industry and reshaped the revolution while beginning the radical transformation of the world’s oceans. The Russian Far East and the new Soviet whaling fleet, the Aleut, represented both the best of the new Soviet Union and its worst violence and recklessness. The Bolshevik Revolution produced, if possible, even more chaos and violence in the Far East than it did in European Russia. In 1918, with the revolution spreading east, Japanese and American soldiers entered Vladivostok hoping to keep the Bolsheviks from extending their control to the Pacific. Civil war raged in the streets and in the countryside, punctuated by a notorious massacre at Nikolayevsk on the Amur River. There, Bolshevik forces killed several thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians. The Allied intervention failed, and from 1920 to 1923 a semi-independent satellite state, the Russian Far Eastern Republic, operated as a buffer between the Soviets and the remaining foreign forces in the country. All this left a volatile legacy of betrayal and suspicion. The events also cast the Russian Far East on its own, with scant support or control from a central government in Moscow overcome with its own problems. During those years of revolution and civil war, and even into the first few years of peace, Russia suffered devastation: around eight million deaths, mass starvation, rampant homelessness, and the formation of desperate armies of orphans. In this chaos, ties with Moscow began to fray. Intellectuals, workers, and even peasants in the Far East talked of creating a “democratic federative republic” that would end the region’s subordination to central authority. Jan Gamarnik, head of the Far Eastern Republic, championed semi-independent policies and noted it was the Far East’s ties to Asia that had allowed it to prosper. Even after the Soviets consolidated power, the Russian Far East continued on a different historical trajectory from the rest of the Soviet Union. The free-market New Economic Policy (NEP), the Bolsheviks’ tactical and temporary retreat from communism, lasted there until 1928, two years longer than elsewhere. The threat of regional autonomy worried Moscow for another half decade.3 One man caught up in the revolutionary chaos, and who at the same time played a crucial role in Russia’s whaling history, was the writer Vladimir

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Klavdeevich Arsen’ev. A dashing imperial military man, an amateur scientist and anthropologist, and above all a gifted writer, Arsen’ev would gain lasting fame as the author of Dersu Uzala, a tightly and beautifully spun fictionalized account of his explorations of the Far East and his deep friendship with his Native guide, the eponymous Dersu. As a result of his wide travels and wide-ranging curiosity, in 1917 there were few Russians who knew the Far East’s natural world better than Arsen’ev. He almost certainly sympathized with the White, or counterrevolutionary, cause, and this may have been part of the reason in 1919 he left the hyperpolitcized city of Khabarovsk to resettle in quieter Vladivostok.4 There, Arsen’ev found refuge in work. In 1918, while writing Dersu, he joined the Far Eastern Republic’s new Dal’rybokhoto (Far Eastern Fishing and Hunting Agency) as a “Specialist in Marine Mammal Hunting.”5 The Far East of Arsen’ev’s time was experiencing rapid growth and transformation. Vladivostok, a city whose name means “to rule the east,” had been established in 1860 and grown into a regional center of trade, military, and governance. Its steep, thickly forested hills offered stunning views over the deep Amur Gulf, where the Pacific Ocean thrusts into Asia, and the Golden Horn (named for its resemblance to the famous body of water in Istanbul), where the sea curls into a protected harbor seemingly created to shelter a naval or merchant fleet. In the last decades of the empire, the city welcomed capitalists from around the globe in search of the business opportunities offered by this meeting of Europe and Asia. Even as Russian soldiers chased out Chinese ginseng gatherers and fought a war against Japan, Vladivostok maintained a reputation as a cosmopolitan center. The city hosted the headquarters of a multinational trading giant, the German firm Kunst and Albers, and the eccentric daughter of American high society, Eleanor Lord Pray, who used to walk her tame Amur leopard through the city streets. It was in Vladivostok that Arsen’ev met Otto Lindholm, who had moved to the city after retiring from whaling. Both were members of the prestigious Society for the Study of the Amur Region (OIAK), which sponsored serious research on the newly conquered region. Lindholm died before the Bolshevik Revolution, but Arsen’ev carried forward some the old whaler’s interests into the new era. Like Lindholm, Arsen’ev attempted to apply scientific rigor to finding prey— always the most difficult part of whaling. In his capacity as marine mammal hunting specialist, he compiled the first comprehensive map of the Far East’s whale populations, information

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Vladimir Arsen’ev’s map of Far Eastern marine mammal migration routes. The map indicates places where whales and fur seals were likely to be encountered. Locating these animals was the most difficult part of establishing a profitable industry. This same region served as the main whaling grounds for the Aleut fleet, which primarily hunted along these migratory routes. The map is held in the State Archive of the Primorsky Region. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Primorskogo kraia, arkhivnyi fond “Primorskoe basseinovoe uplravlenie po okhrane i vosproizvodstvu rybnykh zapasov i regulirovaniia rybolovstva ‘Primorrybvod’ Glavrybvoda Ministerstva rybnogo khoziastva SSSR” (F.R-633). Korotkii arkhivnyi shifr: GAPK, fond R-633, op. 4, d. 100, p. 53. Courtesy of the State Archive of the Primorsky Region.

drawn from his own travels as well as surveys distributed to knowledgeable locals. His map might have been beautiful in the way it revealed the many intersecting, living lines of the Far East’s oceans, had its intent had not been to destroy that life. During Arsen’ev’s time with Dal’rybokhoto, whales again emerged as strategic prey for Russia. In the political and economic chaos of the revolutionary years, Far Easterners looked to mobilize their natural riches to sell for hard currency, much as they would again in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thanks to the process of hydrogenation, developed in the early twentieth century, whale fats could now be turned into a butter substitute that betrayed no taste of its oceanic origins. Whales caught in enough quantity could substitute for the expensive importation

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of pig fats then troubling the Soviet balance of trade. Planners hoped in the longer term that Soviet citizens could learn to eat whale meat; as the industry’s boosters noted, the Japanese enjoyed whales salted, canned, pickled, and dried.6 In the spirit of free enterprise encouraged by Lenin in the 1920s, Dal’rybokhoto invited Far Easterners to submit sealed envelopes to their office containing detailed plans for killing and processing the region’s whales, which sometimes could be seen swimming in the waters just outside the agency’s office. The responses flooded in, and the dozen or so applicants for government permission to whale the Far East show some of the restless energy unleashed by the collapsing imperial structures and the limitless possibility offered by Soviet power. But the applicants were not necessarily any better prepared than their imperial predecessors to try whaling. Their plans cried out for an expert, for someone who possessed real knowledge about whales. As his work with mapping had showed, Arsen’ev was that man. Accordingly, Arsen’ev responded to the applicants with concrete knowledge on whale locations and behavior, and with advice on where, when, and what species to hunt. At the same time, he showed that Russians had learned from watching the reckless destruction that whaling had brought to their shores as well as many examples of overhunting of other marine mammals. Reflecting the sense of environmental pessimism that also animates parts of Dersu Uzala, he stressed the dangers of heedless exploitation. “Every whaling industry” in history, he noted, had been “predatory, in the sense that whalers have destroyed all the animals in the first few years.”7 Prospective Russian whalers thus should not kill young animals or mother whales still with their offspring.8 Arsen’ev also repeatedly cautioned against hunting near the several zapovedniki (nature preserves) in Kamchatka, and prohibited killing whales where it might harm the interests of the local inhabitants. Both these measures reflected his— and most Far Easterners’— respect for conservation and a concern for the well-being of Indigenous people. Worried that the Chukchi, who depended on whale meat, might starve, some even proposed a joint Russian– Chukchi whaling venture that would share the products of the hunt equally for subsistence and commercial purposes.9 Thus Soviet whaling would be imbued at its outset with some of the most progressive aspects of imperial Russian conservation. Arsen’ev’s expert advice did not ensure the immediate success of would-be whalers. In 1920, a group of entrepreneurs and government

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bureaucrats, having received permission from Arsen’ev’s office, set sail on a motorized sloop named the Diana to assess the possibility of catching whales in Far Eastern waters. It was a disaster. The sloop’s new engine quit while still in Peter the Great Bay and the crew rerouted to Hakodate, Japan, where it docked for repairs. Venturing out to sea again, the Diana was hit by a ferocious autumn storm. Without a working engine, escape options were limited. On November 8, furious seas tore through the ship, washing a Korean sailor and the cargo off the deck and into the ocean, never to be seen again.10 Three weeks later, another gigantic wave smashed through the gunwales and threw the ship’s captain overboard, lost as well to the ocean. Finally, on January 16, 1921— more than seven months after departure— the helpless Diana and its starving crew drifted toward Guam, over two thousand miles distant from Vladivostok. There, American naval officials towed it to shore and provided food and medical care to the remaining crew.11 It was a bad start for a new era. As the engine that briefly powered the Diana indicated, change was coming not just to the Far East but also to the global whaling industry. While Russia had been racked with war and revolution, steam and diesel engines were replacing sails on whaleships. The Norwegians had also invented a revolutionary new way of killing whales, with a deck-mounted harpoon gun armed with an exploding grenade replacing the old handthrown iron. Together with faster boats, the elusive but oil-rich rorquals— blues and fins above all— now became reachable targets. Finally, in 1922, another Norwegian invention, the stern slipway, allowed whales to be hauled directly on to the ship’s deck and processed there. A clanking, grinding, seething apparatus of saws, boilers, and canners appeared on board. Production speed and volume increased dramatically. Distant seas such as the Antarctic, which held untold thousands of whales, beckoned. But these new whaling practices demanded new technological knowhow and even larger sums of capital; the disastrous Diana voyage again reminded Russians that these were in short supply in the Soviet Union. So, with the Bolsheviks now firmly in control of the Far East, the Soviet Union did the unthinkable. As Peter the Great had once done, they granted foreigners the right to hunt their whales. By this time, Norwegians had replaced the Dutch and the Americans as indisputable masters of the trade. In 1923, in exchange for 5 percent of any sales, Moscow awarded the Norwegian firm Christian Christensen Jr. a concession to kill any species of whales within the twelve miles of Russian territorial waters on their Pacific

A REVOLUTION IN WH A LING

seaboard from Chukotka to Kamchatka.12 At first, the crew would consist entirely of Norwegian citizens, but the venture was conceived partly as a training ground for future Soviet whalers, and within five years they were to make up a quarter of the workforce.13 Arsen’ev was disappointed, and argued— fruitlessly— against the concession.14 In 1925, the Norwegians took up their concession with their floating station Commanderen and four chaser boats, together termed the Vega fleet. There were troubling omens from the start. The Norwegians arrived unannounced in Kamchatka, taking Soviet officials completely by surprise. Kamchatkan officials assigned six Russian citizens— all enthusiastic young Communists (komsomoltsy in Soviet parlance)— to work on board.15 More problems immediately cropped up. The fisheries inspector in charge of overseeing the fleet failed to find the Vega for its two first months in Russian waters and eventually came upon it by pure chance in Imatra Bay. On board, he found he could not communicate with the Norwegian crew with anything but gestures. As a result, he learned very little about the process of catching and processing whales.16 The following year, further problems developed. The Soviet paper Izvestiia reported in August 1926 that the Far Eastern merchant fleet had discovered a hundred carcasses of dead whales in Morzhovoi Bay. The gigantic, rotting whales were so thick in the water that they imperiled navigation. “However,” wrote Izvestiia, “the main thing here is how the dead whales had been killed completely pointlessly, as they were discovered unused.”17 Secret internal reports outlined a “host of violations committed by the concessioneers”— primarily ecological violations that included “the killing of young whales, anti-sanitary actions, throwing unused parts of the whales overboard,” and so on.18 Furthermore, Russians’ worries for the local Chukchi quickly came true: the whales on which they relied for food grew rarer. To help the Chukchi, the Soviet Committee of Cooperation with the Peoples of the Northern Borders actually recommended the total closure of these waters to outside whaling.19 In 1927, Moscow canceled the Norwegian concession. The Norwegians suspected other motives were at play. They reported constant harassment from local Kamchatkan officials, including threats of fines and imprisonment. Otto Paust, one of the lead Norwegians, reported the Soviets “lived in a childish fantasy” that led them to believe they could skim off endless profits from the concession and expect it would continue; in short, that they could “eat their cake and have it, too.” Indeed, revolu-

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tionary politics and economics at the time were marked by such fantasies. They were also marked by a fracturing regionalism. Paust was likely on to something when he opined that Far Easterners were jealous of the large share of the profits Moscow was taking.20 At any rate, he claimed huffily, the Norwegians would have canceled the concession on their own if the Soviets hadn’t first. The short, troubled history of the Norwegian concession does reveal some characteristic features of Russia’s history with whales. Despite the revolution, the nation continued to approach its oceans underequipped to exploit them, while deeply aware of its Indigenous subjects’ reliance on whales and its European and American competitors’ ability to destroy them. These factors encouraged in Russians a cautious environmental sensibility, one enshrined in zapovedniki, and a willingness to make real sacrifices for the needs of people like the Chukchi. As Arsen’ev’s work makes clear, many of these ideas survived the Bolshevik Revolution, especially in the Far East, and would reappear during the Soviet Union’s move in the 1940s to become a global whaling power. But much would also be lost. By the mid-1920s, the winds of change were already blowing cold along North Pacific shores. The period of cultural experimentation and regional autonomy was skidding to a violent halt. Foreign threats resurfaced as well. The Japanese army was growing, and would shortly (in 1931) invade Manchuria and set up a puppet state along the Soviet border, an expansion funded in large part by their own whaling in the Antarctic.21 Because of his many connections with foreigners, especially the Japanese, Arsen’ev inevitably attracted Soviet suspicions. In 1926 he was forced to write a letter to the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) denying charges of “enemy propaganda.” In subsequent years, the Far Eastern press started criticizing him for practicing “non-Marxist science.”22 In 1930, while surveying railroad routes, still in the service of Russian economic development, Arsen’ev contracted a cold. A heart attack felled him before he could return home. Just fifty-eight years old, he was probably lucky to die when he did: soon thereafter, NKVD officers came for members of his family, exiling them to labor camps; in 1938 they executed his widow, Margarita. One era of Russian engagement with the ocean— exploitative to be sure, but also restrained and informed by holistic ideas such as Arsen’ev’s— was passing away. In 1928, two years before Arsen’ev’s death, Joseph Stalin, Lenin’s suc-

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cessor as leader of the Soviet Union, launched his first Five-Year Plan. It called for the breakneck industrialization of the Soviet Union in order to create new wealth, secure the dominance of the urban working class, and ready the country for the inevitable war with the capitalists. All these goals required great sacrifices. Food would be in short supply until farmers adopted modern machinery. Work, that great privilege and pride of the new Homo sovieticus, would be rushed, dangerous, and tightly controlled by supervisors. With its new mechanization and its strategic value, whaling fit well into that plan. And, for the first time, it would receive real investment from Moscow. As a result, whaling would finally succeed as a modern, purely Russian venture. As with many things in Stalin’s Soviet Union, this success would be laced with tragedy. The first impetus for state investment in whaling came from the Far East. There, one of the organizations created to promote industrial development, the Kamchatka Trading Company (AKO), again proposed whaling as a way to supplement the region’s food supply.23 Anastas Mikoyan, a prominent Armenian Bolshevik, and now Stalin’s commissar for the economy, was an investor in the company, and he listened to its plans with interest.24 Ambitiously, AKO officials hoped to start whaling in the Far East in 1929. No whaling boats would be acquired for another three years, but a name for the future fleet was found: the Aleut, in honor of the Indigenous people who had provided the Russian colonists in Alaska with whale meat.25 As plans progressed, they assumed ever more grandiose forms. The Bolshevik regime purchased a decommissioned US warship to be retrofitted into a floating factory, along with four chaser boats custom-built in Norway. Mikoyan himself personally inspected the ships when they arrived in Leningrad.26 Perhaps the most important of the Aleut’s new technologies was its stern slipway. Previously, one of the most inconvenient and often dangerous aspects of whaling was bringing a gigantic whale carcass aboard a ship it might sometimes rival in size. A series of levers and pulleys helped, but often much of the blubber had to be stripped while the dead whale remained in the water, tied to the ship, surrounded by frenzied sharks. Built directly into the ship’s stern, the slipway, in contrast, allowed the entire whale to be brought on board safely and quickly by utilizing steam winches to efficiently pull it onto the flensing deck.27 The slipway also hid most of the processing activity from outside observation.

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Only one problem remained for the Aleut: all the fleet’s boats were then in Europe, while whaling was to take place in the North Pacific. The Soviets would have to perform an around-the-world voyage. Boris Aleksandrovich Zenkovich— humane, learned, a true patriot of the Far East, and destined to become the Soviet Union’s first serious whale scientist— was then studying at the new Vladivostok Fisheries Institute (TINRO). He could scarcely believe that his young country was launching its own whaling expedition, and he wouldn’t miss it for anything. In April 1932, he jumped on board the express train from Vladivostok to travel across the immense country to Leningrad, where the Aleut lay at port.28 One hundred and twenty-six enthusiastic and mostly very young Soviet citizens, both men and women, joined him on the fleet’s voyage. Few had any experience with whaling.29 Petr Zarva, later one of the most famous Soviet harpooners in both the Pacific and the Antarctic, also began his training on board the Aleut’s maiden voyage. If less cosmopolitan than during the days of sail whaling, the crew was hardly purely Soviet. A Spaniard and an American both joined in Leningrad, and a number of essential Norwegian advisers were hired as well. “We were to learn from them how to kill whales,” Zenkovich wrote, adding hopefully that the Norwegians in turn “would learn from us how to belong to a Soviet collective.” Germans, too, played an important role: the harpooner Otto Kraul would provide one of the two written accounts of the expedition. The “dapper” Kraul, who had served on an Argentine whaling ship in the 1920s, had been surprised to hear the Soviets were whaling. Despite “mixed feelings,” he ultimately agreed to come along.30 All the crew members, whether Soviet or foreign, understood that more than whales’ lives were at stake in this expedition. The Aleut was a test case for the Soviets’ technological and organizational competence, a sign that this infant regime could do better on the international stage than the Russian Empire had. Technologically demanding and of growing global significance, modern whaling carried extra symbolic weight. For this reason, a filmmaker, Yan Tolchan, also shipped on board to record the voyage for posterity. With so many Germans on board, and with Germany in the midst of bitter electoral and physical battles between Communists and Nazis, international politics were also in the mix. Kraul was warned to be careful “and assume that everyone else on board [was] a spy.”31 When the ship’s German navigator, who wore a swastika around his neck, grounded the ship in the shallow waters of the English coast, suspicions rose. Fortunately

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for the Aleut, the catcher boats were able to tow it out of the shallows, and the incident passed without repercussions. Because of the high stakes and the need to make a good impression, the Soviet regime had outfitted the Aleut with an extravagance very rare in the impoverished country. Kraul happily reported receiving an envelope stuffed with cash when he boarded. The Aleut attracted immediate attention wherever it stopped. Docking in a German port, the ship was overrun with curious visitors. As the fleet sailed into the open Atlantic, however, the shine began to fade. The Aleut had not stocked enough provisions in Europe, and the meat they had was soon found to be rotten and had to be thrown overboard. Drawn by the food, sharks appeared around the flotilla. Kraul was shocked and deeply upset when he saw one of the young Soviet girls appear on deck in a bathing suit and suddenly dive into the ocean. “Apparently,” he wrote, “the Russians didn’t know about the sharks, or the appearance of the beautiful swimmer made them forget everything.” A commanding Soviet officer immediately ordered the woman out of the sea, and, as Kraul wryly noted, she found many willing hands to help her back on board. Despite the diversion, declining supplies were beginning to dampen the mood of even the ardent German communists, who chafed at the amount of hard work required on board.32 When the Aleut landed in Jamaica, the crew indulged in a splurge of luxury that was fast becoming the norm for shore stops where appearances were essential. The staff rented cars for everyone, astounding the local British colonists, especially when they were told that cars were standard issue for the happy proletariat in Soviet Russia. Afro-Jamaicans, upon hearing the news, swarmed to the ship begging for passage to Russia. The Aleut was, in Zenkovich’s words, “beginning to resemble that of whalers of old times” in its multinational composition.33 But the Aleut left behind mixed impressions in Jamaica. While Zenkovich and other scientists visited the botanical gardens, the historical museum, and the nearby Blue Mountains and undertook other such healthy diversions, several of the Aleut’s officers became ferociously drunk and smashed some local restaurants. Two sailors slunk back on board completely naked after a night of carousing.34 At the Aleut’s next stop, near the Panama Canal, officers kept the crew on board. Back in Russia, the press reported breathlessly on the progress of the “great” Soviet whaling fleet entering the Pacific.35 This was an era of epic Soviet technological feats. That same year, 1932, a Soviet icebreaker made the first voyage from Arkhangelsk to Vladivostok across the north coast of

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Siberia. Five years later, Valery Chkalov piloted the first transpolar flight, from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington. Intense media coverage followed all these events. Aware of the expectations of a watching nation, the Aleut crew was determined to inaugurate whaling as soon as they entered the Pacific. However, they were still not quite ready when the Soviets encountered an “immeasurable” herd of humpback whales along the Costa Rican coastline. The Norwegians and Germans grumbled at the missed opportunity, which they blamed on the laziness of the Russian crew.36 But, a few days later, the Aleut finally fulfilled the hopes the Soviet people had placed in it. In the open Pacific near Mexico’s Islas Revillegigedo, Kraul made the first Soviet whale kill when he harpooned a fin whale. Later, Zenkovich claimed it was unclear who actually made the first strike, not wanting to give a German the honor. Everyone down to the ship’s cook was so excited that they gathered on deck to celebrate even before the whale had been hauled back to the ship. The date, remarkably, was October 25— the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, according to the Julian calendar. The significance was lost on no one, and the band struck up the Internationale in celebration. Zenkovich wrote, “Today there opened a new page in an ancient industry of the people of our land— the birth of Soviet whaling.”37 However, lack of freshwater provisions forced the ships to abandon a potentially rich whaling ground. The Russians on board were still anxious— desperate even— to experience something of the wider world beyond the Soviet Union, as all knew that they “would never again undertake such an interesting world voyage.”38 They insisted on stopping on nearby Soccoro Island. There, crew members slaughtered the island’s wild lambs in anticipation of the long Pacific crossing. Kraul grew upset when the crew killed a nursing mother, and he blamed Russian heartlessness. “Naturally the Russians did not concern themselves with the motherless lambs,” he wrote, “but instead two Norwegians brought them on board, where the wife of Professor Smirnoff and a female telegraphist took care of them.”39 It was a curious statement, considering it came from a harpooner who regularly slayed mother whales without thought for their offspring. Moving on to nearby Clarion Island, the crew clumsily set an uncontrolled fire and had to make a hurried escape while the entire island burned. This disturbed Kraul not only for the amateurishness it revealed in his crewmates, but also because of the great destruction it must have delivered to the songbirds there that he had found so beautiful.40 This was the beginning of a new— and, in time, dominant—

A REVOLUTION IN WH A LING

foreign view of Russian whalers as hopelessly and cruelly indifferent to natural beauty. Zenkovich had a very different perspective. He admitted that Russian sailors unthinkingly shot at all sharks they saw, a common practice worldwide in the 1930s. But he, as an educated Russian, disagreed with this senseless practice, since he considered it well known that sharks rarely attacked humans. Nor were Russians free of sentimentality toward nature. While on the Costa Rican shore, the crew caught one of the giant turtles seen swimming in the harbor and placed it in a lifeboat for future eating. The turtle fought desperately to escape, but when it realized it could not, it began to shed what looked to the crew like large tears. “Turtles cry?” Zenkovich asked in surprise. The animal’s apparent show of emotion moved the Soviet captain to free it, even though the cook had already begun preparations for turtle soup. But if Kraul had exaggerated Russian misbehavior, the Soviets were also sometimes guilty of playing loose with the truth: Zenkovich would later blame the Japanese for exterminating sea otters in the North Pacific’s Kuril Islands, even though the Russians had handled most of that job themselves.41 What is clear is that at least some Russians on board placed value in environmental responsibility and sentimentality, even as the fleet set forth to attack the whales of the North Pacific. The most important point in the Aleut’s voyage came when it steamed into Honolulu to meet an appointment with whaling’s past and future. Hawaiʻi had deep historical resonance as the former center of Pacific whaling, and the Aleut’s arrival seemed a portent, both to Russians and Americans living there. When the Soviet ship unexpectedly appeared off the waving palm trees of Waikiki in late November 1932, Hawai ʻian newspapers marveled that the fleet was “the first of its kind to call at this harbor since the days of many years ago when the old whalers came down from the North to winter here.”42 Zenkovich recalled that though Russian whalers had been rare in Honolulu, many Russian explorers such as Yuri Lisiansky, Vasily Golovnin, and Otto von Kotzebue had written important early descriptions of Hawaiʻi. Kotzebue, in fact, had provided a famous denunciation of American missionaries in the 1820s, and could usefully be seen as a predecessor to Soviet anticolonialism. The Aleut now prepared to take up Kotzebue’s work, reading up on American imperialism and the oppression of Native Hawaiʻians.43 The cynical Kraul simply wondered whether the Russians intended to light this island on fire as well. A large crowd gathered at Honolulu Pier 2 to greet the Aleut. No one

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knew where the ship had come from, nor where it was headed. When the Americans learned this was a Soviet ship, customs and immigration officials were stumped. Since the fiercely anti- Communist United States did not yet recognize the Soviet Union, there were no procedures for admitting its citizens.44 Nor did the ships make a positive first impression, appearing “battered and rusty,” with a “great maw through which the whales were drawn upon deck to be cut down.”45 This was the first time most Americans had seen a modern whaleship with its stern slipway. Russian exiles— mostly supporters of the White Army who had fled the Far East for Honolulu fifteen years earlier— thronged on board, desperate for news of life in Russia.46 Hawaiʻian residents were in for more surprises. Whaling vessels almost never carried women with them, but the Aleut did: twelve women were on board, including the captain’s wife. They formed a “husky crowd that laughingly slapped an occasional face of some wise-cracking member of the crew,” the first report of the sexual harassment that would become endemic on Soviet ships.47 The Americans could not resist commenting on the Russian women’s beauty. One in particular was “as pretty a little Russian gal as ever danced in a ballet.”48 Beautiful women were to be one of Soviet whaling’s best diplomatic allies. By December 3, the Russians had made enough contact with Hawaiʻians that they had lined up a radio program in which “two or three of the women comrades from the ship will join in the festivities, singing peasant songs from the Ukraine.”49 In return, that same day a group of Hawaiʻian women came on board the Aleut to dance a hula and play their ukuleles.50 Even more shocking for the Americans was the presence of Black sailors. Three “American negroes” and a Virgin Islander had joined the crew in Jamaica. One, Phillip Graves, reported liking work on board, though he said that “he had cooked so much fish that it made him nervous.” Graves, who had lived in Canada and the eastern United States, was prepared to take up a new life in Russia. The other African Americans had signed on for the adventure.51 That Black Americans would willingly sign up for a life on board a Soviet ship, and even choose Russia over the United States, suggested the uncomfortable possibility that America was in important ways inferior to the society of class and racial equality the Bolsheviks were trying to create. As in Germany and Jamaica, the Soviet whalers had proved effective ambassadors for their isolated country. Again, the Aleut voyage was about much more than whaling.

A REVOLUTION IN WH A LING

Honolulu Advertiser, November 30, 1932. Americans were unsettled by the presence of women and African American sailors on board the Soviet ship. The Aleut’s stern slipway can be seen to the right. Courtesy of Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Meanwhile, Depression-era Hawaiʻi seemed to confirm for the Soviets the seriousness of the deep crisis then facing the West. Honolulu was suffering visibly from unemployment, pineapple plantations standing idle with no one to buy the fruit.52 The American military had beefed up its presence, making the city feel besieged. Many of the roads out of Honolulu, formerly popular walking paths, had been shut. Armored military equipment roamed the city’s streets. Even the more objective Kraul, who had been in Hawaiʻi two decades before, found the Native Hawaiʻian population less happy than in his earlier impressions. Zenkovich also noted the mass of policemen in Honolulu, who seemed to be drawn to the red communist flag of their ship fluttering in the wind. Two weeks later, the propaganda war became real. As the Aleut departed Honolulu, several seamen turned up missing. Mystery surrounded them, with one Hawaiʻian paper reporting the men to be a German and a Czechoslovak, another claiming they were both Norwegians.53 Kraul, on the other hand, wrote that the deserters were actually Russians. None were ever located by the Aleut. But the desertions went both ways. Though the local newspapers were silent about it, Kraul reported that ten American “occupation troops” stowed away on the Soviet ships. Zenkovich wrote that

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there were actually eighteen men who wanted to leave these “paradisiacal islands.”54 These men “swore up and down to the captain that they would serve him well and even offered him money to take them to Russia.” But the Soviets turned cautious, and they sent the stowaways back to shore.55 And so, instead of leaving with any more Americans aboard, the first Soviet ship to visit Honolulu instead departed with a renewed sense of historical mission, a firmer belief in the rightness of the Soviet cause, and every hope they would finally make the whales of Russia their own. What awaited them in Vladivostok would ratify these hopes, and then, as with Arsen’ev, destroy others.

4

North Pacific Numbers

The Aleut nearly didn’t make it back home. Hurrying west from Honolulu, it entered a Pacific swelling with tension and intrigue, war rising on the horizon. Again failing to inform anyone of its intentions, the Aleut docked unexpectedly at the Bonin Islands, which the Japanese were secretly developing as a naval base. Japanese officials were not happy to see a Soviet ship and made this clear to the crew. Zenkovich feared they would be imprisoned, or worse, but luckily the Aleut had recently radioed its position to the Soviet Union and other nearby whaling vessels, so it was difficult for the Japanese to act secretly. As it was, they detained the Aleut for two weeks before allowing it to continue and finally arrive in Vladivostok in early 1933.1 Zenkovich, exhausted but delighted at concluding his circumnavigation of the globe, was overwhelmed with questions from friends and relatives. “How wonderful it is to be home, comrades!” he wrote.2 The Bonin Islands incident, however, had cost the Aleut’s captain his job. This opened the door for Aleksandr Ignatevich Dudnik, who would lead the new Soviet fleet through the dangerous waters of both Stalinist politics and the North Pacific. Dudnik was the son of a fisherman in the Black Sea port of Kherson. Early in his career he had moved to Vladivostok, where he accrued hard-won and valuable knowledge of the North Pacific by running transport and crabbing vessels from the Sea of Okhotsk up the coast of Kamchatka and into the Bering Strait. A devotee of the revolution, the young Bolshevik got a taste of international relations and whaling when he served as an observer aboard the Norwegian concessionary Vega fleet that whaled the Russian Far East in the 1920s. It was Dudnik

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who raised the alarm at what he claimed were massive violations of the concession, including harvesting of illegal whales and reckless wasting of their carcasses. While supervising the construction of the Aleut’s catcher boats in Norway, Dudnik established friendlier relations with his former adversaries. Despite already having a wife and child in Vladivostok, he fell in love with a Norwegian woman, Johanne Kleve. She, along with the couple’s new daughter, accompanied Dudnik back to Vladivostok in 1932. It was a decision that would haunt him, though less for personal than for political reasons.3 In the 1930s, the Russian Far East remained a dangerously heated mixture of political intrigue and breakneck growth. Having finally taken direct control of the region in 1923, the Bolsheviks eyed its residents with suspicion. The local NKVD chief oversaw reconstruction of the prison inside Vladivostok’s Hotel Far East in anticipation of arrests. In Khabarovsk, another Chekist (the name for secret police apparatchiks), Terentii Deribas, helped suppress the Indigenous people on the Sea of Okhotsk, executing many in 1931, before doing the same to many of the region’s Orthodox Old Believers. Deribas personally carried out some of the executions, as did Albert Lipsky, a fellow Chekist, enemy of Arsen’ev, and so-called ethnographer with a pistol who gunned down Indigenous people merely to collect their bodies as scientific samples.4 Meanwhile, a growing number of political prisoners trapped in Far Eastern gulags provided much of the labor for the rapid construction foreseen by Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan (1933–1937).5 The Aleut fleet likely encountered some of the many freighters turned into prison ships, which busily plied the North Pacific in the late 1930s, delivering shiploads of shivering prisoners to the forced labor camps being built along the Sea of Okhotsk and Chukotka. Perhaps one of the ships that passed by the Aleut was the Indigirka, a slave transport that wrecked near the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1939. Instead of radioing for help and revealing the ship’s cargo, its officers allowed more than a thousand political prisoners to drown.6 Those laborers who survived the horrifying journeys were part of a demographic boom in the Far East, which in addition to political prisoners received over a million willing immigrants in the 1930s. These included the famous Khetagurovki— around 11,000 young marriageable Soviet women who in 1937 moved en masse to the region in response to Valentina Khetagurova’s call to bring socialism to the Pacific. Vladivostok’s popula-

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tion nearly doubled and Khabarovsk’s nearly quadrupled.7 With the failure of the first Five-Year Plan to industrialize the Far East, the second assumed even greater importance. Not all the resettlement necessarily furthered economic growth, however. In 1928, the Soviet government sent 1,100 fishermen from Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea to the Far East to help with the fisheries there. When the immigrants arrived, local officials found they only had experience on freshwater rivers, and none had any idea how to work on the ocean.8 Still, the Astrakhan fishermen could be counted a success, for numbers counted in Stalin’s Russia, perhaps more than anything else.9 Five-year plans, weekly, monthly, and yearly quotas, record-breaking growth: these dominated newspapers’ headlines and Soviets’ mental worlds. The push for ever greater figures, for whales and then for humans, too, powerfully shaped the Aleut’s decade of work— and thus the history of the North Pacific Ocean— before the outbreak of World War II. Planners quantified everything, from monthly catches to the number of rats on board. Even four thousand miles away from Moscow, Stalinism left its imprint on Far Eastern whaling. But so did local experience, and its tension with central planning opened one of the fissures that troubled the Aleut’s search for whales, its struggle to make good use of those whales, and finally its fight for its own survival. Numbers counted in whales’ survival as well. Often caught in mother-calf pairs, whales entered record books in growing numbers, and measurements of body size showed some species in rapid decline. By the coming of World War II, no whaler, in the North Pacific or anywhere in the world, could consider any species numberless. The second Five-Year Plan envisioned whaling as a crucial component of the region’s growth, particularly in foodstuffs. Its planners assigned the Aleut quotas to meet these needs, quotas initially based on nothing more than guesses about its capacities, and about the North Pacific’s capacity to supply the necessary whales. Six months after its round-the-world voyage, following provisioning and recruiting crew, in June 1933 the Aleut was ready to begin work. Vladivostok— the largest ice-free, deepwater port in the Far East—was chosen as its headquarters. Every year until the war, the Aleut would proceed north from Vladivostok before stopping off at what would become, in 1934, the beautiful Kronotsky zapovednik in Kamchatka. There the mother ship took on water while the catchers hunted down fin and humpback whales caught in the midst of their northward migrations. The fleet soon learned to then head directly to the Commander Islands,

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where the ocean warmed in the long days of early summer and produced large swarms of krill. Local Aleuts reported a year-round population of fin whales, and the Aleut often returned there in late summer.10 After reprovisioning in remote Gluboky (Deep) Bay north of Kamchatka, the fleet would head toward the pole. As the sea ice melted and opened up the Bering Sea and the Arctic, the Aleut switched from speedy rorquals to slower and fatter gray whales, and even to some of the very rare North Pacific right whales.11 Now the pace of everything quickened as these whales would gather at the melting ice only for a few weeks or even days. They fed at these rich edges and were reluctant to move, even when pursued by the loud motors of catcher boats. But soon, as the floes opened, the whales would disperse over a great swath of the North Pacific and Arctic.12 Once that happened, the Aleut again switched focus, now to sperm whales and humpbacks, which might be found anywhere in the North Pacific. Even after a century of Euro-American sail whaling and many centuries of Indigenous and Japanese whaling, North Pacific waters teemed with whales. Grays, bowhead, and right whales were scarce, but humpbacks, fins, and sperm whales were abundant. Many of the targeted whales moved together in large groups. Often the baleen whales were traveling with young between their wintering locations in the tropics and the sites of abundant summer food further north. Still, anyone who has spent any time on the open ocean will appreciate the fact that much of it is entirely empty of any large life. Oceans are vast deserts marked by exceptional oases of life that, unlike on land, exist in three dimensions, extending downward as well as outward. Furthermore, everything in the ocean is on the move, and fog and storms— defining features of the North Pacific— also helped hide whales from their hunters. Thus, the Aleut was hunting an ocean of abundance; yet, most days at sea, it and its catcher boats sailed an empty ocean, accompanied only by each other. Whalers relied on clues, large and small, to guide them to their elusive prey. Those on the Aleut carefully scanned the horizon for flocks of birds, schools of fish, even changes in the color of water to indicate the mere possibility of finding whales. Wheeling and diving high in the air, birds were visible much further away than whale spouts. They often focused on the same prey that whales did and might be an indicator of large creatures below.13 After 1935, the Russians had learned enough of this craft from the Norwegian specialists on board that they took over harpooning. The acquisition of a spotter plane in 1936 made some of this searching easier.14

N O R T H PA C I F I C N UM B E R S

Just as important, however, was the application of science. Initially, the Soviets relied heavily on hearsay and the location of Japanese whalers to discover pods.15 Slowly, however, they began to compile statistics that revealed the likely locations. The Far Easterner cetologist Zenkovich was crucial in helping reveal the ocean’s secrets, and he imbibed much of the Stalinist emphasis on numbers while also drawing on local traditions. He sailed with the crew, observing whales and building on Arsen’ev’s knowledge of migration routes. Zenkovich would also tally and plot catches, trying to uncover patterns in the vast North Pacific. Again adopting some of Arsen’ev’s methods, he gathered information from Indigenous Siberians, who shared their knowledge of the relationship between whales and ice.16 Even once whales were found, though, they were hard to track. Zenkovich, who pondered the question, rejected the notion that anyone could predict where a whale might surface once it dove. Nor could anyone reliably predict when they might dive in the first place, though sperm whales could often be relied on to spend more time on the surface than other species, since they dove so deep and thus needed to fill their lungs with as much oxygen as possible. Gray whales were particularly tricky. Soviet whalers noted that despite being slow, the gray was the only whale “about which no rules of catching have been established.” Only on rare occasions did grays move in a straight line, instead “usually swimming in zig zags, making movements to one or the other side without any determined direction.” Science, the Soviets hoped, might help establish “some or other pattern to its movement.”17 Ironically, those whales that had eluded sail whalers were now the easiest to catch. In the 1930s, large, fast baleen whales like blue whales and fins still had little experience with predators. Killer whales posed the only real danger to them in the sea, and that mostly to the young. Thus, such species had developed no effective responses to humans in boats. Sometimes they spooked easily, but sometimes they reacted “with complete indifference” to a catcher boat careening toward them.18 Few survived such mistakes. Once a whale was harpooned, the story joined more predictable paths. From the human standpoint, it was ideal if the grenade on the first harpoon’s tip exploded near one of the whale’s vital organs. There it would rip apart the heart, the brain, or the lungs. Wherever it hit, blood would pour into the cavity left by the explosion until the brain ceased to function. Or, if the lungs were punctured, blood would soon fountain out the blowhole—

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this was termed by Soviet whalers a “red spout”— and the whale would drown in its own fluids. Usually, though, the harpooner’s aim from atop a pitching boat in rough North Pacific seas was not so true. A second harpoon, even four or five, were often necessary. Then the whale would begin frantic, terrified convulsions, performing “dizzying pirouettes” and “spinning around in the water, spooling the line around itself, struggling into the air, jumping, and sometimes freezing for a second to perform some maneuver.”19 Sometimes the grenade’s concussion might merely knock a whale unconscious, which made it appear dead to the hunters. Then, when tied to the ship, the whale would suddenly awake. One sperm whale thus fixed to the Aleut began thrashing so hard he tore his tail off, then continued fighting against two harpoon lines for a further twenty minutes.20 Ultimately, though, there was little hope for any whale struck by an exploding grenade. The Aleut was practicing industrialized warfare against an enemy equipped only with fat, muscle, and the assistance of companions, who lacked the hands that might have helped. The ocean’s opacity, fast declining with the application of science, statistics, and observation, was whales’ only true protection. On very rare occasions, whales did attempt direct counterattacks. Stories such as Moby-Dick distilled dozens of mostly true accounts circulating around the nineteenth-century Pacific about enraged sperm whales ramming wooden whaleships. But in a time of coal, steel, and grenade, such tales lost their hypnotic appeal, along with their suggestion of danger to humans. Zenkovich drily rejected any romanticism: “There are many stories of whales attacking whale boats. These stories, most likely, are founded on misunderstandings.” He related one incident from an early Aleut voyage, when the catcher ship Trudfront tried to harpoon a sperm whale but only stunned it with shrapnel: The sperm whale appeared near the left side of the catcher boat, came up to it perpendicularly and began to attack the body of the boat, before going to the bow. The four blows were hard enough that the mechanic came out of the machine room to see what had happened, to see either what we had hit, or what had hit us. . . . It was apparent that the whale had had no wish to attack the ship; it seemed, if one had to guess, that it had been stunned, had been rocked by the waves from side to side and shuddered. After fifteen minutes we caught up with it and killed it with a second shot.21

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“Different Types of Whales.” From left to right, top to bottom: Gray whale, right whale, fin whale, sperm whale, humpback whale, blue whale, sei whale. Industrial whalers initially targeted blue whales, then moved progressively to smaller baleen whales. Right whales and gray whales had already been decimated by sail whalers from around the world, though Soviet whaleships still targeted them. Sperm whales, depicted here in combat with a giant squid, were favorite targets of both sail and industrial whalers. W. Cromie, Obitateli bezdny (Leningrad: Gidrometeorologicheskoe Izdatel’stvo, 1971).

If the struggle had surprised the crew, the result surprised no one. The Aleut’s planners developed a mind-numbing array of statistical tables to describe and predict every aspect of the whalers’ activity, from fuel used per day to the percentage of successful harpoon shots for each boat. These numbers revealed that Soviet boats would catch 25 percent of the sperm whales they found, 11 percent of blue whales, 6.7 percent of the grays, and 4.1 percent of the most elusive species, humpbacks.22 Those struck with exploding harpoons almost never escaped. The Aleut returned to port its first year, 1933, with no human fatalities and 180 whale carcasses, all boiled down into oil and chopped into meat.23 The following years would bring greater and greater successes, and on August 1, 1936, the Aleut crew was ecstatic when they learned over the radio that, for his heroic labor, Moscow had awarded Captain Dudnik the coveted Order of Lenin.24 The Far Eastern whalers took their place among the legendary shock workers of the second Five-Year Plan.

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But catching whales was only one part of the whaling industry. Making use of the whale was sometimes even more difficult, and the whale products produced by the Aleut fell well short of the Soviet government’s plans.25 The crew had little experience with the steam boilers used to render the gigantic bodies, nor did they know which parts of the whale to save for meat. Zenkovich described the chaos and bloodiness of the processing: “During whale butchering the stomach content forms a thick, stinking slime, and the blood completely stains the deck, while other whale pieces fall into the mouths of boilers, lowering the quality of the products. In addition, filth and blood seeps into the cabins, sticking to peoples’ feet, including up to the top of the bridge.”26 The shipboard newspaper remembered years later that the “first years were characterized by a barbaric relationship to the rendering of fat. It is enough to say that a half of the useful whale parts, after removing the covering of fat and the head, were lost overboard through the drain.”27 No surprise, then, that in the course of the 1936 voyage, 270 rats were caught, while many more undoubtedly remained alive on board to lick the blood and gnaw the gore. The Aleut’s paint was peeling, cleaning was inadequate, and cockroaches and bed bugs ran rampant. They and the surviving rats were fat, happy, and stinking of rotting whale.28 The humans were less happy. Like their European contemporaries in the Antarctic, Soviet whalers drank nonstop while at sea, even swigging eau de cologne when necessary.29 The crew would have been even less pleased by the fate of their hardwon whale products. Although whaling was originally supposed to feed the Far East’s industrialization, what little demand for whale meat had existed during the depths of the Civil War was quickly disappearing. In 1933, planners threw their hands up, uncertain what to do with the meat that came back from the North Pacific.30 “Only with great effort,” reported the AKO administrators two years later, “have we managed to make a very little bit [of income] by selling the meat for the feeding of livestock.”31 Problems with safely canning the whale meat on board persisted throughout the decade. The canning apparatus presented a large fire risk, and the canned products themselves were sometimes not much safer. In 1939, out of 136 whales caught, 28 were “inedible,” 35 were in part turned into meat, the meat of 93 was completely discarded due to a lack of cans, and 37 went unused due to malfunctions in the canning system.32 One year later, the trust official in charge of canning despaired at the dubiously canned whale meat. “I did not know what to do,” he complained. “Maybe I should

N O R T H PA C I F I C N UM B E R S

A pod of sperm whales off the coast of the Russian Far East. In the background, the Aleut sends its catcher ships off in pursuit. B. A. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami.

be guided by the wise saying ‘You can never be too careful’ and stop the preparation of canned food and turn it into dog meat?”33 In 1940, production for human consumption was abandoned altogether.34 Instead of feeding humans, great whales would now die to feed dogs and foxes, or help produce paint.35 While the bulk of the Aleut’s catches comprised fin and sperm whales, the fleet also landed a substantial number of gray whales. Grays had been one of the favorite targets of nineteenth-century whalers, and by the 1930s their population in the North Pacific had been severely reduced. Some as-

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sumed that Western gray whales, which had once been numerous in the Sea of Okhotsk, were totally extinct.36 California gray whales, some of which migrated all the way from Baja California to Siberia, were also very rare. It is likely the Aleut caught California grays, since it hunted mostly north of the Sea of Okhotsk, but it is impossible to know for sure. What is certain is that as early as 1936, the average size of gray whales caught was shrinking.37 That size continued to shrink alarmingly through 1937, going from an average of 13.33 meters in 1933 to only 10.4 four years later.38 Any whale biologist of the time knew how to interpret these numbers: small whales meant that the population was no longer seeing its members to adulthood. The gray whale population was in trouble. Korean and Japanese whalers had been killing gray whales for centuries, and American whalers had done the same up and down the North American coast until 1921, but— as a sign of their arrival on the whaling scene— the Soviets were now the main cause of gray whale decline. In 1937, League of Nations members agreed to forbid the killing of gray whales. While the Soviets were not a part of the league, they did implement protection measures of their own. During the 1936 season, orders came to stop catching undersized gray whales, a sign that planners were afraid their hunting might be permanently damaging the population.39 The head of production for the Aleut fleet also suggested that whalers’ salaries be tied to the size of the whales they caught. Any whales caught that were smaller than the norm established by the previous three years of hunting would mean a reduction in salary.40 Thus, Soviet planners showed an early willingness to use both state control and market mechanisms to preserve whale stocks. Though Zenkovich was a major supporter of the industry in general and increased catches in particular, he, too, urged more responsible whaling practices. Echoing Arsen’ev’s advice a decade earlier and that of the Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, signed in 1931 (without Soviet participation), he cautioned that “nursing mothers with young should never be killed and a prohibition on this account is necessary.” The prohibition was necessary because the Soviets were indeed killing both nursing mothers and their young, just as was happening in the Antarctic at the same time. Zenkovich related several episodes, including one in Olyutor Bay when the Aleut had wounded a calf. As he described it, with obvious sympathy: the calf’s “mother made no attempt to attack the whale boat. She just let herself die, as she would not leave her calf, but literally clung to it. We killed her from a very short distance with two shots, as

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she made no defensive attempts, not even when wounded.”41 Zenkovich’s account not only documents the killing of mother-calf pairs, but provides some insight into what the experience must have been like for the whales, whose fidelity to familial bonds made them extremely vulnerable. In 1937, the Soviets’ gray whale catch plummeted to 11, compared with 102 the year before. Even as the new conservation measures took hold, some whalers pushed to expand the search for gray whales into new areas. They suggested looking into the Arctic or in the Bering Sea, even to Bristol Bay on the Alaskan Coast.42 Struggling to meet targets for fats, the Aleut plunged eastward. The fleet moved from the Commander Islands to the Aleutian chain— waters the Russian Empire had once tried to claim as its own, and now, in its own way, was reclaiming from the Americans. Transgressing Zenkovich’s calls for conservation, catches of gray whales ticked back up. The Aleut also began staying out to sea later, exposing it to more and stronger storms. Those on board began to feel keenly the months away from Vladivostok and their families, from whom they received only sporadic telegrams.43 But even the expansion of the North Pacific hunting grounds could not guarantee success, and the Aleut consistently fell short of the Five-Year Plan’s increasing quotas. Fleet directors knew they would feel the wrath of the central planners, so they came prepared with a list of excuses. Dudnik sometimes blamed his crew for “drunkenness, absence from work, failure to fulfill the orders of directors.”44 Other responses, though, point to awareness that an ecological blindness lay at the heart of the industry’s failures. The crew reported that whales were changing their behavior, becoming skittish, and fleeing unpredictably, troubling the plan’s certainties.45 Some recognized even greater complexity in the oceans. As Dudnik reported in 1940, “The whaling grounds have somehow changed— some regions have become impoverished, others richer, some have been completely abandoned, the time of whale migrations to the hunting grounds has changed, but the plan remains the same.”46 These factors may have been used primarily to shield himself from blame, but Dudnik’s awareness of ecosystem variability shows he had grasped some of the contradictions of the Soviet utopia: economic planners mandated precise catch numbers for every year and even every month, but the unpredictable world of the ocean made nonsense of such precision. Furthermore, if the numbers ever changed, it was always up— to feed what Stephen Kotkin has called the Soviet economy’s “unlimited demand for raw materials and inputs.”47 These

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demands for increase came from the central, sustaining ethos of the Soviet (and, for that matter, the American as well) promise: life for humans would always get better, never worse. By 1940, though, Soviet whalers understood that life could also grow smaller, that it could decline and not recover; that life, even in an age of socialist science and rational planning, remained mysterious, unpredictable, and fragile— even more so when it came to large whales, which made their own inscrutable plans and moved in ways still barely knowable. The rest of the whaling world was witnessing similar scenes while waging far more extreme destruction. Beginning in 1904, Norwegians had begun whaling in the Antarctic, then home to entirely unexploited populations of humpback, blue, sei, and sperm whales.48 By 1912, Antarctic whaling had grown to four times the size of whaling anywhere else in the world.49 In 1920, the Norwegians brought the first floating factory to that far end of Earth, and were thus finally able to penetrate the richest open ocean whaling grounds around the Antarctic convergence and at the edges of the sea ice. In a world of rapidly growing human populations hungry for fats and needy of soap, the Antarctic whalers found no upper limit on demand for their product. In 1934, 85 percent of the world’s whales went to make margarine, which had become cheaper to produce than any other fat.50 Giant multinational companies such as Unilever (a margarine and soap maker still in operation today— though not using whale products— producing such products as Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) bought up as much of the Antarctic’s biomass as could be transported across the hemispheres, and whale oil would make up an ever greater proportion of Europeans’ diets after World War II. Nor did whalers in the Antarctic exercise much restraint, even as their catches dwarfed those of earlier centuries. At the peak of the sail-whaling days, roughly five thousand sperm whales met their ends every year. In contrast, the Antarctic summer of 1937/38 saw the world’s largest whale slaughter to that point, with more than 55,000 animals killed, a number not surpassed for another thirty years. Scientists in the United Kingdom and Norway began to worry for the first time that if such catches continued, some whale species might soon go completely extinct.51 The Antarctic whaling grounds were still just a dream for the Soviet Union, but 1938 was an important year for their North Pacific whaling industry as well. The rumblings of something terrible had reverberated

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through the Far East for several years. Stalin’s friend but also rival Sergei Kirov had been murdered in Leningrad in 1934. Though Stalin himself may have been responsible, he accused several old Bolshevik heroes of the murder, along with charges of counterrevolution and foreign conspiracy. He subjected them to a show trial and had some of them executed in 1938. Two years earlier, what became known as Stalin’s “Great Purge” had begun. In a spasm of terror that is still difficult to make sense of, the Bolshevik Party turned on itself, persecuting, imprisoning, and executing almost a million of its members along with thousands of other Soviet people. Sometimes arrests came simply to fulfill quotas from the Kremlin, Stalin’s faith in the real and metaphorical power of numbers on full display. Other times, violence burned its way like a winding fuse through networks of associates, commonly clearing out entire cohorts and leaving the way free for Stalin loyalists to replace them. Just such a network of old revolutionaries controlled the Far East, and as bloody border skirmishes with Japan broke out, the region emerged as an especially appealing target of Moscow’s terror. Captain Dudnik, with his foreign wife and a large network of friends in the North Pacific, was particularly vulnerable. When the Aleut fleet failed to meet its quota in 1937, he became even more exposed. That winter, the crew could read ominous words in the pages of the newspaper Krasnoe Znamia: “The whaling fleet left for hunting a month late. The enemies of the people, sitting in Krabmorzvertrest [the trust then supervising the fleet], have done everything in order to block the way.”52 In early 1938, two of Stalin’s most important and blood-stained purgers, Lev Mekhlis and Mikhail Frinovskii, arrived in the Far East. Dudnik could read the signs. He warned his first engineer, V. A. Tver’ianovich, of what was coming and sent him to Moscow on a business trip. His departure probably saved Tver’ianovich’s life, allowing him to later become one of the most important figures in the Soviet Union’s postwar whaling history.53 Dudnik was not so lucky. In June 1938, the day before the fleet was to sail, Chekists appeared on board.54 Dudnik’s calmness, his unchanged expression as he watched the secret police search his ship, was taken as further evidence of his arrogance and disrespect for Soviet power. The charges the NKVD brought against him typified the absurdity of the entire purge: “Your criminal intentions to sell the whaling fleet to the Japanese fishing company Nichiro have long been known. For many years you skillfully concealed your vile plan . . . but in the face of proletarian vigilance, the most sophisti-

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cated enemy is powerless.”55 As if those charges had not been sufficiently cartoonish, the NKVD also produced a witness claiming Dudnik had tried to buy his Order of Lenin.56 The killer of whales had fallen into the hands of killers just as remorseless and far less rational. Unlike most whales harpooned by the Aleut, Dudnik would survive. Like Arsen’ev, though, he paid a terrible personal price. While sitting in a Vladivostok prison, his wife, Johanne, gave birth to a daughter, Svetlana. Dudnik initiated a hunger strike to demand his release, but in the meantime the suspicion cast upon them forced Johanne and the children to flee the country. Dudnik’s daughter died from meningitis shortly before they reached Moscow, never having met her father. Kept in prison and under interrogation for the next eighteen months, Dudnik would not learn of this, or of the survival of his son, until 1940, when he was released with orders never to speak of what had happened to him. Typical of his fortitude, Dudnik refused the orders and accused his torturers of crimes, who in turn were brought before of a judge. As happened many times in the Terror, the purgers quickly became the purged. In 1941 Dudnik was reunited with his son in Odessa. His life held one more surprise: after the war, the Fisheries Ministry called on him to head a new fleet being prepared to sail to the Antarctic. Dudnik accepted, but soon found himself in competition with Aleksei Solyanik, one of the leading, and most infamous, figures in whaling history. Dudnik lost out to the more ruthless Solyanik, and he was forced to leave whaling again, this time to retire back near his birthplace on the Black Sea.57 Dudnik escaped the purges with his life, but he was one of the few in the Far East with such good fortune. That region, according to some assessments, ended up hardest hit by Stalinist repression. In addition to numerous party members, ethnic Koreans, Chinese, Poles, Germans, and Estonians were also murdered or chased from the region.58 The purge and its threats also followed the Aleut into the North Pacific. As the onboard newspaper, Harpoon, claimed, “Along with the removal from work of the enemy of the people Dudnik, the whaling fleet has put an end to the tumultuous drinking, in which certain members of the command staff also took part. Drinking is one of the methods used by the enemies of the people to break up labor discipline, disrupt the fulfillment of the production plan, and cause accidents.” But the newspaper also warned ominously that “among us there are those for whom it is difficult to reject the old drunken

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atmosphere that reigned on the fleet.” And it named names, sending colleagues one step closer to torture or death: “Included in that number are Krivokhizhina, the third assistant captain of the Trudfront, Boronovskii— the second assistant— the radio operator Mikhalov and the radio operator from the Enthusiast Matrosov.”59 But war among humans is often good for nonhumans. The 1938 voyage, once again late, and now staffed by last-minute replacements for the purged, fell even further short of plan targets, at less than 50 percent.60 Fin and sperm whale catches cratered, a shortfall the Aleut tried to make up for by targeting more endangered gray whales.61 The new director of production claimed that the disastrous results could have been avoided with the addition of more science, in particular by Zenkovich. The scientist had not been on board the last two years because the “previous directors, who turned out to be naked betrayers of the homeland, put a number of serious obstacles in his way.”62 Here was the flip side of the purges: they opened opportunities. The new director of production was, in fact, Tver’ianovich, the same man who had just escaped the NKVD thanks to Dudnik’s warning. He had already learned to play Stalinist politics expertly. Zenkovich, perhaps, too— he had hurried off to Sevastopol in the Crimea in 1937, ideally located to become an influential adviser to the whaling fleet that would be created in Odessa after the war. In 1940, the Aleut was still not fulfilling the plan. Directors again complained about the unreasonableness of the quota, now raised to 525 whales: “We suggest we first need to find the reason for the insufficiency of whales in the last few years . . . and then come up with real, possible, achievable numbers.”63 Then, just as the fleet began to catch its breath, war again descended upon the Soviet Union. In June 1941, as the Aleut sailed the North Pacific, on the other side of the world, Nazi Germany attacked. The Communists serving in the whaling fleet were called to the frontlines. Many of the Aleut crew died in combat on the Don River.64 The fleet also lost much of its political energy. As the Aleut director later lamented, “At that time there were only thirty-six Communist Party members . . . and there were boats entirely without Communists.”65 Fearing submarine attack, the fleet had to scatter and shelter in various ports in the Kuril Islands. Navigational aids also had to be switched off during wartime, and while returning to Vladivostok through the Sea of Okhotsk in Ussuriiskii Bay, one catcher boat steamed into a mine hidden by the fog. It blew a large hole in the

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boat, which quickly sank, taking with it the majority of the crew. Officials sentenced the captain, Vladimir Stepanovich Bykovskii, to execution, but in light of their desperate need for manpower they shipped him instead to the war zone in Europe.66 After these setbacks, though, the political shortcomings and wartime dangers did not further reduce the Aleut’s catches. In fact, it enjoyed its best years ever in 1942 and 1943, when it decimated the remaining gray whales in the western North Pacific. In 1944, catches fell again as the Aleut spent the season in drydock in Portland, Oregon, where the wartime Soviet Purchasing Commission was coordinating US shipments of material under the Lend-Lease Act. The Aleut’s catcher boats had retrofitted in Seattle the previous year. American mariners were amazed to see Soviet ships in their home ports, but even more amazed that boats in such atrocious condition had managed to sail all the way from Vladivostok. One Soviet sailor managed to defect, and several were later returned to the Soviet Union.67 Otherwise, the fleet labored quietly, with little fanfare, supplying the Red Army with whale fats until the war’s end. And though the Aleut would work North Pacific waters for another twenty years afterward, its star was soon eclipsed by gigantic postwar investment in new, larger Antarctic fleets. The Aleut faded from global consciousness, but its story still resonates in the Russian Far East. Much of the information I gathered documenting the purges in the region came from a good friend in Vladivostok, whose own story revealed much about the historical legacies of the region. Amir Khisamutdinov was a boat captain in Vladivostok’s fishing and crabbing industry before changing professions and deciding to become a historian. His elegant house, built in the 1980s at the northern edge of the city, backs up against some of the beautiful Primorsky forest Arsen’ev loved. It has generously served as a second home for visiting foreign scholars, myself included, for nearly as long. One of the highlights of Khisamutdinov’s house is its balcony library housing volumes of essential sources for the history of the Russian Far East. In the 1990s, Khisamutdinov was one of the first to try to recover the long-suppressed history of the purges in the region, and his work represents some of the best Russian scholarship on the topic, exhaustive and bracingly honest.68 In the early 2000s, he also worked as scientific secretary for the Society for the Study of the Amur Region, the same society that Arsen’ev and Lindholm had belonged to. It was in that capacity that

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Khisamutdinov led me to one of the most fascinating sources on the history of the Aleut: an unpublished journal by a whaler named A. A. Nefed’ev, kept in the society’s archives. Nefed’ev, who often wrote for Harpoon, kept a nearly daily log of his sixteen years on board the Aleut from 1933 to 1949, and because the journal never reached the Stalinist censors, it is unusually frank, even gossipy. In one passage, Nefed’ev reports that underwear from one of the female laundresses was found in his friend’s cabin, and in another he writes that the Norwegian harpooners were sometimes so drunk they thought they saw two whales where there was only one. But Nefed’ev was also realistic. He describes a Vladivostok so poor that bread was hard to come by, a life on board the Aleut that mostly meant terrible sleep and constant headaches, and resentment among the crew about the growing perks high Soviet officials were receiving. Despite the rawness, though, Nefed’ev mostly comes across as deeply committed to the Soviet project. He tried as hard as possible to turn himself into a model Soviet citizen, reading high-brow literature, such as Chekhov, and condemning religious belief as unscientific.69 Above all, he praised the purifying and liberating effects of hard work, the essential component of Stalin’s industrialization. “How easily and freely the simple, working Soviet man lives!” Nefed’ev once wrote in ecstasy.70 Despite its challenges, whaling mostly fulfilled Nefed’ev’s hopes for Soviet-style self-fashioning. “Those who work on board the whaling ship,” he thought, “are those who really love whaling. And to love whaling means to love the ocean, and to love the ocean means to love hard work.” It’s not hard, though, to see Nefed’ev and others on the Aleut struggling to combine this love of the ocean with the love of the hard work prescribed by Stalinist industrialization. Like Zenkovich, Nefed’ev was a careful observer of whales, which he saw changing behavior in response to Soviet attacks.71 Such behavior might be interpreted as challenges that only increased the value of labor, but they were clearly at odds with the straitjacket numbers of the plan. For others, these competing mentalities are even clearer. In 1938, the harpooners Zarva and Afanasii Purgin had to be disciplined for their unnecessarily descriptive language about the whales. Zarva, accused of being too fond of lyricism, described sperm whale “marriages” or said that the animals were “prowling like hounds.” Purgin, to quote Harpoon, “suffer[ed] from all the above expressions and additionally use[d] such phrases as ‘whales are very cunning.’”72 Such superfluity and personification, according to the newspaper, distracted from the business of hunting.

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The young Zarva and Purgin, the honest Nefed’ev, the scientific Zenkovich, and the generous Khisamutdinov all represent a crucial component of Russia’s Far Eastern culture, one that both knew the oceans intimately and possessed a deep humanism. As Zarva and Purgin’s later, coldhearted, record-breaking whale killing would show, much of that would be lost after World War II. But the Aleut’s legacy— its fully developed apparatus for whale killing, its personnel who had learned the nuances of Bolshevik politics and speech, and its Far Eastern DNA—would persist, if hidden just below the surface, as the Soviets turned toward the fabled whaling grounds of the Antarctic.

5

War and Glory in the Antarctic

By spring 1945, Russian resilience in the face of the Nazi assault was reaping rewards. Red Army troops occupied Berlin and much of Eastern Europe. In a few short weeks, the Far Eastern Army and Navy pushed the Japanese out of Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. The Japanese presence in many of these places— especially their fishermen, who since 1905 had entered Russian waters with impunity— had bothered Russians for a long time. The war, which had started as an existential threat, had brought surprising opportunities. World war brought opportunity for whales as well. Opportunity to feed, reproduce, and migrate free of the continuous danger and noise of the previous decades. Only one factory ship, belonging to Norway, prowled the Antarctic from 1941 to 1945. Only the Soviets remained in the North Pacific. For the duration of hostilities, Japanese whaleships served as military transport ships, disgorging miniature submarines from the slipways that had previously winched up whales. But the slow-moving factory fleets provided easy targets, and many were sunk during the war. By 1945 every single Japanese factory ship was at the bottom of the ocean. Of the world’s forty-three floating factories, only sixteen survived the war. And yet there is little to suggest that the breather was long enough for the world’s whales to “heal their wounds,” as one official at the time put it. Various very rough guesses estimate the recovery rate might have been somewhere from 38.5 to 71.9 percent, but those who first resumed whaling after the war reported no visible increase in whales.1 With the war’s end, the whole world grew concerned about a new crisis:

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a global shortage in edible fats to nourish war-torn populations. Whale oil remained the cheapest source of such fats. Britain hurried to resume Antarctic whaling just two months after the conclusion of hostilities.2 The principal whaling magnate there, Christian Salvesen, stated clearly that under the circumstances, the whale populations would have to be sacrificed to meet immediate human needs.3 The world’s most prolific whalers, the Norwegians, in a desperate situation after years of Nazi occupation, also saw Antarctic whales as crucial, while preparing for a postwar whaling world they might have to share with a host of newcomers. They were alarmed to see countries from Holland to Argentina planning new floating factories that would redouble pressure on whaling stocks. And, to the shock and dismay of the other whaling powers, American occupation forces in Japan helped organize that country’s return to Antarctic whaling, seeing it as an essential means of feeding the starving postwar population. An increase in fat prices in 1946 returned huge profits to those factories already in the Antarctic and whetted the appetites of those not yet at sea. Bad grain harvests in 1947 ramped up prices still further. The whales’ wartime reprieve was over. Even before defeating the Nazis, the Soviets had begun planning a substantial expansion of their own whaling. Anastas Mikoyan, an early friend of Stalin’s, an early advocate of Far Eastern whaling, and by the 1930s the most important Bolshevik economic planner, was the prime pusher for growth. Writing to Stalin just before the outbreak of war, in 1940, Mikoyan complained: “From 1933, every year I submit memos on the necessity of expanding our whaling by organizing at least two whaling stations on Kamchatka and Chukotka, and buying or building two whaling flotillas for operations in Antarctic waters. . . . The country needs the fats.”4 During the war, the Nazis occupied the Soviet Union’s most important dairy regions in Belarus and Ukraine, leaving them devastated and facing a long recovery period.5 As the country demobilized and hungry men returned to the homeland, real wages were only half of what they had been in the late 1920s.6 This postwar Soviet Union was both exceptionally powerful and desperately poor.7 As it emerged from the war as one of the world’s two superpowers, the Soviet Union’s 1 percent share of the global whaling catch seemed pitifully inadequate. The shattered country needed to understand that its whaling activities, as one planner put it, “did not correspond to the demands of the country for whaling products, nor to the international standing of the

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USSR as a great power.”8 This sense of both urgent dietary necessity and international inadequacy drove and marked with its spirit the expansion of Soviet whaling that followed the astounding defeat of the Nazi war machine. The Aleut’s North Pacific numbers would hardly fulfill such goals. It was time for the Antarctic. In this new theater, Soviet whaling would meet novel challenges and temptations. Unlike in the North Pacific, they would share the whaling grounds with Western competitors, in a Cold War atmosphere that sometimes felt like an extension of the Great Patriotic War. The Soviets would also encounter the ravages of an earlier war— the previous European and Japanese destruction of Antarctic whale stocks— that threw into question some of their conservation strategies and ideas imported from the Aleut. Above all, the Soviets took history with them to the Antarctic; a powerful sense that this new chapter of whaling could not be separated from a larger story of Russian dispossession in the oceans. Well aware of the dangers of a return to prewar levels of slaughter, whalers around the world foresaw a renewed need to regulate Antarctic whaling. In 1946, preparations began for an international whaling convention, which would soon result in the creation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Thus, unlike in the North Pacific, where their whaling had taken place out of the world’s sight, others would be watching what the Soviets did in the Antarctic. However, Soviet planners did note the legal principle of the freedom of the seas meant that “generally speaking, no one can constrain or limit USSR whaling in the Antarctic.”9 There were other ways to control the catch. To stifle the growing competition as well as the environmental disaster it might bring, in 1946 Norway introduced a crew law that forbade Norwegian nationals from working for any foreign country that had not been an established whaling power prior to the war.10 Since Norwegians were still the masters of pelagic (open ocean) whaling and even manned many of the British factories, this was meant to keep as many nations as possible out of the Antarctic. To the good fortune of the Soviets, because of their North Pacific activity, they qualified for an exemption to the Norwegian crew law. But as late as 1946, the Allies had no notion that the Soviets might enter Antarctic whaling and were even then considering a ban on the transfer of any whale-catching ships to nonwhaling countries.11 However, the Soviets had already accumulated some of the necessary hardware for a push south. Several American crabbers and whaleships had come to the Soviet Union as part of

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the Lend-Lease arrangement that supplied Russia with war material.12 The USSR was supposed to return them after the war, but the Economics Minister Anastas Mikoyan instead negotiated an agreement for them to be transformed into whale catchers that would stay with the Soviet Union. In comparison with the increasingly obsolete Aleut fleet, they were technical marvels, outfitted with radar and active sonar. These American catchers would become the workhorses of Soviet Antarctic whaling.13 Indeed, aside from their support to the Japanese, the Soviet catchers constituted nearly the United States’ only contribution to global whaling after the war. The US never reentered pelagic whaling, though several small stations operating on the Pacific coast gave it a continued interest in the industry. While the US donated the catcher ships, a prostrate Germany supplied the floating factory. As part of negotiations over war reparations, the Soviet Union claimed the 850-horsepower German whaleship Wikinger (Viking), built in 1929 and captured by the British in 1945.14 The Wikinger was unlike anything like the Soviets had ever operated. One of the modern-style whalers developed for Antarctic catching in the 1930s, at over five hundred feet long it was a behemoth compared to the Aleut. More important, it was outfitted with the suite of technology perfected for Antarctic industrial killing: a large boiling room to immediately render whales into oil and meat, refrigerators to keep the products from spoiling, and a gigantic slipway that allowed more whales to be winched onto the flensing deck than the Aleut had been able to handle. Though in December 1945 an international court agreed to grant the Soviets the Wikinger, a significant problem loomed for Mikoyan and the Fisheries Ministry, which was to run the Antarctic whaling fleet. The ship was anchored in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom.15 British authorities relished neither the prospect of Soviet sailors spending months in the UK preparing the ship to sail, nor the idea that they were handing the keys to the lucrative Antarctic whaling grounds to a new competitor. They allowed the Soviets to take over the ship but still hoped the venture might fail. A Soviet crew arrived in Liverpool in mid-1946, hoping to ready the Wikinger for its new duties in time to join the Antarctic hunt, due to begin in November. Most of the men were either old hands from the Aleut, like the famous harpooner Petr Zarva, or other Far Easterners, such as the up-and-coming ship captain Aleksei Solyanik. Though the Antarctic was a new experience for the Soviets, they brought with them Far Eastern attitudes toward seamanship, whales, and conservation. But it was clear

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the stakes in the Antarctic would be larger. The British government worked at every turn to slow or perhaps altogether scuttle the handover.16 They suspected the Soviets had “no interest in the conservation of whales.” The British government also wondered if larger intrigues were involved; the ex-Wikinger’s large capacity for oil meant it could also be used to supply naval attack vessels.17 Stalin grew nervous, sure that the British would never allow a peaceful transfer of the whaler, and afraid they might simply burn it instead.18 The emerging rivalry between the wartime Allies explains some of this obstruction. Just a few months before the Wikinger handover, Winston Churchill had given his famous speech warning of an “iron curtain” descending upon Eastern Europe. The American presidential advisor Bernard Baruch would coin the term Cold War a month after the end of that year’s whaling season. From the Soviet point of view, however, the troubles in Liverpool were nothing new. This was foreign sabotage of a familiar sort. Foreigners had been trying to keep Russia from the ocean’s wealth since the days of Peter the Great, so no one was surprised they were now preventing a newly triumphant Soviet Union from claiming its whales. And of course, the Soviets were at least partly right. When the Soviets finally received the Wikinger in September 1946, most of the whale-catching gear had been removed and the ship itself was nearly derelict, even though the Soviets had paid for a retrofit.19 But what happened next was like something out of a Soviet fairy tale. In a show of solidarity with their Soviet comrades, British workers from Newcastle broke ranks with the politicians and assisted in the readying of the ship. The international workers of the world were uniting, at least briefly. The workers’ solidarity recalled the 1932 Honolulu frenzy for the Soviet whalers, when several Americans tried to defect on board the Aleut. Or so they were said to. And so perhaps the Newcastle event did not happen either— the only source relating this enchanted episode is one of the original Soviet crew members.20 Just as likely, the British government ultimately decided not to interfere too blatantly, in part because it hoped by playing nice it could convince the Soviet Union to join the new IWC.21 Alone, or with British proletarian aid, the enthusiastic Soviet crew got to work. The first step was the easiest. Following Mikoyan’s suggestion, the Wikinger became the Slava, or “Glory.”22 The name was fitting, for slava, along with mest’ (revenge) were words that permeated Soviet society at the war’s end. Along with the glory, the raw scars of the Great Patriotic

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War were everywhere in the Soviet Union of 1946. Odessa, the port designated to serve the new Antarctic fleet, had lost half its 600,000 inhabitants during the brutal Romanian occupation of the city. Its Jewish population— once among the largest in Europe— had been eliminated almost entirely. This was a nation not only damaged but brutalized by the Nazi invasion. If ruthless methods had characterized Bolshevik culture from 1917, then over the course of the war they had penetrated much more deeply into a society that had only barely escaped utter annihilation, and for years had seen its women and children tortured and murdered. The only way to defeat this evil was to let some of it feed one’s own resolve. If in 1946 the Soviets had a desperate need for fats, they also harbored a deep suspicion for the weakness of restraint. The scars, and the resolve, could be seen in many of the Slava’s new operators. Most of the workers bore the physical marks of the war, and many of the crew members were in fact disabled. The Slava’s doctor recorded myriad head wounds, which deformed the men’s skulls and betrayed equal damage to their psyches and nerves.23 In a disturbingly physical sense, the war was still going on. In fact, some even doubted that Russians were physically capable of whaling in polar waters. Serious Soviet minds applied themselves to reassuring the country that it could make it in the Antarctic. In 1949, the famed Moscow ichthyologist and geographer Lavrentii Berg published a long paper for the Russian Geographical Society detailing the history of Russian exploration in the Antarctic. Berg celebrated in particular that continent’s (disputed) first discovery by Russian explorer Faddey Bellingshausen in 1819, demonstration that their countrymen could survive polar rigors. Bellingshausen’s discovery also reminded the world that Russia maintained a historical right to be involved in Antarctic politics. “The question of the Antarctic has taken contemporary importance in the last years,” Berg wrote. “Many powers— England and her Dominions, as well as Norway, Chile, Argentina, and France— have started making claims to this or that part of the Antarctic continent. In this context it is important to remember, that the honor of first discovery of the Antarctic . . . belongs to Russia.” It also meant that “without the participation of the USSR, no territorial division of the Antarctic can have any legal power.”24 Western powers took this as a manifesto of new Soviet aspirations there, with Soviet whaling its first manifestation. The Bolshevik commissar assigned to supervise the Slava’s crew warned that Antarctic whaling would not be easy. But, he stressed, here the war

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“Hello from the Antarctic” and “Congratulations on the New Year.” A postcard from the Slava’s 1949 voyage depicts the factory ship and a catcher boat among the icebergs. Penguins, which appear in many whalers’ memories of the Antarctic, look on as whales are harpooned.

experience that left the men wounded might actually help with whaling. “We are stronger,” he claimed, “because each one of us was yesterday a warrior, having gone through a long, hard war. And we are scared neither by distant, unknown seas, nor by difficult work.”25 He might have added that a new war was beginning: as a percentage of the total population, the number of whales killed in the following decades would far exceed the Russian dead from World War II. Finally, on December 22, 1946, the Slava departed Liverpool, bound for the Antarctic just in time to join the southern summer’s catching season. Twenty-five Soviet women sailed with 351 men, the women again a major surprise to other whalers, who superstitiously allowed only men on board their ships. Since the Russians were still strangers to the Antarctic, they had once again been forced to hire Norwegian specialists to assist with finding and harpooning whales. The Soviets resented their continued dependence, but the fifty-six Norwegian crew members quickly showed their usefulness.26 The Slava crossed the equator on January 11 and arrived in the Antarc-

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A Soviet catcher boat in the Antarctic with sperm whales tied up and ready for delivery and processing. Photograph courtesy of Yuri Mamonov.

tic between Africa and South America (in what would be termed by the IWC as Antarctic Sector II— coincidentally the same part of the Antarctic that Bellingshausen had explored in the early nineteenth century). On January 28, at about latitude 60° south, the crew sighted its first icebergs. These sentinels of the Antarctic often meant whales. Icebergs and pack ice provided food and shelter for the masses of Antarctic krill that had made the Southern Ocean the world’s most abundant source of food for the world’s largest creatures.27 Seabirds, including penguins, soon surrounded the Slava. In the far distance, the crew could see the first whale spouts.28 The spouts came mostly from fin whales, but also from some of Antarctic’s remaining blue whales— the world’s largest creatures, and a species the Russians had rarely encountered in the North Pacific. Soon, large whales were all around the Slava, in numbers the Russians had never seen before. Catching them was not difficult. In fact, the Norwegian gunners shot so many that they quickly overwhelmed the inexperienced Soviet crew’s processing capacity. When dead Antarctic whales began flooding the deck, the officers suddenly realized the gigantic corpses were too much to handle. They called everyone, including even the bookkeepers, to the task of ripping the heavy blubber from the body and tossing it into the boilers. Very few on board, it turned out, really knew how to process a whale. Soon the officers conferenced and called a halt to the harpooning,

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since so many whales were being caught that their bodies had to be tied to the Slava’s stern to await deck space for processing. Quickly they began to rot and become worthless. All through February 1947, the work proceeded in fits and starts.29 The large slipway was not enough on its own to turn Soviet whaling into an efficient machine. New ways of organizing labor on board would also be necessary. In fact, the wastage of whale bodies would never entirely disappear as a problem. Not just the species and abundance of whales, but other novelties met the Slava in the Antarctic. Whaling there took place far from any accessible land, since the Soviets were not welcome at the only nearby islands, the British colonies in South Georgia. As Solyanik noted, in the Antarctic the open ocean occupied 99 percent of the space between latitude 50° and 65° south— far more than it did in the Arctic. The climate was dry, not wet, but with incessant fog and howling winds, especially through the so- called Roaring Forties around 40° south. The whaling grounds were located primarily in areas of intense low pressure, which kicked up continuous storms. Nowhere, according to the experienced harpooner, Purgin, was the weather worse than in the Antarctic.30 The pack ice, too, could shift dramatically from year to year, making the location of whales unpredictable. And, of course, there were the icebergs. These could be as tall as 1,500 feet, higher even than New York’s Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest structure. Hundreds of icebergs could be visible from the ship at the same time. As one newspaper described the early years of the Antarctic hunt, “The base was surrounded on every side by icebergs of various sizes and fanciful shapes. Maneuvering through them, the catcher ships one after the other delivered enormous whales to the Slava.”31 As picturesque as they might be, icebergs not only threatened the ship, but made hunting much more difficult than on other whaling grounds.32 Still, the ice, the storms, and the penguins created indelible images in the minds of the Soviet whalers, lending the Antarctic a distinct beauty amid the slaughter. Over the next four decades, many Russian sailors would come to love the place, even as they destroyed the life that animated it. The Soviets were not alone in the Antarctic. In 1947, the Slava joined an international Antarctic flotilla consisting of seven Norwegian floating factories, five English factories, two Japanese factories, and one Dutch factory, in addition to several shore factories on South Georgia. At seventeen total floating factories, this was a major increase from the six in the Antarctic

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the year before.33 Though every whaling nation recognized that a return to the disaster of 1930s Antarctic whaling would sooner or later destroy the whales and the industry they supported, it was already too late to stop it. During that Antarctic summer, the Slava encountered several of the foreign factories; more important, however, it glimpsed their impact on the Antarctic ecosystem. The whales the Slava found were often skittish, fleeing at top speed at the first sight or sound of the Soviet ship.34 The Far Easterners who mostly worked the Slava may not have been familiar with the Antarctic, but they knew harried and stressed whales when they saw them. Here, again, was evidence of the world’s overexploitation of the oceans, a practice the Soviets now ascribed to capitalism. Everything suggests that the Russians were genuinely outraged at the excesses committed by capitalist whaling nations, and nothing indicates that in 1946 they had anything similar in mind. While it had caught undersized and nursing whales, the Aleut had never taken outsized catches, and the Soviets were about to sign on the International Whaling Commission. One Vladivostok whaler recalled that during his first voyage out, in 1946, the Slava’s harpooner sized up a sperm whale and declared it too small to catch.35 As Yuri Mikhalev remarked, “The first three years of the Slava were really for necessary things.” It was only afterward that it became “all intrigue and cheating.”36 But even in those first years, the Soviets felt pressure to kill ever more whales. Thrown into an international whaling environment for the first time, the Russians measured their successes or failures against the more experienced foreign fleets. They also equated large catches with patriotic duty. By sheer numbers of whales caught, they did not do too badly. When the Slava banked three thousand tons of whale fat, the onboard newspaperman printed a special issue. The paper was eagerly read and passed around by the crew, “in the dining room, in the factory, and in the engine room. Everyone had a happy expression on their face, everyone, when meeting another, hurried to share with him the latest victory of the flotilla’s crew.”37 The Communists on board took it as their special duty to increase catches, holding regular brainstorming sessions on ways to increase production. As Comrade Kanshin wrote, “All our work, all our attention must be directed to only one goal, one task— to fulfill the government plan. In this matter the Communist should be ahead of all and give a good example to the rest of the personnel.”38 At least some crew members shared this sense of patriotic duty. None put it more grandiloquently than the head

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harpooner Purgin: “We overcome all difficulties, knowing that, together with the whole Slava collective, we are part of the multimillion-strong Soviet people. We know the whole country is following our work, expecting our victorious return.”39 In April 1947, the Slava turned back toward the Soviet Union. Its destination was not the old whaling center of Vladivostok, but Odessa, the romantic, sun-soaked Ukrainian port on the Black Sea. Even though a rehabilitated Dudnik had argued passionately for Vladivostok as the Antarctic whaling base, planners had chosen a new direction. Odessa’s advantages included proximity to Caspian Sea oil supplies, demand for which had increased exponentially with the long journey down to the Antarctic; nearby hydrogenation plants to transform whale oil into margarine; and its relative proximity to the Antarctic, 7,700 miles away instead of Vladivostok’s 9,600 miles.40 Odessa’s campaign to house the Antarctic fleet also showed the power that local interests would have in succoring and suckling from the whaling industry. Whatever its merits, the shift to the Black Sea began to uproot Russian whaling from its longer history, as Odessans began to replace Far Easterners in the fleet. The Slava’s northward voyage to Odessa was not easy. The crew’s health had deteriorated further, and the onboard physicians were improperly trained for the problems they were encountering. Along with crossing through the tropics twice to and from the coldest regions on Earth, the pace and demands of large-scale whaling were intense, requiring “maximum . . . physical and moral strength, [and] a healthy psyche and nervous system.”41 On May 8, one of the Norwegian sailors, Johan Ludwig, died from multiple injuries suffered when he fell from the bridge to the deck while in an alcoholic stupor (some traditions clearly had been carried over from the Aleut).42 But the reception the Slava received when it steamed into its new berth at Odessa justified all the sacrifices. A large crowd gathered, cheering their war heroes– turned– Antarctic adventurers. In Washington, DC, another group of Soviets had just made their contribution to the postwar world. In 1946, in a spirit of cooperation, the whaling nations had hurried to convene an international whaling conference that might divvy up the spoils the way they preferred and which might save the whales from the path toward extinction they had been on before the war. In November 1946, the minister of Fisheries for Western Russia, the man who would shape Russia’s Antarctic industry more than any other apparatchik, Aleksandr Akimovich Ishkov, took a drastic step. Bypassing the

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Soviet delegates sign the 1946 International Whaling Convention in Washington, DC. The signer is V. A. Tverianovich, who narrowly survived the Aleut purge and was appointed leader of the Soviet commission. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, image no. SIA2017– 025447.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was dragging its feet, he wrote urgently to Stalin himself, requesting that the Soviet Union join negotiations for what was to become the new International Whaling Commission. Ishkov thought such a move “essential for the creation of normal working conditions for the whaling fleet in the Antarctic.” Stalin agreed, and he ordered the delegates to hew to the spirit and letter of the Soviet Union’s own laws on whaling, with the “goal of preserving whales from predatory and irrational exploitation.”43 The month before the Slava’s departure, Soviet delegates, including Ishkov and Tver’ianovich— survivor of the Aleut purge— arrived, a few days late and with little warning, to the conference in Washington.44 Their participation allowed the Soviet Union to hire the Norwegian specialists it needed as well as possibly receive whaling equipment from other countries, since nonsignatories were banned from such transfers. It also gave the Soviets a voice in the distribution of the Antarctic spoils and their potential protection.45 The Soviet delegate E. I. Nikishin asked the commission, in

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light of the Soviet’s late departure due to “unforeseen circumstances,” that this year it be allowed to kill whales without limit. The United States supported the proposal.46 This cooperation looked promising, and, despite the request to be freed from catch limits, in 1946 the Soviet Union emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates of conservation. Tver’ianovich proposed the continued protection of gray whales, especially in the calving grounds in Southern Japan, Korea, Baja California, and Mexico.47 The Soviet delegates had been instructed to “especially stress” that the USSR had itself prohibited killing gray whales along the shores of Kamchatka and Chukotka, where young whales were still nursing.48 Tver’ianovich did not mention that the postpurge Aleut had killed gray whales regularly after the 1937 international ban. Soviet commissioners were also weighing in on another of the IWC’s core issues: the important role of science. Many of those who had helped create the IWC, above all the Smithsonian scientist Remington Kellogg, wished fervently to put scientific expertise at the center of this new management system. Leaving whaling to the whalers would surely mean that no whales would be left. But they also knew the whaling industry would never sign on to a purely scientific regime. In any case, in 1946 scientists still understood so little about whales, especially in the Antarctic, that they could not base any potential guidelines on solid evidence. So, as the historian Graham Burnett has described it, the scientists played a waiting game, trying to establish first their reasonableness in the eyes of whalers while waiting for the information to arrive that would give force to proposals for a much smaller quota. The Soviets knew little of these machinations, but they unwittingly gave them support. During the 1946 discussion of initial quotas, scientists proposed a quota of 16,000 blue whale units (the number of whales of all species whose yield of oil would equal that of 16,000 blue whales), to be fixed for several years. A. S. Bogdanov, director of Moscow’s Fisheries Institute, interjected: “I think that it is too early to designate a figure of 16,000 whales right now. We don’t know all the quantity of whales, and I think, according to this Article, it seems that we are appointing the figure 100,000 years ahead. I think that the quantity of whales which should be taken must be designated for each year according to the reports of all our scientists and of all the scientific institutions of whaling.” He instead proposed that the whale quota be set for only one year, with the quota question turned over to the IWC’s Biological Committee, made up, naturally, of scientists. Again, the IWC accepted the Soviet

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proposal.49 Bogdanov’s motives here are not entirely clear. They indicate, on the one hand, the underprepared Soviets’ desire to delay major IWC decisions so they could better understand them and make sure the USSR’s interests were protected. But they also speak to the general Soviet belief in the ability of science to rationally plan economic activity. The Soviet Union, in fact, was the only country at the IWC table that predicted no friction between its whaling industry and its scientists. They were, after all, all part of the same workers’ state. The US representatives at the 1946 convention praised the Soviets’ spirit of cooperation. They had the impression that the Soviets “discussed their problems fully and fell easily into the informal spirit of give and take which characterized the Conference.”50 Three years later, R. Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History reported that “the Russians had shown a very compromising spirit in pelagic whaling, if not in other fields. In fact, the Russians had a very fair record in conservation and seemed ready to agree to whatever controls other nations accepted on whaling.”51 It seemed a promising beginning. Soviet scientists supported their delegates’ pro-conservationist, proscience stance. The cetologist Makar Sleptsov noted shortly after the 1946 meeting that some serious holes remained in the IWC’s charter, particularly the fact that young whales were allowed to be killed. “It is imperative,” he wrote, “to take more decisive steps in the sphere of protecting young whales and nursing mothers, especially sperm whales. . . . At the next IWC convention, the USSR delegation should bring a series of proposals to improve the regulation of measures of the whaling industry.”52 The situation was so pressing, Sleptsov thought, that these measures might even need to be “radical.”53 This was in part because Antarctic baleen whales were more vulnerable during their migrations, as— unlike in the North Pacific— they were often pregnant while traveling.54 Another scientist in Moscow’s Fisheries Institute (VNIRO) summed up the situation: “The task of our Socialist science, and in particular VNIRO, in this question is the working up and development of methods of accounting for the stocks of whales . . . and the number that can be killed every whaling season. Only in this way can we protect whales from the predatory extermination by the capitalist countries, who have taken a hard line.”55 Science, in other words, was the Soviets’ only defense against the experienced, rapacious whalers from Norway, Japan, and the United Kingdom. For the last few years of the 1940s, the IWC did settle on a quota of

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16,000 blue whale units. Once they reached that figure, all whaleships had to quit whaling and leave the Antarctic. The IWC also set minimum sizes for whales.56 The scheme was not perfect— many criticized the quota as being too high, and the incentives it placed on rapid catching meant some termed this period the “whaling Olympics.”57 But given that whaling had almost always taken place without any kind of international control whatsoever, this was a positive first step for conservation. Yet, a deeper look at Soviet thinking in the late 1940s reveals that despite the hopes they placed in scientific management, mistrust of other whalers was already threatening to undermine their belief in cooperation. Even before the 1946 Washington conference, Soviet planners had noted that earlier attempts to impose quotas had repeatedly failed, and they cast a jaundiced eye on the promise of international cooperation.58 By 1948, they also began to suspect that others were cheating, internally reporting evidence that the Japanese were violating IWC regulations by taking undersized whales and whaling out of season.59 Such suspicions suggested to the Soviets that they would be fools to whale honestly while others illegally scooped up the Antarctic’s whales. Soon the Soviets themselves were proving the need for cynicism. In its second season, 1947/48, the Slava caught 153 pregnant female whales, 42 percent of the total catch.60 A naive VNIRO graduate student bemoaned the killing of so many pregnant whales. Already then, he was predicting disaster: “The continuation of whaling with such intensity as now could lead in the future to disastrous results— to the failure of whaling altogether.”61 He then added a touching emotional note to the report he submitted to Soviet authorities: “Whales bring humans such great benefits, and they deserve for humans to take care of them and protect them from destruction.”62 The graduate student at least retained the hope that socialist science would, in contrast to “monopolist countries, meaning Norway and England” develop ways of accurately determining whale stocks and determine from that the proper number to take each season.63 Other scientists were less bothered by their own country’s comparatively small transgressions. Now that the USSR had entered the global whaling world and had joined an international commission, yes, it needed to prioritize conservation. However, it also needed to remember what other nations had done and were doing. In fact, as B. A. Zenkovich, veteran of the Aleut circumnavigation, reminded planners, the “whole history of Pacific whaling, Japanese and American, provides sources, and statistics,

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showing who destroyed whom, especially in our waters.”64 The Antarctic had to be seen in the light of the past. It was Captain Solyanik who stated the Soviets’ situation most clearly and at the same time most cynically: “Soviet whalers have been given a great and honorable task— strictly fulfill the conditions of the [IWC] Convention, keeping within the total quota, and within the coming years to significantly increase our share of whales in the Antarctic.”65 And which one would be sacrificed if both could not happen at the same time? Just three years after the first Slava voyage, in 1949, the Soviets felt ready to dispense with the Norwegian specialists. In 1949/50 the Slava caught more whales than foreign fleets of similar size, proof of Soviet “strength that finds no equal in any other country in the world.”66 That same year, the country also began reporting false catch statistics to the IWC. The initial falsifications actually overstated the numbers of whales caught. For example, the Soviet Union reported 718 fin whales caught that year, instead of the real figure of 69. Similarly, they inflated the number of sperm whales caught from 97 to 173.67 This was done to preserve the Soviet share of the quota for the coming years, to make sure the Soviets finally got their fair portion. The Soviets’ conundrum, and other whaling industries’ pessimism about the possibilities of regulation, in some ways confirmed the destructive logic of the tragedy of the commons— the oft-noted phenomenon that when ownership of a shared resource is impossible, it behooves individuals to maximize their own gain at the expense of the community and to the general ruin of the environment.68 The tragedy of the commons has been especially acute in the oceans, where Western legal traditions have usually proscribed any form of ownership. Given the ceaseless expansion of industrial economies that was coming in the 1950s and ’60s, never was there a more urgent need for a workable scheme for regulating human exploitation at sea. The IWC attempted to provide an alternative form of conservation, not through ownership, but through general agreement on the need for restraint, as informed by science. Some observers considered this failure to privatize whales as precisely the IWC’s principal shortcoming.69 Of course, the Soviet Union would never have participated in the capitalist privatization of whales. Instead, it found the IWC’s investment in scientific authority highly amenable to its own optimistic vision of a technocratically managed natural world. Had the IWC actually given scientists decision-making power from the outset instead of deferring to national

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whaling industries, perhaps real agreement could have emerged between capitalist and communist whalers. After all, the postwar prestige of science around the world constituted the two sides’ largest patch of common ground. But perhaps not. The Soviet Union entered the Antarctic commons with both a deep mistrust of capitalism and a long pre- Soviet memory of oceans ransacked by Europeans and Japanese. Mikoyan may have thought of whales as a solution to fats shortages, but many Soviets thought of the animals as the solution to a problem of history. In 2011, as part of the increasingly popular Russian genre of conspiracy theory, one author, piecing together rumors and coincidences, opined that the Slava had actually been used as part of covert Soviet military operations to intimidate Western navies in the Antarctic. Hunting whales was a lot like hunting submarines, after all; perhaps whaling was just training for real war? And the Slava’s meandering suggested reconnaissance more than whaling.70 But one needs hardly to understand war so literally to see the Slava’s belligerent purposes. If nineteenth-century whalers had seen their trade as a war only “with the monsters of the deep,” then the twentiethcentury Soviets saw it as a war against other humans— humans who had attacked Russia repeatedly, both directly and through its whales. As one Soviet scientist remembered whalers’ mentality, looking back to the Slava’s early years: First, “we” started whaling late and other countries (namely Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States) have already killed so many whales, so our catches represent just a small fraction of the total and cannot have much impact on populations. . . . The second argument was to say that all other whaling countries are whaling illegally, and if we do not kill this whale (and use it for a good socialist cause) it will be killed anyway by some other fleet, thus creating profit for a few capitalists. All foreign countries / companies were characterized as “our enemies”— and from outside it was clear that the feeling was mutual, and that the Soviet Union was often perceived the same way.71

Another chapter of a long history of struggle against Western colonialism and environmental ruin was opening in the Antarctic, but this time the Soviet Union was determined to make it turn out differently. War had turned to glory, and now it was back to war.

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Aleksei Solyanik and the End of Area V

By the 1950s, there was one undisputed face of the Soviet whaling industry: Aleksei Solyanik dwarfed all other figures in Russian whaling, whether in the Soviet Union itself, at the annual meetings of the International Whaling Commission, or in the many foreign ports the Soviet fleet visited. Solyanik had risen from humble circumstances, getting his start as a simple worker on sardine boats in the Russian Far East. Now he commanded the glory of the Soviet Union, the whaleship Slava. He graced the covers of magazines, wrote books, and lectured the decadent, capitalist West on the virtues of hard work and conservation. Before there were superhero cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin for the Soviet people to idolize, there was Aleksei Solyanik. The reasons for Solyanik’s rise are many. He was, according to those who knew him, a master mariner and organizer, and gave exceptionally beautiful speeches.1 Solyanik also had an undeniable talent for self-promotion. The books he published about the Antarctic voyages profiled himself, and he posed for heroic pictures with a gusto comparable to a later master Russian masculinist, Vladimir Putin. Solyanik also clearly relished the rewards of his skill and fame, embracing the power and riches that came his way. In that respect, he was a model post- Stalin Communist of the 1950s and ’60s. Like the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who consolidated power in 1955, Solyanik loved socialism, but he also understood the importance of increasing consumption.2 Indeed, Solyanik sometimes turned his back on Stalin-style austerity too eagerly: as the Fisheries Ministry noted as early as 1950, Solyanik was prone to the “violation of financial discipline.”3 Nonetheless, as Khrushchev reoriented the Soviet Union away from military

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confrontation with the West and toward economic competition, Solyanik proved one of the most capable of delivering the goods. Though none would have foreseen this in the 1950s, these very traits would eventually bring Solyanik down, just a year after Khrushchev’s own fall from power. But, for more than fifteen years from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, Solyanik demonstrated to the West the great achievements of the Soviet whaling fleet. His successes mirrored those of Russia’s booming postwar economy and the country’s stunning technological and political successes. In those heady years, the Communist project seemed to miraculously emerge even stronger from the near annihilation of war. The harsh privations of Stalin’s last years were transformed into solid achievement and energizing competition with the West. In 1956, Khrushchev initiated the “Thaw,” a period of de- Stalinization that introduced some limited freedoms to the Soviet people and promised them an end to the steady stream of sacrifices they had been asked to make for the good of the country. The next year, the Soviet Union launched the first manmade satellite, Sputnik, into space, years before the US managed to do the same, and much earlier than anyone had estimated the Soviets would be ready. In 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the US-supported regime in Cuba, planting a Soviet friend in their American adversary’s backyard. But just as Soviet successes around the globe and in space hid the strains on their economic capacities, the stunning growth in Soviet whaling existed side by side with grave problems. While Solyanik was simultaneously charismatic and tyrannical, the whaling industry both boasted a worldclass scientific apparatus and indulged in a costly overexpansion that went directly against the advice of those scientists. The result for the world’s whales was a tragic disaster, perhaps the worst the world’s oceans have ever seen. If the 1946 launch of their first Antarctic fleet had represented a country unsteadily rising from its deathbed, by the 1950s, Soviet whalers embodied the confidence and hopefulness of a true global superpower. They could also count on a state fully committed to increasing production. Hoping to match Western economic production, Khrushchev placed great hopes in grandiose transformations of nature that rivaled any of Stalin’s plans. His “Virgin Lands” campaign of 1954–1957 saw thousands of eager volunteers rush to Kazakhstan and western Siberia in order to sow corn in these dry, cold steppes. “Fallow land is lost; erosion is a fiction!” shouted the Soviet newspapers, exhorting the full exploitation of these “wastelands.”4

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Fleet Captain Aleksei Solyanik in front of the Slava. Courtesy of Mr. YLeK Photography (Yu. L. Koval), mrylek.blogspot.com.

Khrushchev also ordered the closure of many of the zapovedniki (nature preserves) that the first Bolsheviks, including Lenin, had helped create. No potentially productive land would be allowed to go to waste. This applied just as much— perhaps more— to the ocean. In these optimistic years, Khrushchev’s frenzied campaigns brought some real successes. In the 1950s and early ’60s, a time historians have termed the “Great Acceleration” for its widespread, runaway economic growth, the Soviet Union’s economy grew faster than that of every major developed country except Japan.5 Solyanik understood the spirit of these times quite well. And he also understood something that seems quite difficult to comprehend now, after all the revelations of Soviet cheating and the widespread revulsion at the killing of any whales: Solyanik knew that his fleet of whaleships and whalers were some of the Soviet Union’s best ambassadors. Having visited the United States and Canada in 1941 to help procure aid for the Red Army, Solyanik felt very comfortable with the West.6 At the end of each of the Slava’s six-month voyage to the Antarctic, his ships—tanks full of oil and refrigerators full of meat—would stop in at some Western port to reprovi-

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sion and provide rest and relaxation for a weary crew before the monthlong trip back to Russia. Solyanik relished these stops; in fact, his reports back to the Fisheries Ministry in Moscow often took up as much space describing the Soviets’ time ashore and the huge crowds they drew from Montevideo to Melbourne as they did with catching whales. Solyanik may have been an expert whaler, but he seems to have understood himself just as much as a global goodwill ambassador of a Soviet society in full flight. It would be decades, and hundreds of thousands of dead whales, before the rest of the world learned what happened when Solyanik’s ships were not in port, but in the open water of the Antarctic. Several elements aided Solyanik’s public relations victories. First, foreigners were intensely curious about the exotic Soviet sailors suddenly cast upon their shores. At the time, they knew nearly nothing about everyday life in the Soviet Union beyond the propaganda churned out by Moscow. Whalers were real, flesh-and-blood examples of Soviet men and women. And, to many people’s surprise and gratitude, the Soviets also spent a lot of money while in port. Additionally, there were large Russian populations in many of these ports who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and now, some forty years later, had an unexpected chance to again meet their forsaken countrymen. Such was the case in Australia where, in 1964, so many Melbourners streamed aboard the Soviet whaleship that hundreds were injured.7 In a globe riven in unprecedented ways by the Cold War, whaling voyages were some of the very few opportunities for South, West, and East to meet in person. Solyanik also used women on board to his advantage. From the first visit of the Aleut to Honolulu in 1932, foreigners had marveled at the presence of women on board the Soviet ships. The Soviet Union, among its many promises, had claimed to finally erase the sexism of capitalism. Whalers therefore took it as a point of revolutionary pride to reject both the superstition and chauvinism of other whalers. Still, the Norwegian gunners on board the Slava’s first voyage grew nervous when they saw women on board, and when one of the harpooners died in the Antarctic, they complained about the presence of women to administrators.8 In response, Solyanik and Mikoyan considered banning women from their ships. According to whalers’ lore, Stalin himself, in truth no great proponent of feminism, insisted that women continue to ship on board the Slava. The woman who did the most for Solyanik (though ultimately the most harm as well) was his second wife, Svetlana Solyanik. Some twenty years

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his junior, Svetlana was a force in her own right. She worked on board as a respected scientist, and she was Aleksei’s match as a public relations specialist. When the Soviet fleet docked in Melbourne, Australia, in May 1964, Svetlana gave an interview to a local women’s magazine. Unlike her husband, she was not fluent in English, but she nonetheless made a strong impression. As the Australian Women’s Weekly reported, “The attractive and youthful wife of the captain, Svetlana Solyanik . . . can even make Russian almost understandable with her swift, charming smile and laughing eyes. A science graduate, she has the job in the Antarctic of measuring radioactivity in whales.”9 Other Soviet women impressed the Australians with their descriptions of civilized living conditions on board. One, named Mary (Maria), “with her red-varnished fingernails twinkling in the sunshine as she lit a cigarette . . . briskly switched the conversation to the many amenities of her floating home. Mary spoke of the library, the picture theater, the mail, papers, and new films brought each month in the Antarctic.” She also spoke of a progressive Soviet society that should be the envy of Western feminists— “they enjoy equality with men in their jobs, and many of them are married with children being looked after by grandparents at home.”10 These seemed truly women who had it all, and they seemed to represent a society that had discovered some secret to the good life, blessed alike with material abundance and social equality. In reality, life on board a Soviet whaleship diverged in important ways from these Bolshevik utopias. True, some women did rise to the top ranks of Soviet whaling, such as Valentina Orlikova, who worked as a catcher boat captain in the 1950s out of Vladivostok. She was given the prestigious title of “Hero of Socialist Labor” and later moved into a job in the Fisheries Ministry. Those who knew her described her as “a small, thin woman, with a stern face” who barked out orders with a “metallic timbre,” inspiring her crews mostly through fear.11 Orlikova’s boat employed women as third and fourth assistant captains as well, and this renowned “woman’s boat” hunted down and killed whales with an efficiency equal to that of men.12 Most women on board, however, performed tasks more traditionally assigned to women, primarily cooking and cleaning. As such, they were both among the lowest-paid members of the crew and also subject to frequent harassment by the male staff. Officers and Communists continually exhorted the mechanics and engineers on board not to make drunken advances on the women, but the fact that they had to repeat these demands

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yearly speaks for itself. As in much of Soviet society, the revolution’s early promises of radical equality between the sexes had settled for a more gradual sort of softening of difference. Ironically, just like in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Soviet Union grew wealthier its gender relations grew more conservative.13 But, during the short stays in foreign ports, the revolutionary ideals could be given a brief, thrilling reheat and sprinkled with a hint of sex. The result was, as the Soviet ambassador in Melbourne reported, that “the visit of the Soviet whaling fleet to Australia played a large role in achieving better relations between Australians and the Soviet people.”14 Solyanik met warm receptions in foreign ports for another reason: most people around the world were still enthusiastic about killing whales. In 1958, for example, after a summer spent hunting in the Antarctic, the Slava and its catcher fleet unexpectedly showed up off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand. The fleet proceeded up the coast of the South Island looking like a “galaxy of lights” and then steamed into the magnificent harbor of Wellington, the country’s capital. Kiwis flooded to the ships. The legendary mountaineer, first to summit Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, came on board, just one of over 20,000 local visitors, or one out of every six inhabitants of the city.15 While some wondered if the Soviet whalers were scouting for a future attack on Australia, more took the visit as a painful reminder that New Zealand was not catching more whales itself.16 Australians confronted with a surprise visit by the Soviets a few years later had much the same reaction— it was a shame their own whaling was confined to some relatively small shore stations. Wouldn’t a real Antarctic fleet of their own, like the Soviet’s, be a great thing?17 Solyanik played to Western fascinations perfectly. Back in Wellington in 1958, he showed a Soviet film about Antarctic whaling, Hunters of the Southern Seas, which Kiwis considered “one of the finest documentaries ever to be shown in this country . . . [capturing] all the drama associated with whaling.”18 At a gala dinner in his honor, Solyanik presented the New Zealand capital with a sperm whale tooth he claimed came from an attack on one of his ships by an enraged whale. Few could have missed the MobyDick overtones, which suggested industrial whaling was just as dangerous and romantic as it had been in Melville’s time. More cynically, Solyanik also informed his audience that Antarctic whale stocks were in deep crisis, and that he was personally committed to push for stricter IWC quotas. Solyanik and the Slava departed New Zealand for the long journey home, leaving be-

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hind tantalizing impressions of a Soviet Union and a whaling industry both heroic and responsible. Just one year later, Solyanik would return to the oceans south of New Zealand and commit one of the twentieth century’s greatest environmental crimes. Because, by the late 1950s, the reality on board the Slava was quite a bit different than Solyanik portrayed it. Since its inaugural voyage, the Slava’s catches had been increasing at a rapid rate. While in its first full season in the Antarctic the new Soviet whaler had killed 825 whales, thirteen years later, the year it paid Wellington a visit, it had removed 10,467 whales from Southern Hemisphere waters. If that was still smaller than the 17,416 whales that Norway’s eleven factory fleets had killed and nearly the same as the 10,533 taken by Japan’s three fleets, it was still an astounding increase for just one Soviet factory fleet. The kinds of whales it killed had changed, too. No longer were the Slava’s catches mostly of large blue whales; they were increasingly the smaller fin whales and some comparatively tiny humpbacks. It was abundantly clear Solyanik was correct that in the decades since World War II, whale populations had declined dramatically. But he had been less honest about his commitment to conservation. Solyanik described his approach to whaling in very different terms to his own crew, exhorting them to catch every whale they could and in the process “leave a desert behind us.”19 To create this desert, the Soviets had begun whaling well before the beginning of the IWC’s official opening season in the Antarctic, and staying far later. When foreign whalers were seen in the area, Solyanik would send out coded messages to the scattered catcher ships, telling them to stop to “drink vodka” while hiding their illegal whales behind icebergs. Sometimes extended games of cat-and-mouse ensued, with Norwegian ships in particular attempting to circle around the Soviets and find the whales. Even if the Norwegians remained unsure, the Soviet crew knew the Slava was catching whales whose catch the IWC had forbidden or severely limited. In 1954, the Slava caught a massive southern right whale— a species everyone knew remained on the brink of extinction, and whose killing had been forbidden since 1931. “Perhaps,” wondered one particularly thoughtful whaler, “this was the very last of its species.” “Who are we fooling,” he asked about the growing cheating and devastation, “maybe ourselves?!”20 Soviet attitudes toward whale conservation had already changed nearly as completely as the oceans they were stalking. While crew members worried that foreign proof of their cheating might doom the industry and thus terminate their jobs, Soviet commissioners at

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the IWC were ensuring that would not happen. Suspicions had dogged the Soviets for years, and there had been a number of close calls. In 1950, whalers working for Britain’s Salvesen Whaling Company had witnessed Soviet ships with two dead blue whales ten days before the opening of the season agreed on at the IWC. By the mid-1950s, whalers were sarcastically referring to baleen whales the Soviets took out of season as “Russian sperm.”21 Then, in 1954, South African whalers observed the Slava again whaling before the commencement of the Antarctic season. The Slava tried to hide the illegal whales by emitting smoke from pipes modified for just such purposes, but the South Africans circled the ship and took photographs of the whales on both sides of catcher boats. South Africa shared this information with Norway and other British Commonwealth whalers. They urged the Norwegians to confront the Soviets or to raise the matter at the IWC conference to be held later that year in Moscow.22 The Western media was soon reporting that Soviet whale “poaching” would come under serious discussion.23 But even this unambiguous evidence of cheating did not prove to be enough. When the IWC queried the Soviet Union before the Moscow meeting, the Soviets claimed they were catching baleen whales early “for scientific purposes,” even though they had not applied for such permits. The other whalers, anxious to avoid diplomatic complications, accepted the Soviets’ excuse. An obsequious note to Moscow stated that they “[would] not require an answer to their inquiries and apologise for any inconvenience they may have caused.”24 Everything was over even before the commission could meet, and the embarrassing episode made suspicious nations more hesitant to challenge the Soviets in future years over potential violations. At the IWC’s 1954 Moscow meeting, which surprised Western delegates for its hospitality and luxury, the Soviets impressed with their progressive official stances on conservation. They were, as the Kiwis put it, “on the side of the angels (the conservationists), and their delegation spoke and acted responsibly on this.”25 On the other hand, despite the Soviet evasions of the South African accusations, Soviet cheating was openly, if informally, discussed. The New Zealand commissioner learned there that “Norwegians and British are agreed that it is not technically possible for a small expedition like the Slava last season to produce 150,000 barrels of oil within the permitted period,” when their own nations were producing only 70,000 to 80,000 barrels per factory ship. Amazingly, they expressed their sympathy for Solyanik, who just that year had published his boastful

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Seventh Voyage to the Antarctic. According to Western whalers, Solyanik was “in an unfortunate position, squeezed by Russian five-year plans which require increasing production. He cannot increase production because the catch limit has been reduced [by the IWC]; only by cheating can he stop his production falling.” Even the British whaler Salvesen admitted to liking the “swarthy” Solyanik, who returned the affection with a “conspiratorial wink.”26 Western whalers retained hope that “the Russians will acquire a sense of shame.”27 They drew comfort from indications that the Soviets seemed willing to accept international observers on board their ships and took solace “from the fact that the Slava is a relatively small ship, and thus there is a limit to the damage it can do.”28 Still, all had to admit that Soviet cheating was a problem for other nations, who claimed to be observing the rules unscrupulously and thus experienced far greater losses from the IWC’s continual reduction of quotas.29 British firms, for example, were hesitant to agree on any further tightening of quotas until an “impartial and effective inspection scheme” could be put into place.30 Salvesen was less restrained, complaining to the Norwegians that “every restriction upon the expeditions of countries which effectively enforce them helps to increase the catch of the wicked at the expense of that of the restricted expeditions.” Furthermore, the shorter whaling seasons the IWC was also implementing simply gave the Slava more time to itself in the Antarctic.31 Still, as late as 1959, Australia considered the USSR “cooperative and anxious to avoid break up of convention.”32 The opposite threat— that the Soviets would leave the IWC and conduct whaling completely unrestrained— also kept whalers from pressing their accusations too sharply.33 These mid-1950s meetings would represent the last of the Soviet Union’s sincere siding with the “angels.” Their cheating, while widely recognized, had been relatively modest and was not the chief contributor to the stark decline in Antarctic blue and fin whales. But the Soviet impact on the IWC had been malign nonetheless. Certainty about the Soviets’ cheating was one reason other nations refused to accept reduced quotas, threatening to grind the IWC to a halt. Just as insidiously, the resigned acceptance of Soviet cheating would keep everyone from grasping the scale of the illegal destruction that was coming. Further near exposures of their increasing cheating did scare Moscow, which in 1960 ordered whaling inspectors to accompany each of the fleets, presumably to rein in the worst of the excesses. But the insignificant fifty-

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ruble fines they were allowed to levy suggest how seriously Fisheries actually took the issue.34 Even more incriminating, that same year the new chief whaling inspector watched placidly as Solyanik killed another 1,350 extremely rare southern right whales off the coast of Brazil.35 Instead of condemnation, in Buenos Aires the Soviet fleets received warm congratulations on Yuri Gagarin’s great feat of becoming the first human in space in that May.36 However, the days of whaling as positive propaganda were quickly ending. The fleets adopted special signals for, among other orders: “sink whale carcasses of protected species.”37 Behind the scenes, Soviet planners were noting uneasily the growing dissonance between Moscow’s demands for more catches and the country’s participation in the IWC. In 1958, VNIRO’s Scientific Committee forecast further reductions in the IWC’s quotas and recommended that “when planning the size of the Soviet whaling industry in the Antarctic for the next five to seven years,” they should be ready for quota reductions of 1,000 to 1,500 BWUs (blue whale units, the metric the IWC was still using to set quotas). These “obstacles of an international legal nature” would present difficulties. The planners forecast no increase in foreign whaleships during the same time period, which in spite of a general decrease in whales would allow the Soviet Union to increase its total share of Antarctic whaling from 7.2 to 34 percent. “Such a redistribution of the relatively well-established roles of individual states,” they wrote with some foreboding, “cannot go smoothly.”38 How had Solyanik managed to make the Soviet Union into a problem for the IWC, competing in a few short years with the capitalists in destroying the Antarctic’s whales? In part, of course, it was through his disregard for the rules, catching everything he saw and continuing hunting long after other whalers had left. And Solyanik had an undeniable knack for finding whales, as his crew, longing to return home with the autumn storms battering the lonely Slava, ruefully admitted.39 But Solyanik was not alone responsible. On a modern whaleship, captains were important, but they didn’t need to be Otto Lindholms. They didn’t harpoon whales themselves, borrow any technologies from Alaska Natives, or do science. Instead, Solyanik relied on large factories of experts being produced by the expanding Soviet economy and educational system. Harpooners were one key element of the increasing kills, though perhaps not as crucial as might be suggested by the lavish attention they received in the Soviet press and in later memoirs. Shooting a heavy explosive

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harpoon with a vicious kickback into a panicked whale from a ship towering fifty feet above the pitching seas of an Antarctic storm was not easy. The Norwegian experts were quite serious when they publicly doubted that Russians could ever learn the art. But they did learn it, no doubt because Soviet marksmen trained diligently for years to refine their skills. The most famous of the harpooners, and the most important for the Slava’s success, were Afanasii Purgin and Petr Zarva. Both trained with the Norwegian specialists on board the Aleut, and both were transferred to the Slava in 1946. While the Aleut’s newspaper had scolded both men for their undue effusiveness about whales, one gets a very different picture of them during their work on the Slava. Purgin’s grandfather had been a whaler in the Russian north, and, as he related in his autobiography, he dreamed of following the same path. His father taught him to shoot bears on the shores of the White Sea when the bears were about to enter hibernation and thus nearly defenseless. But Purgin preferred defenseless whales, and after learning harpooning from the Pomors, he headed to the Far East.40 While on the Aleut, he killed more than a thousand whales, and despite nearly suffering a breakdown from the hard work, transferred to the Slava, where he then trained a host of successful harpooners.41 There, Purgin led the dramatic increase in catches, honing his skills and pushing himself to work ever harder and longer hours. Together with Zarva, he pioneered the art of hunting at night with the help of spotlights, ensuring that the Slava never had to cease its slaughters.42 Whaling, Purgin claimed, was an art, and he received all the accolades and respect the officially collectivist Soviet Union reserved for its artistic geniuses, including being named “Hero of Socialist Labor” in 1950. Purgin’s fellow Hero of Socialist Labor, Zarva, came from a family of Ukrainian fishermen. Zarva began his life catching fish, seals, and dolphins in the Sea of Okhotsk and was present when the Aleut killed its first whale in 1932. Zarva assumed a more relaxed manner than the frantic Purgin; his bald head and round peasant face made him resemble a Ukrainian buddha. He retained through his own Antarctic kills a bent toward lyricism, even if it increasingly resembled the platitudinal sentimentality that infected most of the crew: “I love the Antarctic,” Zarva wrote, “its limitless expanses, its diversity, the thousands of unexpected things that meet one along the way.”43 More than anything, though, Zarva still loved killing whales. When he was given the task of training other Russian harpooners, “he grumbled that he wanted to see whales killed by himself, and not by his students.”44

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Postcard from 1953 celebrating the Slava and the nineteenth-century Russian Antarctic explorers. Captain Aleksei Solyanik is in the center, surrounded by portraits of wellknown Soviet harpooners; Afanasii Purgin is to Solyanik’s left. From Kitoboinaia Slava Soiuza, courtesy of Star Publishers, Kherson, Ukraine.

Certainly, the harpooners’ personal skill and innovations were essential for the Soviet Union’s increasing prominence among whaling nations. When Purgin fell ill, his replacement, G. E. Panov, hindered by a “nervous state,” missed his targets repeatedly.45 Men like Purgin, Zarva, or Solyanik were not easily replaceable. Still, their skills were trainable. In fact, as whalers attested, harpooners were not the most important determinant of success.46 The crucial factor, according to at least one expert, was the “knowledge of the hunting grounds and the vigilance of staff and non-staff observers.”47 In fact, the entire crew was called on to assist in hunting. Catcher boats fanned out along a front a hundred miles wide in order not to miss a single whale. Nearly everyone on board took their turn atop the bridge, scanning the waves for spouts. The harpooner’s shot was merely the culmination of a gigantic, collective human-industrial will sweeping the oceans. Arguably, the most important part of this collective was the onboard scientists. To some degree, Soviet scientists had inherited their place on whaleships from Western practices. Sensing a promising symbiosis,

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scientists had shipped on board Norwegian and British floating factories in order to gather mounds of data about whale numbers and migration routes— knowledge that would be useful for whalers and conservationists alike. The United Kingdom’s Discovery Expeditions, which ran from 1918 to 1951 and were funded by whaling profits, were particularly successful in establishing basic knowledge of Antarctic whales and also providing the first warnings that whaling had become unsustainable. The historian D. Graham Burnett terms this early Antarctic work “hip-booted science,” for the way scientists were embedded on board the whaleships and often labored amid the gore of the flensing deck.48 But hip-booted science became far less important in the West after World War II, especially as Great Britain and Norway began reducing their whaling fleets after the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union integrated scientists into the Slava to a degree that even the British never had. While scientists, including Zenkovich and others, had been on board the Aleut, Soviet planners envisioned a much greater role for them in the Antarctic. This was in part because the Russians knew so little about the Antarctic, an especially difficult hunting ground. In the North Pacific, whales migrated along fairly predictable nearshore corridors, routes that had been mapped out from the time of Arsen’ev; in comparison, the Antarctic presented a gigantic blank. This same problem faced the Norwegians, British, and others as well. However, they had had years of experience to teach them the rudiments of whale movements along the ice and along migratory routes. Still, the Russians thought they possessed an advantage: unlike those capitalist companies, Soviet whaling was conducted by the state, which could also sponsor long-term research programs on board its ships. This it did from 1948, when scientists from the Academy of Sciences, Moscow’s Oceanographic Institute, as well as the Fisheries Institute joined the mariners and harpooners on board the Slava. They were given one catcher boat with which to conduct research. The relationship would not always be easy. The research boat was often taken over for hunting when whales were thick, and scientists spent much of their time arguing with the flensers and boilers for whatever scraps of whales that could be spared for scientific analysis.49 In fact, scientists on board Soviet ships actually seem to have been far more socially distant from the crew than in the West. Scientists did participate in key Soviet rituals, just like the rest of the crew, including organizing heated “socialist competitions” with each other, seeing who could do the

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most research in the shortest amount of time.50 They also began doing exceptional science, science that would both bring the Soviet fleet its greatest successes, and also try— but fail— to halt its greatest excesses. But how could scientists provide concrete help to Soviet whalers? One early publication dramatized their work: On the table was a map of the regions of the Antarctic where our fleet was hunting. The currents were clearly demarcated, which gave the possibility of figuring out the location of whales. In the places where the currents came together, there plankton— the food of whales— collects. That’s where whales will be. Vladimir Ivanovich [the onboard scientist], lost in thought, leaned over the map, marking the line of our fleet’s movements. “This is how we conquered the Arctic,” he said.51

Of course, had it been that easy, anyone armed with a map of currents and a whaleship could have killed like the Soviets. But the capitalist whalers had already destroyed the most obvious areas where whales gathered, such as the convergences of currents near the South Georgia Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. So, Soviet scientists looked for more hidden relationships between the ocean and its whales. First, they concentrated mostly on predicting bad weather, since that had been the biggest obstacle to the finding and catching whales on the first voyage, and finding warm water, which appeared to indicate the presence of whales. More research investigated how whales knew to flee approaching Antarctic storms before humans had detected them, deducing that the animals sensed small changes in wave frequency, listening to what one scientist rather romantically called “the voice of the ocean.” If this relationship were better understood, scientists could predict when and where the whales were likely to flee. This would help solve the frequent problem of coming across a huge pod of whales only for them to suddenly disappear and never be found again. Such early research indicates a wide deficit of knowledge; by the late 1950s, scientists were prepared only to say that the presence of whales roughly corresponded with Antarctic water of medium clarity.52 And they admitted in 1955 that answers to the “complicated problem of whale migrations will not be found at once.”53 Twenty-first-century scientists still struggle to explain whale distribution and migration in the Antarctic. But repeated Soviet observations yielded results. The key Antarctic

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relationship was between water temperature, water chemistry, and the production of krill. Temperature was less important, it turned out, than the availability of minerals such as iron and phosphorus— scarce substances in the ocean— which krill need to build their exoskeletons. One implication of such scattered Antarctic abundance was the fact of whales’ “extreme microlocality,” meaning that the same groups of whales frequented the same patches of krill every year. It followed that once such a group was wiped out by hunting, no whales would be found in that spot for quite some time.54 Furthermore, scientists noted that krill-rich regions also hosted “satiated whales.” Unlike migrating whales, which moved quickly, these “act very quiet . . . and hunting for them is very convenient.”55 From 1955, Soviet oceanographic vessels also began searching the Antarctic for krill accumulations, especially south of Australia and New Zealand.56 This kind of work paid slow but steady dividends, and proved of real value in the Soviets’ belated attempts to catch up to the world’s established whalers. In 1960, one scientist, C.  W. Beklemishev at Moscow’s renowned Shirshov Institute of Oceanography, arranged the whaling scientists’ research into comprehensive form. In spite of whales’ “random movements,” he observed, there were distinct separate areas where whales could be reliably found, “an obvious result of the uneven distribution of the krill.”57 But where to find krill? Beklemishev showed that its abundance corresponded very predictably with zones of intense cyclonic activity. Strong winds whipped away surface waters, allowing deeper, nutrient-rich waters to rise, a process called upwelling. This was the same process that also made coastal windward shores so productive, places like Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands, and the Northwest Coast of America. Without coastlines, though, in the Antarctic the upwelling zones were less predictable, more in need of comprehensive study. However, because most cyclones were spawned near the southernmost landmasses— the tips of South America, Africa, and Australia— before spiraling down into Antarctic waters, their general locations could be predicted. Those locations, according the Beklemishev’s research, tallied with historic records of whales catches. There was one area of cyclonic activity, though, that had not seen that many catches. This was the Antarctic immediately south of the Australian island of Tasmania, a place Beklemishev noted was the center of the “Tasman polar front.”58 This was, in fact, a particularly nasty piece of Antarctic water, one of the reasons other whalers mostly avoided it. It was also the part of the Antarctic termed by the International Whaling Commission

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Southern Hemisphere IWC baleen whale management areas and humpback migration routes, as understood in 1953. Area V (Район V) was where the Soviets wiped out a large portion of the humpback whales that migrated north past Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Areas I and II were traditionally the richest whaling grounds, but had been seriously depleted by previous whalers by the time the Soviets entered the industry. Area VI was designated a whale sanctuary for much of the postwar era. B. A. Zenkovich, “Kiti i kitoboinyi promysel v Antarkticheskikh moriakh,” Trudy TINRO 25 (1953), 20.

“Area V.” This little-visited, storm-tossed part of the bottom of the world would soon be central to the Soviets’ expansion. Beklemishev’s discoveries coincided with tumultuous change at the International Whaling Commission. Until 1955, the IWC’s 16,000 BWU quota went unchanged, even though nearly all scientists recognized that this was too high for sustainable catches. After complex wrangling, especially with recalcitrant Dutch representatives, the Scientific Committee managed to cut the quota to 14,500 for the 1956/57 Antarctic season. The Norwegians, who had begun limiting their own numbers, sought a new framework that would assign each whaling nation its own quota. This would, sensibly, reduce the incentive for countries to expand their fleets while also allowing them to better forecast their own catch. The British offered enthusiastic support; the Dutch eventually came around. The Japanese and the Soviets were amenable, but only if they received relatively generous national quotas. At the 1958 IWC meeting, which took place just a few months after Solyanik’s visit to Wellington, the Soviet Union stated that it would sign on to the Norwegian plan if it was given 20 percent of the global quota.59 But, unable to come to an agreement, in 1959 the Netherlands and Norway temporarily left the IWC, though they promised to restrict themselves to selfimposed quotas. The Soviet Union, too, promised to “conduct her pelagic

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whaling operations in the Antarctic in accordance with the Convention,” though it “would adhere thereto only if her interests were not damaged by the activities of countries operating outside it.”60 All were supposed to respect a season lasting only the first four days of February, and by all accounts, most did. The Soviet demand for 20 percent of the global quota was ambitious, since at that time the Slava, despite its large numbers, was (officially) catching only 8 percent of the Antarctic whales taken every year. But the Soviet Fisheries Ministry had begun hatching plans equal to these ambitions. Khrushchev’s Five-Year Plan of 1956 had stated the Soviet Union’s intention to stage a breathtaking expansion of its whaling fleets. The Soviets were considering an astonishing seven new whaling fleets—four in the Antarctic and three in the Pacific— to add to the Slava and the Aleut. This expansion would make the Soviet Union the world’s premier whaling nation. While this Khrushchevian economic revolution has not received nearly the attention that Stalin’s breakneck industrialization of the 1930s has, it would be far more consequential for the global environment. This expansion was also extremely risky and expensive, especially for a country whose nonmilitary production and consumption still lagged far behind the West. At exactly the same time, Great Britain and Norway had begun looking to sell their whaling factories, in recognition that whales were becoming too scarce. One of the reasons the Dutch were arguing so hard for national quotas was that their own new fleets could not pay for themselves without a guaranteed slice of the Antarctic’s remaining whales. Soviet investment in whaling fleets was coming at the worst possible moment, just as the world’s whales were becoming critically rare. Here, then, was the perfect opportunity for Soviet science to play its role in planning. What the scientists had to say cannot have been welcomed by Soviet planners. In the North Pacific, the zoologist Makar Mitrofanovich Sleptsov had just completed a long-term study of whale populations around the Kuril Islands. He had bad news. “The results of excessive hunting,” he reported, “means that the stocks  .  .  . of [blue, humpback, and sperm] whales . . . are in a critical state and have practically lost all commercial value. Radical measures to conserve the remains of these stocks should include the total banning of their catches.”61 In fact, Soviet and Japanese whalers there were catching sperm whales so fast that Sleptsov’s marking program, designed to reveal the whales’ birthing ground, failed because the whales never had a chance to migrate or give birth. Recent increases

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in the number of catcher boats had already “had a negative effect.”62 Other scientific reports spelled out the implications of scarcity for profitability, informing planners that the current overhunting was “not expedient, and not profitable from an economic point of view.”63 In fact, no one in the Far East was really surprised at the crisis— already in 1952, the director of TINRO had warned there was no possibility of increasing whale catches in the region.64 The news from the Antarctic was no better. Between 1952 and 1955, despite intensive hunting, the Soviet fleet failed to fulfill the rapidly increasing targets central planners had set. This led to the inescapable conclusion that “not only do we not have any prospect of increasing the size of global pelagic whaling, but exactly the opposite. Under any reckonings of the hunting prospects, one has to come to the view that the contemporary quota cannot under any circumstance be raised.”65 The by now venerable Zenkovich informed planners that Antarctic whales stood “on the border of total extinction.”66 The only opportunities scientists could see would be to switch to Antarctic sperm whales or the much smaller minke whales, which no whaling nation then thought worthwhile. No scientist had the courage to speak directly against the fleet expansion, but the implications of their dark prognoses were clear: Khrushchev’s plan to more than triple the size of the Soviet whaling industry could end only in disaster, both ecological and economic. Scientists had exposed the bureaucrats’ Panglossian assumptions that the natural world could be exploited without limit, that plans and production could be raised every year, and that political ambitions in the ocean might find an economic rationale. But Solyanik’s optimism and heroism— indeed, the buoyant tide of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union— rested precisely on these assumptions. Ironically, the ideal of scientific socialism had actually worked, in a way. Intensely studying the natural world, tightly yoked to Soviet industry, cetologists both helped increase production and provided warnings of its unsustainability. Soviet science did not fail the whaling industry, or the world’s remaining whales. But the Communist Party and the Fisheries Ministry did. As the biologist Alfred Berzin later complained, there was “complete disregard for all scientific recommendations,” and the scientific reports were merely “bound, sealed with sealing wax, and marked with the stamp ‘secret,’ then consigned to the shelves of special storage areas.”67 Or, as another biologist wrote disgustedly in pencil on the margins of one of his reports in the

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The gigantic Sovetskaia Rossiia in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, reprovisioning after the Antarctic season. Courtesy of welder-history.livejournal.com.

1950s: “All important details of our work are ignored. Evidently we have too great an abundance of natural resources, so we can waste them and manage them so poorly.”68 The fleet expansion went ahead anyway. At the IWC, the Soviets leveraged their building program to achieve a larger share of the quota. Agreeing to cut two planned factories from production, they received their guaranteed 20 percent and still added five new fleets. The massive Sovetskaia Ukraina came off the docks in Nikolaevsk in 1959 and joined the Slava in the Antarctic. It was, as its builders proudly proclaimed, “the largest whaling factory in the world as well as the largest ship of any kind ever built by the Soviet Union.”69 Its size would never be equaled in the global history of whaling. In 1960, a third Antarctic fleet, the Yuri Dolgorukii, sailed out of the Baltic port of Kaliningrad, while in 1961 the Sovetskaia Rossiia, sister ship to the Sovetskaia Ukraina, made it four. The Dal’nii Vostok and the Vladivostok started working the North Pacific in 1963. The Soviets had suddenly become the world’s largest whaling power. To feed the new Antarctic fleets, planners seized the one opportunity in the otherwise bleak scientific reports: Antarctica’s Area V. Beklemishev had pointed out Area V’s excellent potential, given its storminess and thus likely large krill populations. Since the Slava’s inaugural voyage, it had mainly worked Area II, the South Atlantic between Africa and Argentina. In 1952/53, the first season it failed to meet its Antarctic quota (Solyanik made up for it by killing undersize sperm whales in the tropics during the return home), it had cruised “colossal expanses” of Area II in search of whales.70 It found some fin whales, but hardly any blue whales or humpbacks, in the meantime burning exorbitant amounts of fuel. So, Soviet planners shifted directions, directing the fleet toward the even more distant

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South Pacific. In 1957, the Slava killed 2,235 humpback whales in Area IV, south of Western Australia, and another 4,039 in 1958. The new areas, in addition to containing more whales, had the advantage of being far away from other countries’ fleets. Solyanik had complained that “control over our hunting by foreigners” was increasing in depleted Antarctic regions.71 In 1959, Solyanik assumed command over the new Sovetskaia Ukraina. In November, he nosed it and its fourteen catcher boats into Area V. The ship’s gigantic size allowed it to roll safely through the monstrous swells and breakers it encountered south of Tasmania; its exceptional maneuverability allowed it to quickly switch directions to hunt whales “without regard to weather conditions or the state of the sea.”72 The 1,076 men and women of the crew reclined in their more spacious bunks and enjoyed the new movie theater as the ship lurched and shuddered in the constant storms. Save for one other Japanese factory fleet, the Soviets had this part of the Antarctic entirely to themselves.73 The fin whales the Soviet ships discovered in Area V were small. But the Sovetskaia Ukraina, showing off its speed and maneuverability, sped from one concentration of whales to another, leaving behind the once-glorious Slava, which had followed it into the region.74 Soon it became clear that fin whales would not be enough to satisfy the new ship. Solyanik turned to another species, one that had nearly entirely disappeared from whaling catches since its numbers had been decimated: the humpback whale. The species is probably the most widely recognized today, famous for its playful behavior and especially its frequent leaps out of the ocean. Controversially, New Zealand and Australian shore stations then still killed the humpbacks as they migrated into subtropical waters.75 Because humpbacks faced whalers in their breeding grounds and because they had been hunted so intensely in previous decades, the IWC permitted only four days of hunting each year in the Antarctic. As a result, the pelagic whalers barely targeted them. The Soviets, though, found the whales rich picking. Their harpoon guns firing with a frequency none on board had ever experienced, the two fleets ripped through group after group of feeding humpbacks. They soon tested builders’ claims that the Sovetskaia Ukraina could process 150 whales per day.76 When autumn came and the fleets headed back north, they had killed 11,778 of the animals in Area V alone, and another 1,167 in nearby Area VI, which the IWC had designated a whale sanctuary.77 The Sovetskaia Ukraina alone had killed a staggering 7520 humpbacks; that year’s plan

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was fulfilled by 153 percent. These were the kinds of mass slaughters not seen since the 1920s, when Antarctic catches peaked. Solyanik explained proudly to planners that the Sovetskaia Ukraina had processed 16,240 BWUs, the Slava 11,625— far greater than the Norwegians or the British, who had “principally worked in Antarctic sectors II, III, IV, and I, where the concentrations of whales have already been eliminated.”78 He might have added that those fleets were also constrained by their adherence to IWC regulations. At a time when all recognized the perilous state of the world’s whales, the Soviets’ catches were far beyond even the worst nightmares of those trying to regulate the industry. When the Soviets presented their catch numbers to the IWC in 1960, rather than the 11,778 humpbacks they had actually killed, they reported 720.79 Such mendacity painted for the IWC a completely misleading picture. The commission’s 1960 report announced that the previous year’s “small increase of a little over 1 per cent in the total catch mainly consisted of fin and sei whales; the blue whale catch being slightly higher and the humpback catch considerably less than in the previous season.”80 For the humpbacks, “an average Antarctic catch of around 1,250 has been accepted for some time as a reasonable figure,” making the 1959/60 reported catch of 1,338 seem quite reasonable. Even so, the Scientific Committee expressed worry about the state of humpbacks that migrated past Western Australia, from Area IV. Area V stocks, according to scientists in New Zealand and Australia, were “relatively stable” and “in good condition.”81 The following year, though, the Slava and the Sovetskaia Ukraina returned to Area V and repeated their depredations. Before the season was over, 9,619 humpbacks entered the Soviet slipways, but only 302 were reported.82 After two such extraordinary seasons of illegal catching, the effects began to show up elsewhere. In 1961, the New Zealand humpback specialist Bill Dawbin noted a sharp decline in sightings in his home country and organized an extensive search for the missing whales.83 Responding to the disaster with uncommon urgency, that same year the IWC forbade all killing of humpbacks except in Areas II, IV, and V, the latter two, unfortunately, exactly where the Soviets continued to hunt. The following year brought even fewer humpbacks back to New Zealand. In 1962, Dawbin wrote: “The state of the whale stocks must be a great deal worse than even the most pessimistic forecasts had suggested. It is extremely difficult to explain such a catastrophic decline by overkill alone, unless there had been a very large amount of undisclosed humpback whaling at some other

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part of the migration route.” But how could there be enough undisclosed hunting to account for such a radical disappearance of whales, Dawbin wondered. Calculations he and his Australian colleague Graham Chittleborough conducted suggested that “it would need catches of the order of some thousands over and above those we know of to account for such a sudden drastic decrease. It is extremely difficult to believe that additional catching on this order would have occurred.”84 Even if Dawbin and others were beginning to suspect that extensive illegal whaling was taking place in the Antarctic, they still struggled to grasp its magnitude. In the span of four years, the Soviet Union had killed nearly 30,000 humpbacks while reporting less than a thousand. Those four years of unabated Antarctic slaughter came as part of a period of exceptional human excess. The largest releases of radioactive material in the world’s history also came between 1958 and 1962, as the Soviets and the Americans alone detonated some 340 megatons of nuclear weapons around the world. As a result, every human and animal body on Earth had absorbed poisonous strontium-90, one of the unanticipated, invisible fallouts from the bombs.85 That strontium found ever more human bodies to inhabit, as world population growth first reached 2 percent in 1964, inaugurating the greatest decade of human increase in modern times. We now know that 1964 also witnessed the greatest slaughter of whales ever, with the Soviets contributing around 40 percent of the 91,783 animals killed that year. It was as if the early 1960s gathered all the most concentrated extravagances of the Great Acceleration, at the same time concealing them from view. The Soviets knew what they had done, and admitted it, at least internally. The Sovetskaia Ukraina’s onboard inspectors despaired. “If the work of the flotilla continues without adherence to the rules of whaling,” they wrote in 1961, “then with every coming year the catch will fall, as the reproduction of whale stocks cannot be guaranteed.”86 They suggested that the fleet should leave later in the year to arrive in the Antarctic nearer the legal starting time for baleen whales. Acknowledging that the crew as well as the fleet director was motivated to overhunt, the inspectors suggested that no pay should be given for the rendering of undersize whales.87 The biggest problem, in their estimation, were the perverse incentives created by the establishment of three new gigantic whaling flotillas. But the fleets were already there, and they would continue to be used. In the words of one Soviet scientist, “During the five seasons of intense whaling with first

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one, then two, and finally three fleets, the three stocks (western and eastern Australian and New Zealand population) of humpback whales were decreased in abundance to a point that allows us to say that they are almost completely wiped out.”88 In 1961, the Kremlin sent out a classified circular that prohibited any publication of information on whaling. After that date, the fleets worked in complete secrecy, communicating with each other and with shore only in code. Back in Moscow, Fisheries officials took over the catch data and scrubbed it clean before passing it on to the IWC.89 In 1963, the IWC prohibited all humpback catching in the Southern Hemisphere— too late to stop the near total destruction of the population. Even after the ban, the Soviets continued to kill scattered humpbacks in the Antarctic through the end of the 1960s. The whales’ disappearance was of course also devastating to the shore stations. New Zealand’s catch fell from 361 whales in 1960 to 80 in 1961, and down to a paltry 32 in 1962.90 Soon after, the country’s lone remaining shore station closed. Some Soviet scientists tried to pass along clues about their fleets’ activities to Western counterparts. In 1962, Soviet whalers had recovered two tags, which Dawbin and Chittleborough had fired into humpbacks, anticipating they would be recovered and reported when the whales were killed. These would help the scientists map humpback migration routes. The Soviets, eager for the cash reward that came with the tags’ return, handed them over to the IWC. This was a gigantic error. The Soviets reported the marks had come from sperm whales, but records clearly showed they had been inserted into humpbacks— one a juvenile— from the South Pacific. The oceanologist V. S. Arsen’ev, who had opposed the Soviet fleet expansion, quietly urged the prominent British cetologist Sydney Holt to “ignore all the Russian mark recoveries from 1961– 62,” since the data had been falsified and would be useless for science. As Holt wrote, Arsen’ev “says he could get no more information about them so I suppose this means we can think what we like about them!”91 It was a careful clue offered by a fellow scientist, whose fear of his own government kept him from revealing anything more. During one of Solyanik’s cherished visits to foreign ports, his bluster nearly proved his undoing. In 1964, while docked in Sydney, Solyanik arranged a meeting with Bill Dawbin at his University of Sydney office. Solyanik ordered the shipboard scientist, the same Yuri Mikhalev I met much later in Odessa, to quickly prepare some photographs that would allow Solyanik to play the whale expert at the meeting. Frantically work-

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ing through the night, Mikhalev barely finished his preparations before Solyanik’s tender headed for land. As Mikhalev rushed to the deck, Solyanik ordered the sailors to raise the ladder, and Mikhalev had to leap on board. “The captain waits for no one,” intoned Solyanik.92 The men proceeded to Dawbin’s office, and for a tantalizing few hours the man most responsible for the destruction of the South Pacific humpbacks sat across the table from the man who would most have liked to unravel the mystery of their disappearance. That brief meeting in the red-brick neogothic buildings of the University of Sydney encapsulated so much of what was at stake in the world’s oceans in the mid-1960s. Solyanik embodied the success and audacity of the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union and its whaling industry. Mikhalev represented scientific research and planning’s crucial contribution to whaling’s success, as well as its failure to halt its excesses. As one of the future exposers of cheating, he also represented its troubled conscience. Bill Dawbin may be taken as a Western version of Mikhalev, though less tightly connected to the state. He had worked closely with the private New Zealand and Australian shore stations that also killed thousands of humpbacks in the late 1950s and early 1960s (though tens of thousands fewer than the Soviets). After all, the West, too, was experiencing the Great Acceleration, when science abetted runaway economic growth and environmental destruction.93 Belatedly, Dawbin was realizing the oceans he had studied for years were rapidly falling apart, though he could not figure out why. With Solyanik and Mikhalev chatting amiably in his office, the answer was nearly within reach. But the Russians never revealed what they had done in Antarctica’s Area V, and they sailed back to Odessa expecting a hero’s welcome. In 1964, Aleksei Solyanik still flew high across the world of whaling. His downfall was approaching, but he knew as little of that as Dawbin did of his missing whales.

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The Kollektiv and the Long Ruble

While Khrushchev and Solyanik paraded across the international stage, much of the real drama of Soviet history happened in the everyday lives of its workers. This was the world’s first “worker’s state,” and the worker’s experience was crucial to the identity and fate of the Soviet experiment. So what happened below decks on the Soviet whalers gives some powerful clues for understanding why Soviet whaling grew to become one of the most successful and destructive industries in all of Russia, and of all the oceans. Some of this was Solyanik’s doing, but much of it occurred outside even his gaze. Like most successes, it came with conditions— prices that would be paid by whales, humans, and eventually Solyanik himself. Soviet whalers were no ordinary collection of socialist workers. When a Soviet citizen found work on board a whaleship, he or she joined a relatively elite group that in many ways did not resemble the society they left behind on shore. The six hundred (Slava) to one thousand (Sovetskaia Ukraina and Sovetskaia Rossiia) people on board a whaling ship were far more ethnically Russian than the country as a whole. Crew manifests show very few Kazakhs, Tatars, Yakuts, Kamchadals, or any of the other ethnic minorities who actually composed a large proportion of the multinational Soviet people. Ethnic Ukrainians formed a major exception, and their presence helps reveal the most important factors shaping whaling crews: location and education. The main ports of Odessa and Vladivostok contained for the most part ethnic Russians or Ukrainians, and the Russian North— the other location of labor recruitment—was the same. Still, Vladivostok in particular housed substantial numbers of Korean Russians, and the larger

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region of Primorye was very ethnically diverse. Education, either for technical skills or management capacity, was the deciding factor selecting for Russian crews. And while education levels for ethnic minorities improved drastically under Soviet rule, these groups still lagged behind Russians and Ukrainians. The high education level of most Soviet whalers was no coincidence. The 1950s and ’60s saw the Soviet Union invest heavily in human capital. More men and women than ever entered higher education— especially the numerous technological institutes in the big cities, which trained thousands more scientists and engineers than did the United States at the same time.1 This investment was the key factor in stimulating the Soviet Union’s rapid economic growth. The planned economy demanded technological skill and competent management; for a while, the Soviet Union delivered those qualifications, even if the plans remained riddled with perverse incentives and misallocations.2 If Soviet whaleships were more heavily Russian than the rest of Soviet society, those who made up the crew encountered a world far less Russian than the one in which most Soviets were confined. Foreign travel had been completely forbidden until 1955, and afterward still required extensive paperwork just to petition for official approval. This permission was often denied, even for academics and others who had a real need to meet with foreign colleagues. Travel to fellow socialist countries such as Poland, Romania, and East Germany was easier to arrange. But the appeal of such destinations—which by the 1950s were beginning to be rebuilt in the same drab style as Moscow—was limited.3 As a Soviet saying put it, “A chicken is not a bird, and Bulgaria is not abroad” (kuritsa ne ptitsa, Bulgariia ne zagranitsa— it rhymes in Russian, though in both languages a chicken is actually a bird, just not a very impressive one). One of whaling’s top appeals, then, was the ability to break the normal limits of the Soviet experience. In a society curious about the world and hungry for outside contact, whalers got a full dose of both. Solyanik’s extended stays in foreign ports were not just for his own enjoyment or for foreign propaganda, but were also a real lure for his crew. Plus, these stops brought serious money. Whalers scheduled for voyages to foreign ports were given a special allowance of hard currency— far more desirable than the ruble, whose official exchange rate was rarely honored abroad. They spent this cash on all manner of goods unavailable to their neighbors back home, stocking up on the new, low-cost electronics and clothing just

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entering into mass production in the West. Singapore was an especially popular stop; one whaler remembered it as “the dream of every sailor.” “Goods were cheap, and it was possible to buy presents for the entire family and beyond, and sheets of fine fabric for clothing were especially cheap.” The Vladivostok whaler Yuri Sergeev recalled, “We had never seen such an abundance of goods, and our eyes swam.”4 In contrast with the low wages and brutal conditions aboard Soviet fishing vessels, whalers were paid well. In part, this was because whalers possessed rare skills. In 1948, Anastas Mikoyan had complained that whalers’ low salaries “create[d] great difficulties in putting together the whaling fleet with qualified naval cadres.”5 So they got raises, especially those involved in the prestigious new Antarctic fleet. In 1950, when the average yearly wage in the Soviet Union was 7,668 rubles, boilers on board the Slava made 36,000 rubles, and even cleaners made 10,000 per year. Solyanik made a staggering 134,000 rubles— nearly 17.5 times the average wage.6 Such large wage differentials were quite common in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which had greater income inequality than did Great Britain at the same time.7 One of Khrushchev’s accomplishments was to de- Stalinize the wage gap; by the mid-1960s, incomes had better equalized, while at the same time rising across the board. Whaling, though, remained unusually remunerative. But the monthly salary was only the beginning of a whaler’s wealth. As with some other branches of the Soviet economy, the whaling trusts provided housing for their workers. Special whalers’ apartment buildings can still be seen in prime locations in Odessa and Vladivostok. Noncommunal housing was a coveted perk in the Soviet Union, where housing stock never caught up with the needs of the population. Once in the Antarctic, whalers could also expect to receive two types of bonuses. The first was the so-called polar bonus, which upped monthly salaries for time spent above or below certain latitudes, as compensation for the cold and difficult working conditions. Second, workers received bonuses for meeting and exceeding their monthly quotas for catches and whale products. Whalers received a 25 percent bonus for meeting the target, then a 60 percent bonus for exceeding it by anything over 20 percent.8 This was the legendary “long ruble” of which Soviet whalers spoke. The motivation to kill as many whales as possible was as clear as the incentive to work hard in any capitalist enterprise. Because Soviet whalers spent time abroad, they received another, hid-

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den, bonus. One of the confounding things about the Soviet’s planned economy was that many of its people had too much cash— that is, the Soviet economy often did not produce enough goods to satisfy the desires of consumers, so that much of their salary ended up in what economists term “forced savings.” Since housing, health care, and sometimes even meals and travel, were paid for by the state or, more commonly, one’s place of work, many Soviets found very little use for their money. Thus, it was not the money to purchase goods that mattered, but access to them in the first place.9 This situation created chronic shortages and the infamous long lines that formed whenever a scarce item became available, but also meant travel abroad opened up unique opportunities. For this reason, whalers’ high salaries were welcome. Better, though, was the ability to actually spend them. Thus the paradox of Soviet citizens, whom most of the world thought of as shivering and poor, landing at a port like Wellington or Singapore and spending money like no one there had ever seen. Ironically, Soviets abroad acted like ideal Western consumers. But, in fact, their wild spending came directly from the experience of living in a shortage economy at home. Back at home, the rewards would multiply. Upon return to Vladivostok, one man remembered, “Neighbors gossiped about the ‘rich’ whalers. In Singapore, empty suitcases were extremely cheap, and we would buy several of them. In addition to exotic goods, some ingenious whalers packed their suitcases full of robes, jackets, etc. Jealous neighbors would say: There’s Ivan (or Petr or Stepan), he brought twelve suitcases back!”10 These Western-style clothes brought large profits on the black market back home. The particularly successful could turn these profits into the most coveted Russian possession: extra personal space. As one whaler who had managed to purchase four apartments in Moscow, along with a countryside dacha, admitted, without embarrassment, “Capitalism has remained in my consciousness.”11 Whalers ranked with Communist bureaucrats as some of the only Soviets with the access to foreign goods that could bring such privileges. However, these foreign visits also presented threats. Most frighteningly for authorities, whalers faced a temptation to defect. This had been a problem since the Aleut’s 1932 stop in Honolulu, and became more serious as whaling moved outside of Russian waters and the Cold War tightened its grip. The stops in Australia on the way back from the Antarctic made the Communists and staff on board very nervous. Thus, in May 1968, just out-

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side Sydney, Australia, the onboard whaling newspaper reprinted a letter, purportedly written by a defector from an earlier whaling voyage, detailing the high costs of defection. Instead of “freedom,” the defector had found all the hardships of capitalism described by the Soviet press, especially unemployment and inhumanity. As the repentant, ex- Soviet defector wrote: “I don’t know if these are people living here— or wolves.”12 The message to those about to experience the delights of Sydney was clear, that the West was best enjoyed briefly before a return to the safety of socialist comradeship. This comradeship was something quite essential to the Soviet worker’s life. Exotic ports, exotic goods, and the lure of the seven seas— in some ways these were the standard experiences of fishers and whalers throughout the world and throughout history. But a few essential differences made the Soviet whaler’s experience unique, and these differences also help explain the excesses of Solyanik and the rest of the fleet. Most important, the Soviet Union had much bigger goals for its workers and their labor than did most states. If the American dream of the 1950s consisted of a house in the suburbs and a family car, paid for by lifelong employment with a big company, the official Soviet dream concentrated on the satisfaction of labor itself. A city apartment and dacha in the countryside (car ownership was almost always out of the question, despite what the Aleut had claimed to the Jamaicans) were increasingly part of the grand bargain struck between workers and party, but they were not yet the most important part of the Soviet experiment. In the workers’ state, work was the point. And in truth, the commonly heard Western criticism that socialism failed because of a lack of work ethic got it exactly wrong. There is little reason to doubt the claims of whalers such as Nefed’ev that they worked from a solemn sense of socialist duty and of self-fulfillment, two sides of the same coin. Through the heyday of whaling, many Soviet workers threw themselves into their labor like few other people in the history of the world, even if drunkenness and absenteeism remained problems, and began increasing in the 1970s. The central idea for the Soviet worker, and especially for whalers, was something they called the kollektiv. “Collective” is the obvious English translation, and yet it misses something essential about the concept and the practice. Like a work collective, the Soviet kollektiv was a group of laborers who shared a common goal of production. But it was more; the kollektiv, especially on board a ship, was a shared identity and a shared fate.

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The kollektiv was the basic unit of Soviet political and economic life, and, crucially, it was rewarded or penalized as a whole for its collective output. Taken together, all the individual kollektivs were supposed to make up one giant, harmonious kollektiv. “To live together as one friendly family— that is an old naval tradition, and it should have an even brighter manifestation under the conditions of our large kollektiv, so far away from the homeland for so long.”13 So wrote one of the editors of the Sovetskaia Rossiia’s onboard newspaper, the main venue for the whalers’ self-expression that was printed every several days and read avidly by the crew. As expressed by the editorial staff, the whaleship kollektiv was meant to be a microcosm of Soviet society, only better. It had to be, for the crew would be away from home for nearly eight months, in a corner of the globe as far distant from the Soviet Union as could be found. The whalers’ mission was crucial to the homeland, but the kollektiv faced a multitude of threats, both from without and within. In the ideal kollektiv, the entire crew made decisions; despite the wage differentials, whaleships went a long way toward meeting this ideal. Almost everyone on board was granted a say in some aspect of the Antarctic voyage. Hunting kollektivs voted on the location of whaling, while mechanics’ kollektivs brainstormed ways of performing better maintenance. Shipboard democracy and kollektiv culture were complicated, though. In addition to natural rivalries between professions, Soviet ships added a further layer of complexity to this mix. Members of the Communist Party, the trade unions, and the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization) all had a voice in decisions, too. Most Soviet citizens were not members of the Communist Party, but the highest positions in Soviet society, and on whaling ships, were reserved for party members. It was a peculiar feature of Soviet life that the workplace functioned as a site of continual political persuasion. During whalers’ precious hours of leisure, they often had to attend Communist Party lectures designed to push the party line and recruit more members. But these produced very mixed results and often inflamed tensions.14 After one lecture on the “Stalin Constitution” (a 1936 document that grandly promised democracy and freedom of the press while delivering the opposite), a party member reported with dismay that “some comrades went searching for wine, interrupting the lecture.” When the speaker confronted the interrupters, he received a sarcastic response: “Our people are literate, and the lectures should be too.”15 They had a point. The literacy of whaling crews was re-

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markably high, as it was throughout the Soviet Union. Workers frequently patronized the onboard library, continuing a tradition of intensive reading on board Soviet whaleships. Having immersed themselves in Russian and foreign literature (one reporting reading Proust, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Sholokhov, and others in the course of one voyage), whalers often disdained the crude Communist lecturing.16 Where exhortation did not work, perhaps threats would. Staff recognized that the kollektivs’ motivation and unity could flag, and they addressed this issue early and often during the course of the voyage. The very first installment of the 1967 onboard newspaper warned: From the experience of previous years we know that amongst the novices, together with real hard workers, . . . there will be “accidental” people, here only because of their love of the “long ruble.” These people exhibit the least action and concern for the interests of our kollektiv. Their distinguishing mark is that these people are vagrant and temporary. From the first day, these “temporaries” are detected; following only their own selfish interests, they must be educated, and if need be driven away from us. That is the task of our permanent cadres, responsible for the interests of the flotilla.17

Educating or driving away the selfish was also the task of so- called agitators, party members among the crew who spurred the workers toward innovation and rationalizations of their tasks. The agitators could be quite numerous— there were eighty of them aboard the six-hundred-man Slava in 1956–1957, for example.18 Thus, crew members faced high expectations and tight supervision from the moment they stepped on board a whaleship. All were potential enemies; all faced a real possibility of being scorned and isolated from their comrades. These could have been (and sometimes were) exceptionally stressful work conditions. The challenge for the staff lay in the fact that many, perhaps most, of the crew had shipped for the exact reasons that were seen as dangerous: the big salary and the adventure. Mostly, the ships were full of young males drawn to the thrill of adventure and killing, but who were also homesick and lovelorn. These traits, when unbridled, could easily shatter the kollektiv. Alcohol was perhaps the most debilitating problem for the kollektiv. Newspapers tried to shame such behavior by naming the perpetrators—for example, “On the last voyage electro-mechanic Lysenko and third electro-

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mechanic Senotrusov took to drinking in the cabin during the watch and an electrical surge occurred. On the first day out from Vladivostok, thanks to the ‘lack of the necessary discipline,’ the main electric engine was flooded.”19 While such accusations did not carry the threat of death as they had during the purges, they could still cost the accused their privileged jobs with the whaling fleet. Stops in foreign ports provided extra temptation, and the possibility of extra embarrassment for whaling officials. In 1965, Soviet sailors got roaring drunk in Singapore, then stole from local shopkeepers. Another drunkard tried to defect on a stolen junk.20 Later, in the early 1970s, whaling officials conducted a “fight against drunkenness.”21 Smart skippers kept the spirits locked in their own cabins under their personal control. This led to difficult moments, however, such as the time one of the men came to catcher boat captain Yuri Sergeev begging for six bottles of vodka to dull the pain brought by news that his little son back in Vladivostok had just accidentally overturned a barrel of hot tar and been scalded to death.22 Sergeev gave him the bottles. Like most workplaces in the Soviet Union, the ship was a site of constant criticism. This was seen as a good thing. Searching, if often formulaic, self-criticism was built into the system of socialist labor. A meeting of the Communists on board the Slava in 1947 provides some of the flavor of what must have been an exhausting exercise. Solyanik himself set the tone, pointing out that “hooliganism” had been taking place even before the ship’s arrival at the European port of Gibraltar. Drinking and general misbehavior threatened to “wreck all our work.” Comrade Timanov complained that the men had not yet mastered their work and that they were behaving poorly at the dinner table, yelling and screaming. Finally, Comrade Penzer balanced nicely the epic and the everyday: “Every victory takes place when people are well prepared . . . but today not all of our tasks are turning out well with sanitation. . . . There is a battle with cockroaches.”23 On board the whaleship, the greatest expression of the kollektiv was the collective form of hunting. On the Slava’s first voyage, in 1946, the Soviets tried to explain the concept to one of the Norwegian advisers, a man named Martinsen. He had advised the catcher boats never to share information about whale locations with each other, as cutthroat competition was the nature of Antarctic whaling. The Norwegian, English, and other fleets were constantly fooling their own compatriots in order to pursue their greatest individual profit. In response, the idealistic Soviets scoffed at Martinsen’s naïveté. They patiently explained that something called “socialist rivalry”

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meant every Soviet catcher boat would share the proceeds, and that the stimulation of competition would simply mean a greater pie for everyone to divide among themselves. The Norwegian retained his doubts. “You will deceive each other,” he assured the Soviets.24 “Socialist rivalry” was a venerated Soviet concept that originated in a pamphlet Vladimir Lenin had written in 1917, entitled How to Organize Competition. Lenin described socialist labor as consisting of the “heroic, in the world-historical sense of the word, organization tasks which the Socialist revolution has imposed upon the working people.”25 The essence of socialist rivalry was to challenge workers to outdo each other. The party would then identify and recognize those individual workers who found the best means of increasing production. Standardized, those innovations would then benefit everyone: individual competition enriched the entire kollektiv. This was a vision of economic progress independent of centralized leadership, one that would instead use the great socialist awakening of individual creativity and hard work in the service of the greater good. In practice, Martinsen had some reason for his smugness. Given that bonuses were sometimes awarded to individual catcher boats, each Soviet crew had incentive not to share everything with their competitors. Often, catcher boats lied about the location of whales they had found in order to keep them from other boats.26 Party members objected vociferously to this failure to give “objective” news, but they made little headway.27 In fact, competition often actually limited catches. As soon as they sighted whales, the catcher boats scattered in a mad dash to harpoon as many whales as they could before their competitors caught them. Soviet planners later decided this scattershot method did not allow whales to be methodically killed through a comprehensive sweep of an area. Therefore, sometime in the 1950s, whaling directors switched to a “collective method,” which paid all catcher crews the same salary. Still, catcher captains would complain that their boats were often positioned at the flanks of the formation used to destroy groups of whales, and thus made fewer catches and would be shamed in the onboard newspapers. Whaling directors had to keep careful records of which boats had been on the front or flanks too much in order to assure equal access to the kill.28 In 1960, worried that catches were declining, directors abandoned the collective method and returned to giving individual bonuses. Problems intensified with the building of new fleets in the early 1960s, each of which possessed a different quota. Regional rivalries exacerbated

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these tensions. In 1968, the Vladivostok whaler Sergeev related a story that was not entirely unusual. As he chased a whale, a catcher from another fleet, the Sovetskaia Ukraina, appeared and charged full speed ahead on a collision course with Sergeev’s boat. This was done to intimidate Sergeev’s harpooner by applying “psychological pressure.” Despite very narrowly missing a collision, Sergeev got the whale. On another occasion, opposing whalers both fastened their harpoons to a flagged whale and tugged against each other until the Ukraina catcher’s line broke and the Vladivostokans claimed another prize. As Sergeev wrote, “Odessa whalers and Far Eastern whalers were not renowned for their brotherly love, to put it mildly.”29 This noncollective form of rivalry continued to test the patience of fleet directors, especially as economic indicators began to turn south. In 1962, officials suggested the creation of a “flagman” from the fleet directors who would supervise and coordinate the choice of hunting grounds in an attempt to avoid competition between fleets.30 Other problems also came from socialist rivalry’s obsession with speed and volume at the expense of accuracy and efficiency. Most problems involved not catching whales but processing them. Refrigerators installed to better preserve whale meat often proved a weak link. On one voyage, the crew complained about the horrible smell issuing from the meat locker, as the refrigerator struggled to keep up with the mounting catches. In the course of the voyage, though, socialist rivalry kicked in. Engineers improvised a solution, and the refrigerator came back to life. Still, it would work only when pumped full of Antarctic water— anything warmer and the dead whales started to rot again.31 A “passion for records,” which planners simultaneously encouraged and bemoaned, caused its own problems. For example, those in charge of refueling would often pump as much fuel as they could as quickly as possible and neglect all other concerns, such as cleaning up before the next shift supervisor took over.32 Soviet records abound with accounts of whale products going entirely to waste on board, with catches far outstripping processing capacity. If one catcher ship experienced great success while others in the area did not, instead of helping with towing the whales to the factory ship— which was essential to do quickly before they began to rot— the unsuccessful catchers often scurried away, desperate to make catches that would pad their statistics.33 This was not what Lenin had had in mind for socialist competition. Under Khrushchev’s liberalizing reforms, the splintering of the kollektiv and the economy proceeded further. He granted more power to regional

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economic bodies, loosening central control in the hope of stimulating production. Indeed, some economists claim that the Soviet Union did not even have a planned economy after Stalin’s death (one of the reasons, in their view, for the economy’s ultimate collapse).34 Khrushchev’s reforms gave local trusts— like those that ran Far Eastern and Odessan whaling— increased power in lobbying the Fisheries Ministries for more labor and machinery, which would allow them to more easily meet plan targets, regardless of whether they were cost effective. Under such circumstances it was nearly impossible to judge whether Soviet whaling was ever profitable. Labor and other input prices were not determined by the market, nor were the prices Soviet consumers paid for whaling products such as margarine. Plus, reflecting Marx’s labor theory of value, accountants ignored capital investment while calculating overall profits, instead merely balancing fuel and labor cost with proceeds.35 Thus some could claim that whaling yielded a three-billion-ruble profit every year until its conclusion in the 1980s, while others wondered if it ever saw the black.36 Official account books are hardly more helpful, as they sometimes show deep losses inexplicably crossed out and replaced by equally large profits. Another impact of Khrushchev’s loosening plan discipline was that whalers— like other Soviet ministries— had to massage their catch numbers in just the right way to avoid seeing plan targets raised too quickly. They knew that the Fisheries Ministry would raise plan targets the following year based on catches from the current year, the so-called ratchet effect.37 Then, if they failed to meet the new, higher plan, they wouldn’t see another bonus. Thus, the smartest plan of attack was to just barely exceed plan targets in the hopes of seeing only a small increase the next year. Workers and directors could capture that year’s bonus and still possibly to do the same in the future. Here, again, local economic players maintained a sense of the world’s real limits, but faced an economic system that did not. This encouraged disastrous overcatching, which put the Soviets in good capitalist company; in free markets, workers and companies had little economic motivation to restrain themselves until they had so depleted the natural world that profits became impossible. If the Soviet system was at times worse for the natural world, it was because even the end of profitability did not provide a motivation to quit. There was another reason not to quit: remarkably, despite all the problems, the whaleship kollektiv held together. No boats were lost to accidents, the fleets returned in triumph, and very few whalers decided it would be

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better to stay at home. Whaling played its role in Khrushchev’s “economic miracle” too. The Soviet Union went from widespread starvation in 1946 to consuming sugars, vegetables, and other foodstuffs at levels similar to those in Western industrial countries. Life expectancy surged to sixty-nine years, also on a par with developed countries. The margarine and vitamins derived from the Antarctic’s whales played important roles in this nutrition revolution.38 Russia had never been so wealthy or healthy. But achievements in production were growing rarer in the Soviet Union by the mid-1960s. The optimism of Khrushchev’s early economic, technological, and diplomatic successes had begun to fade. The celebrated “Virgin Lands Campaign,” which had promised to unlock the agricultural potential of Siberia, had seen disastrous setbacks after 1958 and an especially acute shortage in 1964. One joke from the time asked: “What is the name of [the very bald] Khrushchev’s hairstyle? Answer: The harvest of 1964.” Khrushchev’s increasingly erratic behavior and bullying resembled Stalin’s last years and convinced other members of the politburo to overthrow him in October 1964. A more cautious leadership headed by First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev took over. Industrial production was also lagging, and— even more seriously— problems were showing up in the increasingly complex consumer economy. There, quality and efficiency mattered a great deal, and although the Soviet economy turned more and more toward producing consumer goods, it struggled to keep pace with the public’s growing appetites.39 Whaling was different. It was one of the few industries where the shortcomings of socialist planning and competition did not matter a great deal, at least to the producers. The state had invested heavily in capital equipment and research, making the goals reachable, so targets could be exceeded nearly every year. As long as one looked only at production (the task of the whalers) and not the final product (the task of others), the indices looked good. The seductively quantifiable quality of whales and their internal parts, measured out in catches and tons of production, fit the planned economy’s methodologies. Furthermore, the race for numbers was normally won through intensity of effort and discipline, not necessarily through increased efficiency (which was becoming impossible with the reduction of whales) or through quality of production. Effort and discipline were the hallmarks of the Soviet labor ideal. Finally, as the next chapter describes in more detail, whales themselves proved incapable of escaping the plan. They might range widely and move swiftly, but whales— especially baleen

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whales in the Antarctic— have a constricted diet and change migration patterns only gradually; these were the bottlenecks of production that for once the Soviet Union was able to harness to its own desired ends. Thus, while whaling was already becoming something of a dinosaur in the mid-’60s, it represented a continuation of a simpler, more satisfying time in the struggle for socialism, when all that seemed to matter was the brute struggle to wring wealth from the natural world. And so whaling seductively lubricated the kollektiv’s social relations. Whatever the strains and insults endured through socialist competition, whatever the cleavages of interests revealed through the systems of reward and punishment, by each voyage’s conclusion, almost all had met their targets and reaffirmed the kollektiv and its effectiveness. Whaling delivered the central Marxist promise— the promise of labor rewarded materially and psychologically. When whalers read in their onboard newspapers about the many setbacks imperiling each catcher boat’s production throughout the season— storms, drunkenness, “tricky” whales— and then at the end of the season found that the plan had once again been exceeded, that they had all succeeded despite the most desperate odds, they read the story of the Soviet Union. What many forgot, or cared not to notice, was that whales’ living bodies fueled the competition and eventual harmonious reconciliation that nurtured the kollektiv. Each whale that the men’s labor pulled from the ocean and then pulled apart hastened the kollektiv’s demise. In 1965, the fleets’ catches began dropping, and even as the whalers turned to smaller and smaller whales, those numbers would never regain the heights of the early 1960s. Surprisingly, one of the first to be deprived of the kollektiv was Aleksei Solyanik. As captain of the Slava, Solyanik had experienced no competition for a decade. But when the new fleets were built, Solyanik handed off the Slava to another captain, B. M. Morgun. For the first few years in the 1960s Morgun tried to match Solyanik’s Sovetskaia Ukraina whale for whale, but he usually failed. Solyanik’s superior ship, experience, and frequent head starts led him to the best parts of the Antarctic, where he quickly hunted out the whales before Morgun and the Slava got there. In fact, it looked suspiciously like Solyanik intentionally scared and scattered whales the Slava might otherwise have caught. Morgun complained bitterly, but Solyanik had a record of producing results, so the Fisheries Ministry turned a blind eye.40 In 1970, Morgun was found dead at the bottom of a ship’s hatch.

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A Soviet kollektiv gathered on the back of a blue whale carcass. The photograph graphically illustrates the fact that the kollektiv’s success depended on an ever-increasing number of dead whales. Photograph by Yu. F. Borshchov, in the personal collection of the author.

Whether he fell or was pushed was never clear. Solyanik’s fall had taken place a few years earlier. It, too, was connected to the weaknesses in the kollektiv. In 1964, the year of Khrushchev’s removal and Solyanik’s visit with Dawbin, the Sovetskaia Ukraina took a new route to the Antarctic, sailing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Unexpectedly, the Soviets came across sperm whales near the tropical Seychelle Islands north of Madagascar.41 The ship was made for Antarctic work, not for the heat of the tropics, and factory-ship whaling between the latitude 40° marks was prohibited by the IWC. Solyanik ordered the catcher boats to pursue the whales. Catching them proceeded successfully, but problems quickly arose in the boiler room, where the sperm whale carcasses were being melted down. With lit fires and tropical heat, temperatures rose to at least 56°C (133°F), and men began fainting at the job. The ship’s commissary denied them the wine ration that was supposed to be especially helpful in high temperatures, reportedly because Solyanik wanted to keep it in reserve as motivation to increase the catch. As complaints made their way to the captain, Solyanik played a malevolent trick. He let the entire crew vote— the kollektiv in action— with the knowledge that the catcher crew smelled big bonuses and had little idea what was transpiring below decks. In effect, Solyanik pried open the latent fissures between members of kollektiv to force his will. After the crew voted to continue, Dmitrii Chegorskii, working in the engine room, collapsed from heatstroke and died. A temporarily chastened Solyanik ordered a departure from the Seychelles, but when the

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ship found another group of whales a day later, the catchers returned to the hunt. Again, the heat brought fatal consequences: thirty-nine men had to be sent home due to ruined health, leaving the Ukraina short-handed for the rest of the voyage. Still, Solyanik refused to allow one man, I. Avramenko, passage home, and Avramenko, too, died on board.42 If it weren’t for Solyanik’s love of publicity, the horror might have passed without repercussion. But the captain had invited a reporter, Arkadii Sakhnin, from the newspaper Sovetskii Komsomolets aboard to chronicle his triumphs in the Antarctic. Instead, back in Odessa, Sakhnin published a devastating exposé. He reported that not only was Solyanik responsible for the deaths of the whalers on the last voyage, but that he had built a private empire of nepotism and corruption on board. His wife, Svetlana, lacked the experience necessary for the job she was given; so did his children. Solyanik had also built a private swimming pool on board for Svetlana. Solyanik was hauled before a party tribunal, where new First Secretary Brezhnev told him that though they had long tolerated his excesses, they could not overlook his “arrogance and conceit.” Svetlana, Brezhnev added sarcastically, could still be considered a hero, “since she managed to put up with you for months at sea.” Though Fisheries Minister Ishkov defended him, Solyanik was fired.43 A few years later, Svetlana left him for another man. Solyanik’s dismissal shocked the world of Soviet whaling. Decades later, he still has many defenders among ex-whalers. They recognize something essential that the Soviet public and even its bureaucrats perhaps did not: Solyanik’s excesses were central to the success of their industry, and as much as his imperiousness might have been resented, the logic of Soviet planning and Soviet labor demanded the endless increases which Solyanik provided. Aleksei Solyanik may have represented a malignant arm of the kollektiv, but like all cancers, he had grown from the body’s own internal processes.

8

The Cetacean Genocide

A few years ago, my wife, my daughter, and I swam with whales of Tongatapu in the South Pacific nation of Tonga. Tonga was an important breeding and calving area for the humpbacks of Antarctica’s Area V, the same ones decimated by Soviet whalers from 1959 to 1962. Fifty years later, whales again filled its lagoons. For most of the morning, our boat trailed cautiously behind a few humpbacks without getting close enough. Then, in the early afternoon, a mother- calf pair allowed us to approach. The three of us jumped into the water and the two whales lingered as we paddled toward them. Scientists have only vague ideas of humpback lifespans, since most of the data comes from whales killed while still young, but fifty years is a minimum estimate.1 So the humpback mother we were looking at may have been a youngster when the Soviet fleets sailed through its feeding grounds. The odds were very high that her parents had fallen victim to those whalers. Was any memory of this slaughter passed down, I wondered, swimming toward where I thought the whales were. In the murky water I couldn’t see anything until— suddenly— a huge eye appeared just a few feet in front of me. Below, I could see a small calf, nearly touching the bottom of the lagoon, sheltered by its mother’s long, barnacle-encrusted flipper. The pair seemed to occupy a space and time so large that I could not begin to grasp it, even as I came closer to it than I had ever imagined I would. I gripped my daughter and pulled her close. Did the whale mother do the same to her calf? Suddenly, with a powerful kick, the two were gone. I popped my head out of the water; both whales leaped out of the ocean and

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A right whale mother-calf pair. Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

twirled. Once, twice, then over and over, they leaped, further and further toward the horizon. What was all that about? I wondered. And still do. That encounter was my closest ever with a living whale, and it lasted all of about five minutes. The experience for Soviet whalers was very different. For decades, they encountered whales nearly every day of the Antarctic and North Pacific summers. They also touched them, smelled them, even climbed inside them. Like me and millions of others today, they also watched them, though they usually observed very different behavior— the whales either feeding in a frenzy or frantically fleeing. Soviet whalers recorded perhaps more hours of whale observation than any other group of humans in the world. Not only that, but they also talked to whale scientists and read their work, far more than did whalers from other countries. Soviet whalers knew whales in an extraordinarily deep and intimate way. They also slaughtered them, destroying the whales’ lives and families and almost eradicating them altogether. It is a hard and troubling contradiction: those who knew whales best in the twentieth century killed them in huge numbers, while enthusiastic whale watchers like me who in comparison barely know the creatures cannot stomach the thought of harming them. Other difficult but perhaps even more important questions are these: How did the various species of whales who died at genocidal levels in

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the twentieth century experience this destruction? How did they evade, suffer, and ultimately find a way to survive these worst years of their history? Modern whale science can begin to give us some insight into these questions. So, too, can the records of Soviet whalers and whale scientists— people who, while killing whales, also described key bits of their lives. At times, these men as well as a few women also found new ways of thinking about these creatures that began to open up a new future for both. Fundamental to understanding most whales’ experience is a recognition of the bifurcation of their lives, split between the tropics and subtropics and the polar oceans. Every whale species that the modern industrial fleets targeted except sperm whales mated and birthed in winter in warm shallow waters near the equator and migrated toward the cold poles for the summer. For whales, the wintertime tropics are sanctuaries. Some predators prey on the young there, but until humans began hunting them intensely, the dangers were very few. Shallow-water sharks were too small to breach familial defenses around the young, and orcas were deterred from launching attacks by the risk of stranding. Besides, the tropical oceans are usually too poor in nutrients to sustain predators. Whales may starve while they are there, but they have the fat reserves to outlast their few tormentors. In fact, some scientists posit that many whales’ exceptionally long, and energetically costly, migrations to the tropics take place precisely to avoid predators.2 The poles, in contrast, are spheres of aggressive action, pumped full of the energy of nearly endless summer light and churning storms. Whales plow these waters with an energy to match that around them, and one can imagine they experience their feeding months as an excited, nearly frenzied period of their lives, the polar opposite of the tropics. Almost certainly, they look forward to it, especially as their fat reserves dwindle to nearly nothing late in the spring and the forced confinement of the tropical nurseries becomes wearisome and dangerous. Smaller species of whales such as minkes are vulnerable to attack in their polar feeding grounds, as are the young of all species; but whales’ experience there was long mostly free from danger. Whales do not all arrive at the poles at the same time. Blue whales first start appearing in the Antarctic in October, fins and minkes come in November, and humpbacks often arrive in early December.3 Nor does each species arrive as one group. Newly pregnant whales arrive first, as they are the most desperate to resume eating and meet the demands of the growing

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fetus. Whales in embryo grow remarkably fast— far faster than even their great size would predict. Conceived during one summer’s tropical fast, and then born at the beginning of the next, their eleven-month gestation (even shorter for some great whale species) is far quicker than the eighteen months that much smaller elephants require. Their hurried development is likely forced by the impossibility of surviving a second winter of tropical starvation. Only the superabundance of food at the poles enables such a precarious reproductive strategy. Once in the Antarctic or Arctic, whales began their search for food. Except for gray whales (which feed on ground- dwelling mysids), that food is mostly krill— small shrimp-like crustaceans that are possibly “the most abundant animal on the planet.” Small as krill are, there are so many that their estimated biomass of 400 million metric tons surpasses humans’ 350 million metric tons, though it falls behind cattle’s 520 million. In one day, an adult blue whale can consume as much six metric tons, or just over 13,000 pounds.4 Because the oceans, especially the Southern Ocean, are so vast and voluminous, krill are not easy to find, despite their numbers. Whales must perform exceptional feats of reconnaissance in order to locate worthwhile clumps hidden within the billions of cubic miles of outwardly featureless, three-dimensional ocean. First, they must navigate along migration routes learned from their mothers, likely aided by their detection of Earth’s magnetic fields.5 These routes are commonly more than five thousand miles long; for gray whales, more than ten thousand miles— longer, even, than the sea route from Vladivostok to the Antarctic. Once in polar seas, they may still find themselves hundreds of miles away from any prey patch.6 Scientists are not really sure how whales locate these patches. Likely, whales first seek out areas of generally colder water, which contain more of the nutrients necessary to build the food chains krill depend on.7 Some whales, such as humpbacks, have nerve-rich tubes in the front of their rostrum that may aid in detecting differences in water pressure, current flow, and other hints about the state of water elsewhere.8 For whales that also eat fish— humpbacks and fins above all— hearing also plays a role. Fishes’ gas-filled swim bladders produce low-frequency sounds to which whales’ internal ears are perfectly attuned. Krill, too, when schooling, emit some sounds that whales might pick up. Or the sound of other whales’ foraging may draw them in.9 Having homed in on prey, whales turn to taste, and possibly smell.

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Swimming toward a dense swarm of krill, whales probably begin to taste the salts that zooplankton release when feeding on phytoplankton and are a sure sign of krill.10 Bowhead whales, at least, seem also to be able to smell krill, whose odor resembles that of boiled cabbage.11 Once within the swarm, very sensitive skin and whiskers— and, on baleen whales, an unfused lower jaw that contains a special sensory organ— help the whales detect krill movement and lunge into just the right place. Whatever the whale tastes when it swallows a heavy load of krill, it is not the shrimp flavor one would expect. Lacking a sense for both sweetness and umami, it probably tastes only the krill’s saltiness.12 There seem to exist a whole series of rules that govern this summer pursuit, with the Antarctic partitioned out between different species. Fin whales seek out swarms of large, plump krill; humpbacks look for groups of smaller individuals; minkes settle for middling microshrimps. Blue whales remain so scarce that scientists have no firm idea of what kind of krill they target. Whales hunt different parts of the Antarctic as well. Minkes, with their slim bodies and small fins, are able to feed among the pack ice. They can fit through narrow ice floes or punch holes in thin ice with their hard, thin rostrums.13 Larger whales, however, have to avoid the ice, lingering along its productive edges or, as with fin whales, avoiding it altogether. And the third dimension— depth— that shapes every moment in the ocean so differently than on land also comes into play. Minkes dive deep into the cobalt Antarctic depths for their krill, while above them, humpbacks graze the surface waters. Rarely do the different species trespass into each other’s niche. The krill themselves keep to cohorts of similarly sized individuals, as if to experience together all the joys and terrors of an Antarctic existence: for months, a methodical grabbing at tiny pieces of algae before a brief, panicked scurry and violent gulp that feels like nothing else they have experienced; then, their slow digestion in an entirely novel watery realm. If whales spend their winter months mating, getting to know each other, and establishing long-term social bonds, the frenzy of the polar summer sets many of them on lonely paths. Food is spotty and unpredictable, so when patches of krill are found, many whales will come together. Often, though, their association ends with the meal.14 With nearly no predators before humans came to the Antarctic, bunching together for defense was unnecessary. Furthermore, none of the ocean’s food can be defended, so there is little reason to fight over feeding grounds and almost no overt conflict between individuals or groups.15 Thus, the poles are a strange free-

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for-all. Distant whales drawn to the same tastes and sounds of millions of krill bodies meet briefly, together extending their flexible balloon-like throat panels for a few gigantic gulps while carefully avoiding each other’s massive bodies. Sometimes the crash of hundreds of tons of bones, fat, and oil bursts through the surface, then the whales quietly disperse as the krill disappear. The whales’ world is solitary when compared with human communities, but some social bonds are important. This is especially true for female sperm whales, which remain in warmer waters and in the same pod, among relatives, their entire lives. Baleen whale calves accompany their mothers along the migration routes and throughout their first year of polar feeding. Sei whales usually move in pairs, and sometimes form groups as large as fifty when food is abundant. Female humpback whales often travel together and feed with the same companion— usually, but not always, another female— for years, if not decades, on end.16 Other species seem to form more accidental groupings, but groups of some sort aside from the frequent mother-calf pair are common. And since whales can communicate over very long distances underwater, our comprehension of what constitutes a group may be far too limited.17 Soviet whalers were always surprised when they found individual whales, which they called odinochki, “loners.”18 Unlike earlier sail whaling, which often targeted whales in the tropical breeding grounds, modern industrial whaling attacked them mainly near the poles. The story of the whale genocide, then, was often of death suddenly overtaking pairs of whales, or small groups, distracted by the business of searching for prey, feeding, or resting after a meal. It was hundreds of thousands of exploding harpoons peppering the ocean with shattering percussion every summer, but over such vast spaces that whales must have experienced it mostly as distant reports whose meaning became clear only at the moment they became the target. It was a gigantic story divided into three million separate, often separated, deaths. However, in some ways, each species of whale experienced the twentieth century in distinct ways, individual lives routed into con-specific paths by the arrival of human hunters. Certain decades were devastating for certain species, while other species might have experienced it as barely out of the ordinary. Industrial whalers, the first able to kill any species they liked, attacked their prey in a relatively consistent pattern of declining size. Before the war, bulky blue whales, fin whales, and humpbacks

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dominated the Antarctic catches. In the 1950s, blue whales dwindled to almost nothing, and fin whales were subjected to two further decades of nonstop annihilation. Humpbacks again became targets before the Soviets nearly finished them off in the early 1960s. By that time, much lower-value and much smaller sei whales and the more communal sperm whales (each species maxing out at about sixty feet) were beginning to replace the largest baleen whales in global catches. Seis fell away by the late 1970s, while sperm whales continued, supplemented by the very small (maximum size about thirty feet) minke whales. During the early 1980s, minkes sustained the last whaling fleets nearly entirely by themselves. By then, the oceans were a lonely place for whales. While nearly all this information about whales’ lives comes from twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientists and retrospective tabulation, Soviet whalers had their own clear ideas about whales. Like any hunters, as a matter of professional survival and pride, they observed whales’ behavior closely. Of course, irretrievably separated from the whales’ cold, liquid world, positioned high on the decks of catcher boats and mother ships, and with the singular aim of finding and killing whales, they learned only certain things about their prey. One essential piece of missing information was sound. With diesel engines either rumbling in transit or screaming in pursuit, whales’ low-frequency songs, moans, and clicks— their most important form of communication— were drowned out, cutting off a main channel through which the whalers might have gotten to know them. When whalers did hear their prey, the experience could be arresting. As Eduard Vladimirovich Barsegov, a whaler who later became a sculptor, recounted, “With a pain in my heart I remember the plaintive moans of the agonized whales. Somehow the screech or rattle would reach your ears whether you were on the deck, in the cabin, or in the engine room. This sound reverberated in my head repeatedly and has remained in my memory my whole life. It was very difficult to get used to the heartrending moans of the huge giants of the sea.” Barsegov, who worked above deck but not as a harpooner, had conflicted feelings about his job. “I suffered,” he reported, “feeling sorry for the defenseless whales. ‘Go faster, save yourself,’ I shouted to the whales in my thoughts.” But the lure of the kollektiv and long ruble was stronger: “Upon returning from my first trip, my pay was so small that the other machinists contributed part of their money. . . . With the years, I unwittingly developed the whaler’s azart [passion], as with every additional whale killed the pay

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A Soviet harpooner takes aim at a pod of fleeing sperm whales. As the photograph demonstrates, whalers obtained clear views of whale behavior, including their social relations. Photograph by Yu. F. Borshchov in the personal collection of the author.

of every member of the crew palpably increased, and in that sense I was no exception, but was just as much a hunting member of the kollektiv, and, like all, hoped for a good payday at the end of the voyage.”19 Barsegov’s ultimate integration into the whaleship kollektiv was typical for many Soviet whalers, his sensitive response to whale sounds far less so. Instead, whalers mostly learned about whales by watching their behavior while under pursuit. Their viewpoint resembles that of twenty-firstcentury drones, positioned high above fleeing whales and gaining a striking impression of the whale’s full body. These views provided whalers a rich source of a certain kind of information. First of all, they quickly learned to differentiate between the behaviors of the various species they were targeting. Some, like the fin whale, sped away at a constant speed when pursued. Others, like the smaller seis, were even quicker, but usually waited until the catcher boats were nearly there before they fled. This made it, to quote one whaler, “difficult psychologically for whalers to get ‘tuned in’ to hunt for sei whales,” but with time they learned to approach them more slowly.20 Soon, Soviets also learned that whales that had just gorged themselves on krill were more docile and slower moving, thus easier to kill. By the late 1970s, when catcher boats had gotten faster and could run down most whales

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they saw, such close attention to whale behavior lost its urgency. Few found themselves “tuned in” to minke whales; nor was there much need to be. Whalers were, however, closely tuned in to the changes in whale behavior they observed, making it clear their prey was responding— sometimes dramatically— to the existential threat they faced.21 The Soviets sometimes came upon especially “tricky” whales, individuals that had tangled with whaleships before and had learned tactics, like zigzagging, that made them extraordinarily difficult to catch. Other whales immediately sped away at the first indication of a whaleship and kept underwater as long as they could.22 One whaler described encountering a particularly evasive whale that would pretend to dive deeply for food but then come up suddenly in unexpected locations, everywhere but in front of the ship’s harpoon. Nicknamed the “academician,” this whale “had learned the tactics of the catcher ships like his five fingers” and was part of a pattern of whales “getting smarter year after year.”23 Parts of the Antarctic that had seen industrial whalers nearly without pause since the 1910s contained especially cautious whales. Fin whales there seemed to have the “instinct of self-preservation . . . firmly entrenched in their genes.”24 Could these “smart,” “tricky” whales merely represent natural selection in action— namely, that whales already genetically disposed to caution survived longer? It could. But it’s worth noting that from at least the nineteenth century, Indigenous and commercial whalers, who knew whales better than anyone, insisted that whales learned from their encounters with humans.25 “All the whalers say,” reported one Soviet, “that these are frightened whales, and for that reason they are tricky.”26 Often, the tricky whales were seen to have scars on their backs from earlier, failed attempts to harpoon them. Nor would the strategies Soviet whalers described— changing directions, staying underwater for extended periods, mixing dive times unpredictably, and so on— have originated with whales’ experience with their only other significant predator, orcas. Possessing highly accurate biosonar, the killer whale, unlike the whaleship, never has to guess where its prey is, making evasive measures fruitless. Evidence that some whales adjusted their strategies from killer-whale defense to whaleship evasion comes from other twentieth- century whalers. They reported that sperm whales for years had used a “marguerite” formation, bunching together in a circle, vulnerable youngsters in the center, powerful tail flukes kept out on the

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perimeter to injure and even kill attacking predators. For a whaleship, such a formation was like gift-wrapping: a few shots would kill the entire pod of conveniently packaged and stationary whales. By the 1970s, however, more and more sperm whale pods began to abandon such a suicidal strategy in favor of fleeing.27 While this certainly saved many a sperm whale, it also left the old, weak, and young far more vulnerable, sundering the sperm whales’ most important social bonds. Such were the difficult choices whales had to make in the face of the greatest threat they had ever known, one that admitted no comparison with anything they or their ancestors had experienced. Whalers also observed social relations in the ocean— experiences that convinced many that whales maintain complex communal bonds. They noted that some whales seemed to react with emotion to the deaths of their companions, and that different species of whales reacted differently. A Soviet children’s book relayed whalers’ impressions: Whalers, who know the customs and habits of whales very well, believe that humpbacks are the most intelligent whales. They not only have a highly developed maternal instinct, but also a comradely one. When a blue whale or fin whale is wounded, their comrades gather around the wounded one and, seeing that it is suffering, swim away soon after the harpoon shot. But humpbacks throw themselves into helping the wounded one, not thinking of the danger. They calmly scurry around the injured one, as if asking him what has happened. And when the weakening whale begins to drown, they put their flukes around him and try to keep the dying creature at the top of the water.28

The idea of whale comradeship, of course, resonated strongly with the Soviets— could it be whales kept their own kollektivs underwater? Whalers did not have to rely solely on their eyes for information about whales; they also read about them. The shipboard newspapers offered short courses in whaling history and cetacean natural history. Zenkovich and others had written popular books about the Aleut and the Slava. After 1961, Soviet whalers could read Moby-Dick in Russian, with the same beautiful illustrations that the socialist artist Rockwell Kent had provided the American edition.29 After 1972, they could even watch a Soviet-made film about the novel. Moby-Dick also appeared often in the Soviet whaling

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newspapers— anytime albino whales were encountered anywhere in the world, the legendary whale was sure to get a mention.30 Melville’s novel proved a useful source of mutual comprehension (and sometimes useful miscomprehension) between Soviets and Western whalers, such as when Solyanik recounted a sperm whale attack to his Kiwi audience in Wellington. But Melville’s depiction of the whale as a dangerous monster, which at least held some truth during his time, never took hold among the Soviets. This must have been in part because whales so rarely killed whalers in the twentieth century. When they did take some revenge, it was entirely accidental, such as in 1972, when the harpooner Nikolai Filipovich Kozubenko fastened to a sperm whale. After initially lying quietly, the whale suddenly began to writhe in its death flurry, increasing the tension on the harpoon line. When the harpoon suddenly came free of the whale’s body, it flew back on deck, striking and killing Kozubenko. This was one of very few recorded deaths of a harpooner in the Soviet fleet.31 In any case, the Soviets were too invested in science to latch onto anything that sounded fantastic. The scientists on board made sure the crew had a proper education about whales. It was Zenkovich who explained to the first Soviet harpooners aboard the Slava in 1933 the differences between rorquals and other baleen whales, and between baleen and toothed whales.32 At night, with a single lamp illuminating his lectern, he would hold forth on those and other wonders of the sea. “Without exaggeration,” Zenkovich wrote, “our youth . . . love to learn about the ocean, and everything connected with it.”33 Zenkovich excelled at dispelling fantastic notions. When the Aleut crew reported a Moby-Dick– like sperm whale attack on their ship, Zenkovich corrected them— it had merely been the whale’s tail accidentally striking the boat during its death agonies. He reported the same for humpbacks: “I had to hear more than once about how dangerous humpbacks are, especially nursing mothers when either they or their young are injured.” These accounts, though, were “to a significant degree are based on accidents and misunderstandings.” There was no place on board the Soviet whaleship for nonscientific myths. Scientists also helped interpret the whales’ mostly hidden familial lives, characteristics that had important implications for the populations’ futures and that fascinated the whalers on board. One popular theme was the gender relations of sperm whales. When the Aleut came across a pod

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of sperm whales off Kamchatka, Zenkovich noted that these were much larger than the females they had previously encountered in tropical waters. He explained to the crew: We “old-hands” (starichki) easily recognized the whales by their huge blunt foreheads and spouts. . . . These were, as we say, “superfluous males.” They were driven from the mixed pods by stronger males, their battles having ended in defeat; they joined into a group and now travel through the oceans.34

Despite Zenkovich’s scientific certainty, though, he was reproducing whalers’ lore and Russian gender expectations as much as he was relying on any real research. It is true that only male sperm whales live in high latitudes, but scientists today have rejected the idea of superfluous males. That conception rested on the assumption that a single dominant male— Soviet scientists called them “sultans”— dominated the pods of female sperm whales, their “harem,” found in the tropics.35 Closer study of sperm whale males has shown that they possess enormous testicles, an unambiguous sign that they compete to reproduce with females not by fighting with each other, but by inserting a greater volume of sperm into the female than rival males.36 Put another way, if anything, the female sperm whale is the sultaness, pairing with as many males in her transitory harem as she desires. Scientists’ knowledge, of course, was supposed to contribute to the success of the Soviet hunt. But in this case, it may have worked to just the opposite effect. Aboard the Slava, a professor of biology named Smirnov informed the harpooners about sperm whale “harems” and advised against targeting the females and young. Instead, they should wait for the big “sultan,” who would yield abundant oil and also draw the other whales to him.37 Since no such sultans actually existed, the Soviet harpooner who waited patiently for a sultan to emerge from the pod instead watched as the whales fled. These are reminders that, as much as scientists and whalers tried to learn about their prey free from preconceptions, these were inescapable. Among many factors, the unusual gender relations on board the whaleship shaped Soviets’ perceptions of their prey. While the oceans presented a complex interplay of gender, on board the whaleship the relationships were more restrictive. The older-fashioned chauvinism that gained favor

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in Soviet society after the war encouraged the imagination of things like male- dominated harems. Also, whatever the boasts, the proportion of women on board the Soviet whaling fleet was in fact very low— usually some fifty or so out of crews of more than a thousand. So, like many men in maritime industries, whalers had to mostly do without women. In the Antarctic whalers’ case, this meant spending more than half their year with the mostly male kollektiv instead of with their wives and children. All the signs of sexual frustration were apparent, from the sentimental poetry of longing to repeated sexual harassment of the women on board.38 No wonder, then, that whalers looked with fascination at whales’ own social, familial, and sexual practices. Thus, it was whales as social and familial animals, rather than as monsters, that Soviets encountered them. And above all, it was the bond between mother and calf that transfixed and often troubled the men. Zenkovich related one experience, at Mechigmensk Bay near the Chukotkan village of Lorino: We harpooned a mother, wounding her pretty lightly. The baby would not leave the mother. Noticing that we had wounded a nursing mother, we decided to kill the calf as well, which was sufficiently large. We wounded it, and it got tangled up in the first harpoon line which was stuck in the mother. They both fought for over an hour without making any attempt to attack the boat.39

Zenkovich, at least, found this event disturbing, for reasons of both conservation and compassion. But it was not just scientists who found the destruction of cetacean families troubling. The Far Eastern whaler and future writer Oleg Maksimov, who kept a diary of his voyage aboard the Slava in 1954, put his experiences in emotional and religious terms: Today [December 13] we committed a sin. We killed a mother whale. This is forbidden. The whale’s young will be without milk, alone in the ocean. In the near future he will probably be tortured by killer whales. First they tear out the tongue and the lips, and then eat the rest. Milk flowed from the mother for a long time, in a long trickle. All the water around the catcher boat turned white. I felt really sorry for the mother. . . . I wanted to cry, but to whom would I complain.

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As Maksimov also reported, Soviet harpooners targeted illegal, young whales in order to draw their larger mothers in for the kill.40 Such episodes provided constant reminders to male whalers that not only had they abandoned their own families for long periods in order to provide for them, but that this provision depended on destroying the families of whales. Sail whalers had merely stripped the whale’s blubber and let the carcass go. But for industrial whalers, there was one more stage at which they learned about whales and their familial relations. With the whale dead, harnessed, and winched on board, its dismemberment provided a unique opportunity to learn about its life. First, flensers used long, scythelike knives to cut deep grooves the length of the whale’s body, the whale suddenly opening with what one observer described as a “crisp, satisfying pop.”41 Winches spooled off the thick blubber in strips, which were sent below decks, where another series of laborers pushed and shoveled it into a variety of ovens to be rendered into oil. The men above decks then sawed off the head and opened up the rib cage. Tearing through the gigantic muscles, tendons, and bones took time and intense effort and spewed bone chips and gurry (whale offal) all around the deck. The crew dug through the bloody mess of internal organs, lungs bigger than a man, hearts about the same size, everything rapidly decomposing, heating, and bloating thanks to the abundant bacteria in the stomach cavity. Vitamin-rich organs, such as the kidneys, were sent to special laboratories for medicine production. The rest, including the greasy bones, was boiled down to capture any drops of oil, or ground into “whale meal” used as fertilizer or animal feed. The disassembly of an adult whale, put together over decades and through hundreds of thousands of laborious migrations across vast stretches of the world, took just about an hour. Soviet whalers often discovered something else inside the carcasses: whale fetuses. Sometimes mother whales would spontaneously give birth when harpooned; sometimes the calves came out during towing or winching up the deck.42 Sometimes the calves tried to follow their dead mothers up the slipway.43 But most often, the discovery came during processing. In any given year, approximately one in four whales will be pregnant during the Antarctic summer. In November and December, their embryos are fairly small— two to three feet long, depending on the species. By the end of the whaling season, in March or April, though, the embryos were near term, as long as twenty feet, almost perfect replicas of their gigantic mothers. Of course, to kill a pregnant whale or a nursing mother contravened

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Sperm whale in the process of disassembly. Courtesy of Yuri Mamonov.

all sensible methods of conservation, and had long been forbidden in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.44 But whalers usually could not determine whether a whale was pregnant before they fired their harpoon. Sometimes they even failed to notice the nursing calves next to their mothers. This was one of the reasons the IWC continued to shorten the open season for whaling, trying in particular to prohibit catching during the early season when it was nearly exclusively pregnant females feeding in the Antarctic. Whaling long before and after the official season, though, Soviet flensers encountered more pregnant and nursing whales than any other country’s whalers did. On one voyage in 1953, for example, Soviet scientists discovered 443 unborn fetuses in the 2,200 mostly fin whales killed that year. Nearly 20 percent of whales brought on board had been pregnant. That year, the Soviets killed nearly 23 percent more females than males, as they had made no attempt to differentiate between the sexes. As the onboard scientists lamented, “Not all harpooners in our fleet are humane hunters. In the chase for a quantity of kills, they neglect to take into account the size of the whales.” Some harpooners tried to observe the prohibitions, but not many: “There are also harpooners who don’t care about those rules. These are causing the quicker destruction of the Antarctic whale population.”45

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A man and four women ride a near-term fetus on board the deck of a Soviet whaling ship. Courtesy of Yuri Mamonov.

A decade later, these practices continued, as did the scientists’ protests. As one report author put it in 1965, a year in which two thousand pregnant or nursing sperm whales were killed, these practices were wrong “from the standpoint of moral order.”46 With such scenes and with so many protests, no one on board could imagine they were slaughtering bizarre monsters or simple reservoirs of oil. They were destroying families in creation. But we also have profoundly contradictory evidence— indications that some whalers celebrated this very aspect of their kill. The evidence is not in whalers’ written accounts; their memoirs rarely mention the discovery of fetuses, and when they do, they read laconically, such as the following entry from Dmitrii Pavlovich Tikhonov: “We killed sperm whales throughout the year, so we find several embryos, one that is completely developed, covered in gray skin. Drawn to the smell of the meat, sharks circle the ship the whole night.”47 The reality was not always so prosaic. Though no whaler’s account mentions them, photographs from the time show whalers desecrating whale carcasses. They drink the milk from slain lactating mothers. They ride the unborn fetuses like sleighs. They do it all with obvious enjoyment and camaraderie. What to make of such images? Studies suggest that the larger the number of animals killed and processed in slaughterhouses, the more distant humans feel from them and the more license they feel to torture them

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and desecrate their corpses. Exploited and underpaid workers are particularly likely to commit such acts.48 Soviet whalers certainly handled enough whale corpses every year— some years over 20,000 across all the fleets— to be both disgusted and morally numbed by their work. Whalers from other countries too showed a proclivity to pose for photographs inside whale carcasses and sometimes with whale embryos, born— one suspects— from a combination of fascination and desensitization. As the British zoologist F. D. Ommanney, an unusually keen observer of whales and whaling, put it: “The impersonality of living things after death have, I think, made men callous about killing whales. . . . We only get a close view of whales after they are dead, and then they look so very dead!”49 No doubt some whalers did become desensitized to the sufferings of their prey. But whaling— and Soviet whaling in particular— differed in several crucial respects from the twentieth-century slaughterhouse. Unlike pigs, chickens, and cows, whose life cycles and reproduction were controlled from birth and who thus lost much of their dignity and individuality, whales remained wild animals. Each whale had to be chased down and outwitted— a word that reminds us that whales remained very much conscious, intelligent, and autonomous individuals. Whalers could see this with every encounter. Also, unlike the poorly educated and poorly paid modern slaughterhouse workers, Soviet whalers enjoyed all the comparative prestige, perks, and privileges their long ruble afforded. If life was often cold and tedious in the Antarctic or North Pacific, it was not the unrelenting horror and drudgery of the abattoir. Perhaps, then, the Soviet insistence on the need to conquer nature played a significant role in the whalers’ desensitization. Many scholars have seen the Soviet Union’s environmental history in just this way. Official proclamations, not to mention dozens of poems, stories, and novels, described nature as “wild and hostile.”50 Famously, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote that “under socialism man will become superhuman, changing courses of rivers, heights of mountains and nature according to his needs and, in the end, changing his own nature.”51 These transformations demanded the application of— in the words of the historian Paul Josephson— “brute force technology,” a phrasing that indicates the scale of change envisioned and the need many Soviets felt to suppress any feelings of compassion.52 After the trauma of World War II, the language of conquest and brute force only gained in power.53 By the 1970s, some Soviet academics even worried that indifference to nature and animals had gone

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too far, reporting that Russians casually killed dogs, cats, and birds on Moscow’s streets. They chalked up such behavior to excessive urbanization and underdeveloped intellects.54 If the conquest of nature was so deeply ingrained, then whales could only have appeared to Soviet workers as hostile objects to overcome, any feelings of pity a betrayal of the revolution’s central aims and promises. But this is too simple. As with many areas of life, Soviet attitudes toward nature and animals were profoundly conflicted. With a long and equally powerful tradition of nature appreciation, many Russians found both the conquest of nature and animal cruelty abhorrent. In the books that Soviet whalers read on board were many examples of deep compassion for animals and their suffering. Authors such as Jack London (White Fang, Call of the Wild) and Ernest Thompson Seton (Wild Animals I Have Known), who attempted to use science to write stories from the animal’s point of view, enjoyed immense popularity in the Soviet Union.55 Zenkovich, for example, brought books by London—whose socialist sympathies were particularly welcome—with him on the Aleut’s circumnavigation. While none of these writers described the internal lives of whales, they did focus on the personalities of charismatic predators, such as wolves, and would have given Soviet readers ample invitation to imagine their prey as intelligent, sympathetic individuals. Many whalers’ journals and recollections reflect just such a view toward whales. Furthermore, whalers themselves rarely ever spoke or wrote about the conquest of nature, even as they devoted many pages to the conquest of poor discipline and drunkenness. It is almost as if the conquest of nature, and of whales, was so complete by the 1960s that there was little point in talking about it. Whales are everywhere in the onboard newspapers, but mostly as units of production, as inert as coal or steel, as divisible and unremarkable as sticks of margarine. Never do they appear as adversaries. It may seem counterintuitive, but I think that alongside other, darker motivations, Soviet whalers’ fascination with whale fetuses and lactation— parts of whales that still seemed alive, even after death— expressed a deeper desire to recover the vitality of their prey. It expressed a desire to move beyond the idea of whales as a numbing series of numbers, beyond the scientists’ insistence that whales were not mysterious, beyond the natural world as an undifferentiated conquest. All these conceptions ultimately stole from the whales what the whalers knew to be true of them. They also took from the whalers what they most wanted: a profession and kollektiv

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full of real, unpredictable life, not just the regimentation of ritual and plan. If the means they found to express such desires were perverse, that reflects the ultimately irreconcilable contradictions of life on board the industrial, socialist whaleship plunged into the modern oceans of death. If in some ways Soviet whalers recoiled at this mass slaughter, for many species of whales, the loss was crushing. In the worst cases, it meant nearcomplete extinction. As the biologist George Small wrote in 1971, from the deepest depths of blue whales’ history: “Today the blue-whale population probably numbers something between 0 and 200 individuals. . . . What, then, are the chances for the survival of the blue whale? None.”56 Soviet scientists on board the Antarctic fleet that same year were writing that “if reported violations are not stopped, it will be a straightforward explanation for the extinction of the largest animal on the planet and thus will be one of the greatest crimes of mankind.”57 These predictions of extinction were wrong, but not by much. Blue whales in the Antarctic remain at less than 1 percent of pre-whaling abundance, a number that must have been ever lower in the 1970s.58 South Pacific humpbacks are thought to have declined from around 27,000 individuals to only 450.59 Southern right whales, which had been driven nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century and were illegally hunted by the Soviets in the twentieth, may have reached similarly low levels. Fin whales likely survived in somewhat larger numbers, but still were reduced by at least 75 percent around the globe.60 Sei whales in the North Pacific probably declined from about 42,000 to 8,600 individuals, with an even greater reduction in the Antarctic.61 Some local populations of sperm whales were nearly totally annihilated, though on the whole, the species did better than others, as did minke whales. By the 1970s, the oceans were eerily empty places. Once-abundant whale communities persisted only in pockets. While some species, like gray whales, were beginning to rebound, others, like blues and South Pacific humpbacks, were ghosts, their rare appearances a startling reminder of a plenteous world already passing from memory. Large whales had become an insignificant part of the ecosystems they had dominated for millennia, and we are still grappling with the consequences of their removal. There is very little baseline data to work with, so it is hard to estimate the impact. But a few things are clear. First, though many at the time thought the loss of whales would free up lots of extra krill for other animals to eat, this is not true, at least not in the long run. The reason for this is whale excrement. Whales defecate malodorous but

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nutritious streams of pinkish liquid that is particularly rich in iron taken from krill exoskeletons. Iron is rare in the oceans, especially in the upper water column, and thus the whale excrement is quickly taken up by phytoplankton, which feed krill and stimulate further production. When humans decimated whale populations, especially in the Antarctic, they also removed rare iron from the ecosystem. Every other creature on the food chain has suffered, and so the loss of whales was a loss for entire polar communities.62 Other oceanic species probably did benefit from the loss of whales. Large squid, for example, likely proliferated, given the roughly 60 percent decline in one of their main predators, sperm whales. But the well-known explosion in squid numbers over the last several decades has revealed one of whales’ most important functions in oceanic ecosystems: stability. Long lived and wide ranging, whales even out prey populations around the ocean and carry with them reserves of energy accumulated over many years. They act, in a sense, as ecological “memory,” storing up the energy of abundant years so that ecosystems emerge relatively unaltered from lean ones. Short-lived, rapidly reproducing squid populations, on the other hand, boom and bust with climate and other factors, and so a mass death can produce huge fluctuations, and potentially permanent changes, to the ecosystems around them.63 Whaling’s history reverberates in another way as well. Mammal-eating killer whales, mostly bereft of large prey, had to search for other prey. The point is controversial among scientists, but some believe these killer whales turned to the far less nutritive minke whales, elephant seals, sea lions, fur seals, and even very small sea otters. The impact on these species was devastating in its own right. By the 1990s, all were in decline, in some cases catastrophically, their deaths possibly an echo of whale deaths and human excesses from decades earlier.64 What must industrial whaling have felt like to whales? This requires speculation, but we do have some idea. Whales have both very sensitive skin and the long memories necessary to find their way repeatedly across half the planet along migration routes, so pain and its memory would have been prominent parts of whales’ lives in the twentieth century. Remarkably, an excellent proxy for these emotions exists in the form of the layers of wax deposited every year in a whale’s internal ear canals. The wax preserves stress hormones, such as cortisol, that coursed through the whale’s body when it experienced fear or pain. Because whale scientists collected

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these earplugs throughout the whaling years, scientists have been able to assemble a data set of historical whale emotions. What they show is not surprising: stress levels of whales jumped in the 1930s, fell during the war years of the 1940s, and then rose dramatically until about 1963, the peak year of postwar whaling. As the earplugs measure the stress of animals that survived years of hunting before finally being killed, they likely indicate that a whale’s anguish resulted as much from the death of its companions as from being chased itself. Indeed, those whales that were chased were very unlikely to have survived long enough to accumulate earplugs with any time depth.65 Within this composite suffering, there must have been particularly agonizing moments. One must have come when calf, mother, or companion were killed. Another, though, must have come later. Those whales who survived the polar slaughter and returned to their breeding grounds faced a terrible problem: the essential components of social life were gone. Most imperative, this meant they might not find any mates— the whole reason for their migration there. A humpback whale migrating past New Zealand might end up at its birth lagoon in Tonga and find itself alone, or with only a few companions. Perhaps those left were all females, or a few males and one female. If each individual whale likely experienced the killing in the Antarctic as a local, singular event, the breeding grounds revealed the scale of the slaughter. This must have been the moment, if any, when the whales realized what had happened to their societies. We can at least guess that they did realize it in some way: records over subsequent decades suggest that humpback whales abandoned some breeding grounds— Fiji, for example— in favor of other places where more of their own could kind be found, such as Eastern Australia.66 Alone in a lagoon, having seen and heard the last moments of their families and companions, those still left ventured out into the unknown, across empty ocean, until they heard again the familiar songs, low and mournful, drawing them toward new lives and the survival of their kind.

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Scientists Locate Their Prey

Part of the reason whales survived the genocide of modern whaling was the influence of the very Soviet scientists who helped plan their destruction. They were unlikely saviors. Like all scientists in the Soviet Union, those studying whales had to adhere closely to state policy. And, during the last decade of Stalin’s rule, they had to adopt some of the most bizarre scientific theories of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Russian scientists undeniably played a critical role in launching the Soviet whaling industry and helped increase its catches. But even in the darkest times, sometimes through coded language and sometimes through open protest, Soviet scientists advocated for the protection of at least some whales, while recording the crimes of the Soviet government for posterity. Some began secretly collecting information on the falsified catches. Even more remarkable is that despite such unpromising conditions— thanks to a long tradition of heterodox Russian scientific thought and to Soviet cetologists’ close view of the slaughter— they developed some of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary ideas about whales, their societies, and their imperiled survival. To understand Soviet cetologists and their legacy requires a consideration of the special place science has held in Russian society.1 Lindholm and Arsen’ev’s careers both encapsulated a long tradition of using scientific research in the service of the state, and their wide-ranging inquiries captured a characteristically eclectic combination of humanistic and naturalistic interests. Many scientists drew strength and inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution, which enthusiastically embraced some of their ideas. In fact, many Russian scientists had been ardent revolutionaries—

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for example, the anarchist Petr Kropotkin. His 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution challenged social Darwinists’ claim that competition explains all evolutionary change. Based on his experiences in harsh Siberian landscapes, Kropotkin argued instead that cooperation among animals is essential for their survival and development; altruism, in other words, is entirely natural. Bolshevik theorists eagerly latched on to these ideas, which they felt provided a scientific basis for the new society they hoped for— one that would suppress ruthless competition and build upon humans’ capacity for cooperation. Similarly, the ecologist V. V. Stanchinskii’s pioneering research into community biology was warmly received by revolutionary political organizations precisely because of the support they seemed to give to the potential for human communal achievement and for the greater complexity it might lend to economic planning. Only when the internal dynamics of an ecosystem were understood, Stanchinskii argued, could economists plan how much to extract from it or preserve within it.2 These ideas would also strongly influence Soviet whale research. After the revolution, much scientific work moved into a series of new, more narrowly focused research institutes created to directly assist social and economic planning. In 1933, coincident with the start of the Aleut fleet, Stalin reorganized Soviet fishing administration into a series of fishery and oceanographic institutes, with Moscow’s VNIRO (All-Union ScientificResearch Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography) at the center and filials in Vladivostok and Odessa, among other places.3 VNIRO’s tan-gray Stalinist neoclassical building in one of Moscow’s leafiest neighborhoods near Sokolniki Park would direct Soviet whale research for the next fifty years. Some have argued that the Stalinist subordination of science to economic transformation sundered the earlier power of ecology and holism in Russian biology, but longer traditions did persist.4 It was in TINRO, the Vladivostok branch of the Fisheries and Oceanographic Institute, that B. A. Zenkovich, the Aleut scientist, worked. His Around the World for Whales (1936) was the first popular book on whaling to appear in the Soviet Union, and in many ways it represented a combination of late imperial traditions with the early Bolshevik interest in animal altruism. In both that book and in his scientific publications, Zenkovich described in detail whales’ emotional and social lives. He described their “pain and agony,” while noting the way orphaned whales would follow their dead mothers around or male whales would come to a wounded female “as if trying to find out what had happened to her and how to help

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her.”5 Of course, Zenkovich also played an essential role in helping find and kill those same whales. The same mixture of insight into whales’ lives and advice on killing them can be found to an even greater extent in the work of Avenir Tomilin, who in time would become one of the world’s most important whale scientists. Like many Russian cetologists, Tomilin got his start as a biologist, studying small belugas in the Arctic. But in 1933 he joined the Aleut in the North Pacific, where he observed sperm whales responding to human hunting by coordinating their actions through sound. When a catcher boat fired its harpoon at a lone sperm whale, a whole pod of whales that had been scattered across two miles of ocean quickly bunched together in an attempt to defend themselves against the attack. The speed with which the whales gathered was impressive, and Tomilin could explain this only with the conclusion that they had been communicating danger to each other over long distances. Another whale species, humpbacks, when harpooned, made an audible sound like that of a cuckoo, which seemed to be a cry for help to a companion of the opposite sex. Tomilin heard several of these calls, and in many cases the wounded whale’s partner came to its assistance and refused to leave until it was itself harpooned and killed.6 After 1937, Tomilin moved to Rostock University, on the Black Sea, where he began studying the dolphin-catching industry near Novorossiisk. What drew his interest most were the abundant sounds the dolphins made while being captured. It became clear to Tomilin that these were not merely calls of distress, but that the animals were calling to each other. He confirmed this during one voyage when 169 dolphins were rounded up; it happened that two mothers remained outside the net while their offspring were caught inside. Despite the mass of thrashing and struggling dolphins in the net, the mothers were able to locate their own children, and the pairs came together at the net’s edge. Tomilin surmised the dolphins must have been communicating sonically, since they could not see each other. One mother remained next to her child until it became entangled in the net and drowned, while another stayed by the net until the last dolphin was scooped out of the water and thrown on board.7 Not coincidentally, the Black Sea dolphins quickly grew endangered. In some ways, Tomilin pushed the early Soviet interest in cetacean communication and sociability remarkably far. He credited whales and dolphins with an extraordinary range of communication capabilities— from sonar to clicks to thumps to moans, both underwater and above—

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The scientist Avenir Tomilin with a dolphin. Courtesy of Yulia Ivashchenko.

and he claimed the sounds made sophisticated and refined communication possible. Whales and dolphins could “subtly distinguish between sounds” and could signal danger, opportunity, and even emotional status to others of their species.8 In short, Tomilin was painting a picture of complex creatures with rich social and emotional lives. Not many whale scientists around the world were doing anything like this in the 1940s. It was only in the 1960s that cetacean communication assumed a starring role in Western science and popular culture. In 1960 the American scientist John Lilly began his experiments with dolphins and LSD that encouraged him to claim that the animals could learn human languages, and in 1967 the biologist Roger Payne discovered the complexities of humpback whale song,9 Lilly’s and Payne’s publications at the end of that decade helped transform Western conceptions of whales from monsters to “minds in the water,” as a popular book published by antiwhaling activists put it in 1974.10 Soviet scientists, thanks to the likes of Zenkovich and Tomilin, had already made this transformation three decades earlier. But changing conceptions did not necessarily lead to changing practices. Given Tomilin’s ideas about the complex social and emotional lives of whales, perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of his work is the conclusions he drew from it. Mostly, he thought his insights were important because they could help catch more dolphins and whales. In Tomilin’s own words: “As [whales] react with uncommon intensity to some signals, even

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to the disregard of their own safety, we came to the conclusion that this reaction could be used in order to rationalize [i.e., make more efficient] hunting.”11 “If,” he continued, “we imitate the signals that elicit responses from this or that species of dolphins . . . or are made by wounded whales, it is clear that these sounds can attract corresponding animals toward the hunting boats.”12 Thus, the very characteristics that within three decades would convince the Western public that killing whales and dolphins was immoral appeared to Soviet scientists a key breakthrough in killing more whales. Even as Tomilin and others experienced and imagined in much greater detail the social and emotional lives of these creatures, they gave no indication that their attitude toward killing them might change. It is a reminder that, even as Soviet researchers formulated a myriad of interesting questions, their original stimulus had come from a mandate for economic growth. Tomilin’s research also shows the productive and problematic relationship between Soviet whale killing and whale science. This relationship stimulated innovative research, but did not necessarily lead to real sympathy for the intelligent creatures or a desire to protect them. This history makes it clear that greater familiarity with whales does not inevitably lead people to want to save them.13 Subsequent researchers took Tomilin’s prewar observations further. Working with captive dolphins secretly being trained by the military in the 1960s, some Soviet cetologists detected a strong tendency toward play and altruism in the creatures. They recorded dolphins playing not only with others of their species, but also with turtles, pelicans, and even a small shark.14 They also came to the aid of injured companions. Exceptions certainly occurred. Apparently, the instinct to help disappeared among dolphins when they were shot at with guns, and sometimes sick individuals in aquariums were ignored by their companions. These lapses in solidarity, though, proved that assistance was not always driven by blind instinct (otherwise they would have helped each other in every situation), but in fact by some sort of altruistic choice.15 The detection of cetacean altruism again seemed to confirm the insights of earlier Russian biologists and Bolshevik social theorists, though it contradicted Marx, who claimed that animals lacked both relationships and consciousness.16 After the war, American and European cetologists increasingly conducted their research onshore with coastal whaling stations, or with captive animals. Onboard Soviet scientists, though, gained in number and

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gained deeper experience with living whales as their own pelagic industry expanded. At sea for many lonely months with hunters who were in their own way true marine mammal experts, the Soviet scientists saw remarkable things. To take one example: Nineteenth-century whalemen frequently reported witnessing the battles between sperm whales and giant squid— fantastic stories that I, like many kids, grew up reading about. However, there is only one single known report from the modern industrial era of these iconic battles: Zenkovich’s description from a 1962 round-theworld voyage.17 But for all the advantages Soviet cetologists enjoyed, as well as all the insights they had gained by the 1950s, they were about to experience one of the most challenging times in the history of Soviet science. After World War II, Joseph Stalin decided to insert himself into Soviet science. He personally planned the Soviet Union’s “Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” which attempted a massive development of hydropower, an afforestation program, and the planting of new crops on the country’s desert edges. The plan expressed boundless optimism in engineers’ ability to change the natural world for humanity’s benefit and rejected Stanchinskii’s earlier ideas of working with natural dynamics.18 At the same time, Stalin also forced Soviet scientists to adopt the discredited theory of Lamarckian evolution, which claimed that traits and behaviors developed during an organism’s lifetime could be passed down to its offspring. This was the so- called Lysenkoism, named after Stalin’s chosen instrument in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko’s unorthodox views on evolution appealed to Stalin because they promised quick and beneficial evolutionary transformations, but he was a dangerous fraud who dealt long-lasting damage to many branches of Soviet science and industry.19 Conducting whale research under such conditions was perilous, but, paradoxically, some of Soviet cetology’s most creative ideas emerged out this period. It was a Far Eastern researcher who provided one of the best examples of the possibilities of Soviet cetology after the war. Makar Mitrofanovich Sleptsov was a prominent cetacean scientist with VNIRO, who, like Tomilin had first studied in the Russian Arctic.20 From the late 1930s, he moved his research to the North Pacific, where he studied both whales and oceanic ecosystems. In 1948, Sleptsov wrote the first major Soviet survey on cetaceans, entitled Giants of the Oceans (Giganty Okeanov). While much of the book presented relatively straightforward natural history, several long sections took up much more groundbreaking concerns.

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First, just as Stalin’s optimistic “Plan for the Transformation of Nature” was getting started, and just as the Slava was beginning its Antarctic work, Sleptsov’s book painted a picture of oceans in peril. He described whaling as a “sad picture of a thousand-year slaughter of whales.” Extinctions marked every passage of this history, and things had gotten even worse recently. In the twentieth century, the “once-large herds of baleen whales of the Northern Hemisphere [had] been diminished and combed out so as to be unrecognizable,” and despite these lessons, Antarctic whaling was then in the process of repeating earlier mistakes. Many whales species had become deeply imperiled by humans, who, Sleptsov wrote, were “capable of changing nature incomparably faster than nature itself changes.”21 It seems Sleptsov shared with Stalin the certainty that humans could take natural processes into their own hands; he just was not sure history suggested this was a good idea. Remarkably, Sleptsov’s warnings were the closest that Soviet readers had to a guide to the world’s whales as the Slava began its destructive career. Giants of the Oceans also appeared during the height of Stalin’s postwar “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign (which blamed nearly everything on foreigners), as well as the year of Lysenko’s triumph over his rivals in the Academy of Sciences.22 Sleptsov did not escape these developments either. His description of whaling’s long history of destruction was a warning, but it also suggested that foreign whalers were so culpable that they had no grounds for restraining the Soviet breakthrough into the Antarctic. Indeed, Sleptsov reassured readers that Soviets were more conservation-minded than Westerners, as he asserted the Aleut’s record demonstrated. Other claims showed more clearly the pressures that Stalinist-era science had come under. When Sleptsov surveyed the wreckages of oceans past, he mentioned the North Pacific’s extinct Steller’s sea cow, which he wrote had been killed off by American, Norwegian, and “other” animal hunters in the eighteenth century.23 This claim was absurd; as was well known in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, Russians were the only Europeans in the far North Pacific when the last sea cow died in 1768.24 But such things were inadmissible in the Soviet Union of 1948. Perhaps Sleptsov, known for his “inimitable humor,” enjoyed what he can only have thought of as an absurdist joke.25 But Sleptsov was clever. Later in the book, he turned, seemingly enthusiastically, to Lysenkoist evolution. The moment came, characteristically, as Sleptsov addressed the subject of cetacean behavior. He noted first that

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whales were capable of changing their behavior in response to new experiences. Those whales that had experienced human hunting, for example, were subsequently much more careful. How to explain this? To Sleptsov, at least, these behavioral changes indicated that “whales are capable somehow of ‘remembering’ danger, or, so to speak, possess conditioned reflexes.”26 This was already a bold statement for cetologists at the time, many of whom saw whales as unthinking automatons. But when Sleptsov discussed migration, he went even further. “It is very likely,” he asserted, “that marine mammals, with their highly organized brains, have an easier time orienting themselves in space thanks to the acquisition of experienced or, as it is called, conditioned reflexes. But in this case, the experience accumulated through centuries fixes itself in the nervous system of the animals, and gets inherited by its descendants.”27 This was classic Lysenkoism, the claim that experience could encode itself in genetic material. With his reference to Lysenkoism, the import of Sleptsov’s doomsday warnings about whales becomes clearer. He was in fact suggesting more than the idea that humans directly and catastrophically whittled down whale numbers: Sleptsov was claiming that human hunting changed whales on a genetic level. The species’ “conditioned reflexes,” which changed in response to human persecution, became imprinted in the whales’ DNA and were then inherited by their descendants. Through Lysenkoist evolution, humans were actually creating a new type of whale, though humans possessed little control over the outcome and the results were likely to be bad. Through this strange route— by agreeing with Lysenko that all natural limits to human activities had melted away and that evolution responded immediately to humanity’s actions— Sleptsov had arrived at a conclusion, hidden from all but the attentive readers, that directly contradicted Stalinist ideology. Sleptsov wasn’t the only Soviet cetologist to put Lysenkoism to his own purposes. Others, such as the oceanographer Sergei Konstantinovich Klumov (who was known to support “anti- Soviet students”) used it to argue for lower Soviet catches.28 While many cetologists had assumed that all whales of one species mixed freely around the globe, in 1955 Klumov argued the opposite. If whales’ habitual actions became imprinted in their DNA, then whales of either hemisphere would not be able to cross the equator without serious problems. Taking fin whales as an example, Klumov asked, incredulously, how “a whale’s body going from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere [could] quickly take on the biological

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rhythms of an opposite season, a different tempo of life, than that to which its ancestors had become attuned to through inborn instincts and historical development?!”29 Reversing Sleptsov’s claims of whales’ flexibility, Klumov argued that Lamarckian evolution, which had imprinted seasonal rhythms on whales’ bodies, had fixed them in their own hemispheres. This was, again, a reversal of the intent of Lysenko’s ideas, which counted on species’ plasticity to quickly adapt to harsh conditions and allow human manipulation to push past boundaries that had once seemed uncrossable. The question of whale locality, which may seem somewhat esoteric, actually had major implications for whaling policy. Whales’ “localness,” as Klumov went on to argue, meant that if one group of whales were hunted out, others would not easily take their place. There was no general stock of whales around the world to replace them. In other words, overhunting produced nearly irreversible losses. As Klumov wrote, “The recovery of whale stocks in those regions [of overhunting] . . . does not happen, and if it happens, then extremely slowly, over decades.”30 Soviet planners could not hope that overhunted regions would quickly bounce back, and should restrain their ambitions accordingly. Only in 1992, after the cessation of legal commercial whaling and after decades of disastrous management by species, would the IWC finally switch to the stock-based assessment Klumov was advocating.31 Of course, Sleptsov’s pessimistic vision and Klumov’s warning about stock structure did not necessary lead toward progressive Soviet whaling conservation. In fact, it was precisely in the decades when scientists and the public were reading Sleptsov’s Giants of the Oceans that the Soviet whaling industry became unshackled from law, even from rationality. It was also at this same time that Soviet whale science expanded tremendously, with teams of oceanographers and biologists joining the Slava, then the Sovetskaia Ukraina and the other giant floating factories coming off the production line. Their patient, comprehensive research on whales and their ocean environment played a central role in allowing the Soviet fleets to rapidly expand their catches. Zenkovich, Sleptsov, and Klumov’s repeated warnings against fleet expansion and the killing of pregnant mothers and young failed, as did some of their careful hints to foreign scientists about what was happening. But, despite all the strictures and defeats, they had produced some remarkable science. They had also made some painful trade-offs. After twenty years of research, the North Pacific had become a magical place for Sleptsov. His

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affection for that ocean— and in particular the abundant waters around the Kuril Islands, where he discovered a sperm whale birthing ground— shine through even in his scientific writings. Spending years on small boats far out to sea, he attempted to come to a holistic understanding of whales and the remarkably rich ecosystems that supported them, in line with the best traditions in Russian ecology. Sleptsov described a magical location near the Kurils that he termed a “zone of fertility,” where every sort of krill, fish, and cephalopod suddenly appeared, with nothing but distinct water temperatures to mark the spot on the map. Some years, when the currents shifted, even tropical species might be found off the coasts of what many Westerners thought of with crude simplification as “Siberia.”32 But it was also a fragile place.33 As Sleptsov attempted to build a model of the biomass available for whale consumption (the kind of research Stanchinskii had advocated), which could be used to predict how many whales there might be available to kill, he noted that whatever figure he came up with might be invalid the following year, thanks to unpredictable meteorological and oceanographic changes. There were no “normal” years on which to base predictions.34 Sleptsov was attacking (again, in his subtle way) the very belief that science could be used to predict the future— an unwelcome thought not only in the Soviet Union, but also in Western scientific communities that were then working out sustainable yield theories. Surprisingly, though, Sleptsov advised planners that the new fleets entering the North Pacific should be sent to the Bering Strait. He pointed out that years of increasing catches by the Aleut and the recent introduction of two Japanese fleets demonstrated that there were far more whales here than the Soviet fleet had been catching. The new, larger Far Eastern fleets could put an end to this “insufficient use of the whale stocks.”35 Given his pessimistic view of whaling as a whole and his experience of radical overhunting in the Kurils, the advice seems exceptionally cynical. And perhaps it was. But there is another explanation, which helps us understand the very difficult situation cetologists such as Sleptsov found themselves in during the radical fleet buildup. Faced with the inevitability that, no matter their advice, the Fisheries Ministry would send more whalers, Sleptsov salvaged what he could. At least he might send the whalers away from his favorite “zone of fertility,” where the sperm whales bred and birthed. And this is just what happened. The new Soviet fleets headed away from the Kurils— first north to Chukotka and the Bering Strait, and then later south and east to Hawaiʻi, California, and their unplanned rendez-

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vous with Greenpeace. In 1964, the Kuril shore stations, which had nearly destroyed the nearby sperm whales, closed down.36 It was a small victory wrung at the cost of other whales, elsewhere. Sleptsov and Zenkovich retired from active research in the 1970s, while in 1974 Tomilin published In the World of Whales and Dolphins, the capstone of a career of interest in cetacean communication and a work that would exert a powerful influence on the Soviet public.37 Some later scientists referred to Tomilin’s last book as their “bible.”38 Meanwhile, a new cadre of cetologists was being born under the conditions of widespread cheating, dwindling whales, official secrecy, and— paradoxically— Khrushchev’s new openness, an openness that was never entirely shut down during Brezhnev’s more repressive 1970s.39 Lysenko’s influence was officially repudiated in 1965, freeing this new generation from any genuflection toward official evolutionary theories. Yuri Mikhalev was one such exemplar of the new generation. Born to a family of agronomists in 1938, Mikhalev and his family were forced into poverty and a move to Uzbekistan when his father died in the Great Patriotic War. Taking advantage of the exceptional educational offerings of the Soviet postwar decades, Mikhalev embarked on the study of zoology at Kishinev State University, where he was mentored by scientists bitterly opposed to Lysenko. He was then sent to conduct whale research at the new marine mammal laboratory in Odessa. Though Mikhalev never planned on studying whales, the work appealed to him as “interesting and romantic.”40 He gained deep experiences with whales on six cruises to the Antarctic between 1964 and 1975.41 Reflective of new interests developing in cetacean science, Mikhalev turned his attention to whales’ population dynamics, writing a dissertation on the reproductive biology of fin whales, then the main target of the Soviet fleet.42 His colleague in Kaliningrad, Dmitri Tormosov, addressed many of the same questions for sperm whales while sailing out on the Yuri Dolgorukii.43 Though questions of whale communication, sociability, migration, and stock structure continued to interest Soviet scientists, by the 1970s the problem of whale reproduction had begun to seem far more urgent. Everyone realized that whaling’s principal difficulty was no longer finding whales. Instead, they needed to understand when and if depleted species would rebound and whether a sustainable take of the remaining fin, sei, sperm, and minke whales was possible. The Soviets’ work joined a growing stream of American and British investigations into the same

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question, headlined by the innovative work with population modeling done by Douglas Chapman at the University of Washington.44 Soviet cetologists agreed that, in light of whales’ “catastrophic situation,” there needed to be a “wide development of population research for all species of whales, in particular with the adoption of the population-morphology method.”45 While Chapman mostly concluded from his modeling that whale catches would have to fall drastically, some Soviet scientists thought mathematics offered hope for renewed catching. Already in the 1970s, some were detecting rapid growth in minke whale populations that were presumed to be scooping up all the extra krill left by absent blues, fins, and humpbacks. This, at least, was the proposition put forward by two VNIRO scientists, M. V. Ivashin and R. G. Borodin. The two— Ivashin in particular— had become prominent cetologists in the 1970s and were possibly the most recognizable Soviet faces at IWC meetings. Working in Moscow’s VNIRO, they unerringly supported the Fishery Ministry’s priorities. This perhaps led them to an unusually rosy acceptance of the efficacy of the new population modeling, a science they patriotically traced to the early Soviet biologist Fedor Baranov.46 Whatever its origins, by the late 1970s, Fisheries felt that population science had advanced enough that the advice of the IWC’s Scientific Committee was finally sufficient for managing whale stocks rationally.47 This was the old Bolshevik dream of rational socialist science, now pinned to global governance. Ivashin is easy to stereotype. He is remembered by Western whale scientists as “gray,” a “typical Soviet bureaucrat”; the lasting image is of him burning incriminating documents in VNIRO as Russia opened up its archives in the 1990s.48 But Ivashin’s faith in technocratic solutions to whaling’s crisis found many adherents among more progressive Soviet cetologists as well. They seized on whale science’s managerial possibilities and paired them with older Soviet concerns with whale sociability to produce utopian alternatives to the total destruction of the world’s whales. The most influential of these cetologists was Aleksei Yablokov. The son of Muscovite intelligentsia— his mother had signed the famous “Letter of the 300” protesting Lysenko’s influence in 1955—Yablokov stood out from most other cetologists. He was a giant of a man, at 6-foot-4 hulking over his fellow scientists. Despite arguing his scientific opinions with fearsome passion, Yablokov was a gentle giant. He opposed all forms of militarism and cared deeply for animals. He found inspiration in the early twentieth-century Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the

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Aleksei Yablokov (tall and bearded, second from left) would go on to become one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent environmental activists. His mentor, S. E. Kleinenberg (far right), advocated for Black Sea dolphin conservation and sent telegrams of congratulations to the fleet scientists when he learned of Solyanik’s dismissal in 1965. Courtesy of Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology.

“noosphere”— the idea that humans might be able to guide their own evolution and depart from their long history of environmental destruction.49 Perhaps inevitably, he ended up in the Academy of Sciences instead of one of the fisheries institutes. When I attended a whale science conference in the Arctic city of Arkhangel’sk a year after Yablokov’s death, attendees talked about him in the hushed tones normally reserved for saints. Such respect came partly because Yablokov served as Russia’s first minister of the environment under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, but also because he was a scientist of wide-ranging interests and philosophical leanings in the best Russian tradition. Like many others, Yablokov received his first experiences with whales in the Far North and the Far East. Under the mentorship of the eminent dolphin scientist S. E. Kleinenberg, he studied beluga morphology and comparative anatomy, defending his dissertation on the subject in 1959.50 He then considered studying captive dolphins in the Black Sea, but when

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he realized the animals were being used for military purposes, he rejected this option, though it would surely have offered him easy research and abundant funding.51 Yablokov turned to more theoretical mammalian evolution, and instead of working directly with industry, he and his lab became a center for eclectic thinking and the development of radical ideas about nature protection. Yablokov’s work drew in the venerable Tomilin, whose thinking was developing along similar lines, as well as the Vladivostok cetologist Alfred Berzin. Berzin’s 1971 monograph on sperm whales warned of their perilous state, even as Soviet industry turned to them as the mainstay of their catches after the decline in Antarctic baleen whales.52 A few years later, Berzin wrote one of the most depressing assessments of the deep crisis in the oceans: sailing through the North Pacific, he and other scientists saw no more than five gray whales in the Sea of Okhotsk and encountered only a few scattered humpback whales off the coasts of California. Today these places abound in whales. At that time, Berzin wondered if the new bans on hunting some species had come too late to save many of the big whales.53 Faced with the catastrophic reality Soviet cetologists had foretold from at least the 1940s, Yablokov’s group schemed up suitably radical responses. In 1978, they described for the Soviet scientific community a three-step process that would finally take the Soviet Union and the world from an exploitative to a sustainable catch of whales. First, they thought advances in population biology now allowed whalers, with scientists’ direction, to “selectively” kill only whales that were no longer reproducing. As Yablokov later explained: “Berzin and I together with Tomilin . . . thought it was necessary to know every whale, to know every whale in the Okhotsk Sea, to have every one of them tagged and to catch every time just an old whale who was close to his natural death, who we knew would die on his own.”54 Modern technology, including boats, planes, and even satellites, could ensure “yearlong, uninterrupted monitoring of chosen groups.”55 It was a spectacularly ambitious and utopian scheme that imagined total human knowledge of the oceans and attempted to remove all irrationality from whaling. Of course, it would have also meant a drastic curtailment of the Soviet catch, even from its comparatively low level in the late 1970s. The scientists’ intensive monitoring plan would enable a second step, one they called whale “shepherding.” Specialists would guide whale pods through the best migratory routes leading to quiet places that could provide the whales abundant food and safety necessary for reproduction.

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Yablokov and Berzin worried that without human guidance, whales faced a perilous world where intensive fishing had ruined many of their former haunts.56 Scientists could also guide whales away from ship traffic, areas of intense pollution, and places where military maneuvers or geological exploration would endanger them. But managers would be more active, too, especially in increasing the whales’ reproductive intensity. Hormonal injections, for example, could regulate whales’ estrus cycles and enable the implantation of several fetuses at once, in order to double or triple their reproductive rate.57 The scientists’ third step— “farming”— took them even further. Here Yablokov and Berzin mooted capturing marine mammals and raising them and their descendants in enclosures, similar to the way elk, beaver, and other semidomesticated animals were raised for their pelts. This step, they admitted, would require much deeper research into all cetacean species.58 Given whales’ catastrophic decline by the late ’70s, radical solutions seemed the only way to continue using the animals for economic purposes. Looking back, these ideas seem technofantastical and a little totalitarian.59 They resemble more Arthur C. Clarke’s 1950s science fiction— in fact, his 1957 Deep Range anticipated some of the Soviets’ ideas— than Western counterculture’s contemporaneous reimagination of whales as peaceful minds in the water too special to ever be killed.60 But, Yablokov and other Soviet cetologists were working under very different strictures, in a country still determined to whale as long as possible. In that light, we can see the half-formulated beginnings of a new Russian relationship with whales. Yablokov expressed this idea more clearly later, explaining that their intentions were to avoid unnecessary killing, “in order not to kill baby whales, not to kill mother whales.”61 This was a vision of a relationship that attempted to preserve whales’ family relations, while still using them for human communities, a relationship that looked in some ways as much Chukchi or Iñupiaq as it did Russian, a relationship that might have been possible already for a century, but that only began to be imagined as the end approached. “Of course,” as Yablokov later admitted, “it resulted in nothing.”62 At the same time, the new generation of Soviet cetologists also began to make noise about another issue— the widespread falsification of whaling data. Mikhalev, Tormosov, Berzin, and others noted from the very beginning of their scientific work aboard the fleets that their numbers did not coincide with those that were later provided to the IWC.63 Yablokov,

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though he did not sail on the ships, found out from his colleagues about the illegal catches. He later placed the blame squarely on Ivashin from VNIRO: Ivashin was the main person who falsified the data. . . . He was doing his job and earned money which he sold himself for. . . . He made his choice. You can’t condemn him. How can you condemn him? He had a family, he had children. Perhaps he had no other opportunities. But that he was doing a dirty job, that’s for sure. . . . There was also that data which he manipulated to forward to international institutions. He was the final person in charge of forwarding them. . . . Ivashin travelled as an observer with . . . the Sovetskaia Rossiya. . . . He was a very well-educated scientific worker. But he sold his soul to the devil.64

Whether Ivashin was working for the KGB or just for the Fisheries Ministry, Yablokov did not know.65 Falsification bothered the scientists because they cared about conserving whales, but also because it meant they could not produce real science. Their work on reproductive dynamics and other topics could never be accurate with the false statistics they were forced to put into print. Often, they used “Aesopian language”— the use of code and allusion— to publish forbidden data and express to other insiders what Soviet officials would not allow to be said openly.66 Western scientists, such as Bob Brownell (then at the US State Department), noticed puzzling discrepancies in Yablokov’s published scientific articles and wondered among themselves whether he was trying to send a message to the outside world. Sometimes the hints were not so vague— on a 1975 joint research cruise with Western scientists, just months before the Greenpeace confrontation, the Soviet mariner Alexander Paskalov, a colleague of Alfred Berzin’s, told the American cetologist Dale Rice that he had been on board a catcher ship in the North Pacific that had killed “maybe 10 or 20” illegal gray whales before the captain of the fleet told them it was forbidden.67 In Russia, the cetologists took the developing battle to fleet meetings convened in Moscow every year before and after the Antarctic season. There, scientists from every fleet would complain bitterly to the Fisheries Institutes about their falsified data. Fisheries officials, including the Aleut veteran Tver’ianov, greeted this annual tradition with exasperation and then increasing anger.68 Finally, Mikhalev was dragged in front of the KGB for a lesson in fear and Soviet economics. He remembers being completely

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unsure whether he would ever reemerge from KGB headquarters. He did, but not before he learned that the Soviet government considered the destruction of whales completely irrelevant. When there were not enough left to catch, they would simply repurpose the whaling fleets for fishing, an idea that had been part of their plans since the 1940s. As for the science, it was meant only to serve the whaling industry anyway, so as long as the Soviets could correct for the real figures, published inaccuracies hardly mattered. Mikhalev, though, was not a man to back down from a fight, and his continued complaints cost him his position in Odessa. This was the soft repression of the 1970s Brezhnev era, when irritants were sent to mental institutions, exiled, or simply denied career advancement, instead of being executed or sent to the gulag as they were in Stalin’s time. From that perspective, Mikhalev was lucky. So was whale science: Mikhalev, Tormosov, and others’ real data, hidden in their laboratories or in their homes, survived. And while these data would not see the light of day for another two decades, they stand as a testament to Soviet scientists’ moral courage and unbroken traditions of imagination and conscience. So do the earlier notes of complaint and outrage from Zenkovich still found in Russian archives, as does the Aesopian language smuggled into the published works of Sleptsov and Klumov from the 1940s. No Soviet scientist openly supported the Western environmentalist claim that whales should never be killed, under any circumstance. But they came to equally consequential, and equally radical, ideas about the intelligence and social sophistication of whales, and about the urgent need to change human relationships with them. If Soviet whaling left any lasting, positive legacy for the world, it is this: during one of the cruelest, most reckless epochs in the oceans’ history, people were there to record it, to record their outrage, to imagine alternatives, and at times to even bravely tell the rest of the world what was happening. These half-hidden actions and ideas were consequential, for they would also find root in the broader Soviet public, and would begin to turn the tide during the final, pivotal chapters of modern whaling.

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Whales in the Home

One June, I traveled to Vladivostok, a city situated magnificently on steep hills facing the Pacific Ocean on one side and the deep forest of the taiga on the other. Although I had booked a room in a seaside hotel, I could see none of this. Like San Francisco, Vladivostok often experiences an intense “June gloom,” and that week the fog was so thick I could barely discern anything outside my window. Each day, I tried to catch a glimpse of my surroundings as I took the bus out to the historical archive that housed thousands of ultrathin pages of records produced by the city’s whaling industry. Located past the last bus stop in an industrial wasteland a long walk along a narrow shoulder of road where trucks thundered by, the archive occupied a few rooms in a faceless storage unit. Every day that I made the miserable journey, I wondered: could a city have possibly erected a better monument to forgetting its past than this? Few researchers had examined the archive’s trove of whaling documents, some of which the whale scientist Yulia Ivashchenko had used to help establish the extent of illegal Soviet whaling. One day, though, I learned that a key source I had hoped to discover— the newspaper that Vladivostok whalers printed on board their ships— had not ended up in the archive. Instead, strangely, copies were housed in a small primary school library in one of the city’s suburbs. My time in the city was short, so I quickly puzzled out the bus map and dashed out of the archive. The library was located along one of those steep hills in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. Despite my map, I got off the bus too early and ended up walking several miles through scattered apartment blocks, guided by kind residents who looked

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at me in astonishment when I asked for directions in accented Russian. As I finally neared the school, I came across a spot where all the problems of post- Communist Russia seemed to come together. An apartment complex with shattered windows presided over an open field of weeds and broken beer bottles. In front of one of the entryways, a little girl played amid the glass shards. She was about the same age as my own daughter—who was at that moment safe and warm, enjoying the prosperity of another world. This was not the Vladivostok that its whalers knew. Instead, thanks in part to military subsidies from Moscow, and in part to their own work in bringing back the nutrients and lubricants grown in whales’ bodies, Vladivostok and the other whaling ports of Odessa and Kaliningrad had enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. These cities were also some of the most worldly in the Soviet Union, their whalers enjoying the prestige that came from the rare privilege of foreign travel. If the Soviet promise of a better life based on personally fulfilling labor existed anywhere, the booming whaling cities of the 1960s and early ’70s were a part of it. Life in these cities, and its relationship with the oceans that helped feed and define it, goes a long way toward understanding the importance whaling had in the Soviet Union, and why some there still lament its end. The afterlife of whales, as they moved through the rest of the Soviet Union in the form of fats and vitamins, also helps us understand the way the Soviet public began rethinking these relationships. Founded in 1860, Vladivostok is one of Russia’s youngest cities, but it boasted the longest and most intensive engagement with whales. Anton Chekhov saw one swimming in Amur Bay during his visit to the Far East in 1890, and sometimes whales could be observed from the whaler Otto Lindholm’s estate’s on the Golden Horn.1 Lindholm’s grand house embodied the wealth wrung from his Sea of Okhotsk right and gray whales; portraits of the Russian emperor and empress watched over its large ballroom complete with indoor palm trees, grand piano, and luxurious fireplace. Outside, flower gardens, a tennis court, and Lindholm’s own private pier on the sea spoke to whaling’s foundational place in the city’s history and hierarchy. The old adventurer’s success bought him such prestige that in 1896 he even traveled to Moscow to attend the coronation of the new tsar, Nicholas II. Lindholm died in Vladivostok in 1914, closing one era of the city’s whaling history, while another under Arsen’ev and the Bolsheviks was just about to begin.2 The Bolsheviks’ creation of the Aleut fleet reinforced a sense of Far

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Eastern identity that predated the revolution. Far Easterners had always fashioned themselves as frontiersmen, adept, especially, at hunting the region’s abundant wild animals. As the cetologist Boris Zenkovich, a “native Far Easterner” himself, quoted one of the harpooners on board the Aleut: “There is nothing more beautiful for a hunter than Primorye,” the Far Eastern province encompassing Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.3 The association between hunting and the Far East persisted long after the region’s population of sika deer, Amur leopards, and Siberian tigers had begun to recede, and its centrality in regional identity helped build support for whaling. In other ways, though, the Bolsheviks radically transformed Vladivostok. In 1924, the city’s largest thoroughfare, called Aleutskaia, was renamed October 25th Street for the anniversary of the revolution. The following year, 1925, the new Fisheries Institute (then TONS, later TINRO), future academic home for Sleptsov, Berzin, and others, set up shop in a pre-revolutionary building located on the sloping hill between the venerable Society for the Study of the Amur Region and the Golden Horn. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks shuttered the city’s churches, eventually turning Lindholm’s old place of worship, the Lutheran church, into the Museum of Pacific Naval History.4 The Aleut whaling trust looked down on the ocean from the crest of October 25th Street, its location on the former Aleutskaia street an increasingly faint echo of Vladivostok’s past. In the 1960s, the city began experiencing major changes that would impact its inhabitants’ relationship with the ocean. In line with the redesign of many Soviet cities in that era, planners widened Vladivostok’s streets and carved out large areas for public gatherings and recreation. The biggest change involved an attempt to create a “Red Square” for the Pacific city, resulting in the destruction of a “pleasant, park-like plaza” at the city’s central elbow on the Golden Horn in favor of the gigantic, empty, paved Central Square that still funnels the sea winds and collects parked cars. Buildup for the Soviet Navy’s Pacific fleet occupied more and more of the coastline. Those projects burned out holes between city and sea, a legacy still visible today in the vast concrete deserts lining much of Vladivostok’s coastline. But other changes from the 1960s actually strengthened Vladivostokans’ connections with the ocean, especially their possibilities for maritime recreation. The city’s central east– west street, Svetlanskaia (Leninskaia in Soviet times), lost some of its historical buildings in favor of more open space downhill toward the Golden Horn.5 Planners transformed “Sports Harbor” on the Amur Gulf into a popular city beach. One day there in 1965,

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bathers were surprised to see a whale spouting just offshore.6 Nor was that modern Vladivostokans’ only experience with living whales. In the 1970s, a floating Dolphinarium was built next to the beach, holding dolphins and beluga whales that besides entertaining Soviet beachgoers were also secretly being trained to spy on American military installations in the North Pacific.7 Dolphinariums, in fact, became very popular throughout the USSR after their initial establishment as an arm of scientific dolphin research in the early 1970s.8 In July 1962, the Sovetskaia Rossiia, accompanied by its twenty catcher ships, steamed for the first time into its new home in Vladivostok’s Golden Horn.9 As per the tradition developed in Odessa in the 1950s, the three boats that had killed the most whales in the Antarctic entered first, in front of the factory ship, with the other seventeen catchers following the mother ship behind. Ten thousand Vladivostokans, including ecstatic family members, local officials, and dozens of reporters, met the freshly scrubbed ships at Marine Products Trust’s pier just off Svetlanskaia. An orchestra struck up a tune. According to the papers, no one in Vladivostok had witnessed a celebration of this magnitude since 1934, when the crew of the famous Cheliuskin icebreaker had come on shore.10 Two more fleets— the Vladivostok and the Dal’nii Vostok— arrived in 1963. This rapid expansion provided Vladivostok with an enlarged sense of identity and an unheard- of prosperity. According to some estimates, whaling and other fisheries provided some 75 percent of Vladivostok’s income, with naval spending accounting for the majority of the remainder. Furthermore, the Soviet government subsidized the education required to enter these professions, opening them to a wide swath of the city’s population. As Vladivostok whaler Viktor Sherbatiuk remembered, “School was completely paid for by the government. And in the postwar times it was a real chance for young men to survive, receive a profession, to land on their feet.” Sherbatiuk went to work for “Dal’kitozvertrest” (Far Eastern Whaling and Animal Trust) and after several years there returned to school to get his nearshore navigator’s license, which allowed him to attain a prominent position on board the Sovetskaia Rossiia. Sherbatiuk long remembered Vladivostok’s whaling years with pride, and in the 2010s he began an attempt to raise money to establish a whalers’ monument in the city.11 As Sherbatiuk put it, “Vladivostok is not Vladivostok without the memory of the whalers.”12 Without whalers, Soviet Vladivostok would not have been anywhere near as bustling and prosperous. As in the times

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of Lindholm, it was a city built on the wealth of distant seas. But now its wealth was available to any intelligent, hardworking young man, socked away not in mansions and private piers but displayed in wide avenues and public squares. Nor were whaling’s gifts only made of concrete, for the whaling fleet usually arrived delivering exotic goods. In 1962, the Sovetskaia Rossiia had stopped in Singapore and picked up a trove of musical instruments, some entirely unknown in Vladivostok.13 Later, whalers brought back tape recorders, televisions, radios, and new, synthetic clothes. Dressed strikingly in the latest Western fashions, whalers themselves cut a distinctive swath through the city. They were counted the “elite among the fishing clan.”14 Those in Kaliningrad reported something similar; whalers were the only ones in that city who possessed special blue pants, purchased in Uruguay, that shed rain and stayed stylish unlike anything seen in the Soviet Union.15 At the other end of the social spectrum, drawn by the influx of hard currency in which whalers and fishermen were partly paid, prostitution boomed in Vladivostok.16 Whaling didn’t entirely open Vladivostok up to the rest of the world. Because of its large military presence and proximity to sensitive borders, the city remained closed to foreigners throughout the Soviet period. Nonetheless, during the 1960s and ’70s it did become increasingly reintegrated into the Pacific Rim that before the revolution had made the city wealthy and diverse. During his 1959 visit to Vladivostok (the first ever by a Russian head of state), Khrushchev informed residents that the Pacific Ocean connected them to the world beyond the horizon, even with the United States.17 While that claim was typical Khrushchevian exaggeration—Vladivostok’s links with the US remained virtually nonexistent— connections did open with Japan. As relations with erstwhile socialist ally, China, splintered and in 1969 even erupted into bloodshed along the Far Eastern border, the Soviet Union turned to Japanese trade.18 From the late 1960s, whale products became an important part of the growing trade with Japan. In 1975, for example, Vladivostok sold five thousand frozen tons of edible meat and two thousand tons of sperm whale fat to its neighbor.19 To simplify matters, Soviet whaleships also began transferring whale products directly to Japanese ships in the Antarctic. Despite frequent disagreements over quality and sometimes between various Soviet branches of the planned economy, trade in whale products carried on.20 Between 1980 and 1987, the Soviet Union sold another 56,745 tons of

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whale meat to Japan, a development that some claim allowed the industry to become profitable for the first time.21 At the same time, Soviet planners refused to allow sperm whale teeth to leave the country for export, in part because of “large demand on the internal market” and in part because of the apparently irreversible decline in the numbers and size of whales being caught.22 These very real worries about decline were a reminder that Vladivostok’s renewed connections with the Pacific Rim ultimately rested on the integrity of oceanic ecosystems. While maritime transport boomed in the North Pacific, life below the surface was in a barely concealed free fall. For several years in the late 1960s, five different floating factories and their catcher boats docked in the Golden Horn, a massive show of whaling capacity in an ocean also stalked by three Japanese fleets.23 The same period saw the largest increase in the Russian deepwater factory fishing fleet.24 Anyone surveying Vladivostok’s crowded piers in the late 1960s could have clearly seen the Soviet Union’s growing wealth and investment in becoming an oceanic force. Other changes were only vaguely decipherable in the new fish and whale products that filled the stores and weighed down the laminate dining tables crowding the mass-produced Khrushchevian apartments colonizing Vladivostok’s hills. Those who left their apartments, passing by the Golden Horn and massive Central Square every day to work as scientists in TINRO, knew that the city’s oceanic foundations were more tenuous than they appeared. The early 1960s inaugurated jet service between Vladivostok and the Black Sea port of Odessa. The Soviet Union’s Tu-104 was one of the world’s first passenger jets, entering service just behind Britain’s DeHavilland Comet and just before Boeing’s 707. It rivaled the gigantic Sovetskaia Rossiia and Sovetskaia Ukraina whaling factories as technological marvels and symbols of the country’s modernity.25 The Tu-104 also had a shockingly bad safety record: two of the planes had plunged out of Far Eastern skies in the early 1960s, and another crash landed in Odessa in 1961, just a few months before the city’s first flights to Vladivostok. Nonetheless, the jet connected intrepid inhabitants of the booming Soviet Union in greater numbers and with much more speed than ever before. The new airborne link between the two whaling ports strengthened their historical association. Since the 1880s, most immigrants coming to Vladivostok had departed from Odessa. In the twentieth century, whalers often made the arduous railway journey between the cities; Odessa’s orig-

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inal Slava whalers, for example, had visited Vladivostok in 1948 to learn the trade.26 Many whalers had gone the other way, such as a Comrade Batrakov, who had started his career as a Vladivostok merchant mariner, then moved to Arkhangelsk, and for the health of his sick children continued on to become a whaler in the sunnier Odessa.27 Like Vladivostok, Odessa was established as an imperial bridgehead— in this case, part of Catherine the Great’s conquests in the Black Sea. And Odessa, too, has long boasted a global outlook and cosmopolitan citizenry. Imperial Russia’s main grain exporter, the city drew Greek merchants and a large number of Jewish traders in the nineteenth century, an analog in some ways to the Koreans and Germans who set up shop along colonial Vladivostok’s Svetlanskaia and Aleutskaia streets. Odessa’s iconic Potemkin steps, made famous in Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic portrayal of the 1905 Potemkin mutiny, offer a view onto an industrial port whose cranes and ships could have been transplanted directly from the Golden Horn. Most of the United States’ Jewish immigrants also passed through Odessa’s port; thus, ironically, it was the Black Sea that historically provided Russia’s strongest connection with North America, and not (as Khrushchev claimed) the Pacific. Unlike foggy Vladivostok, Odessa sparkled. Leafy acacia trees fluttered in the gentle sea breezes that keep the city pleasantly warm, lining the broad avenues flanked by neoclassical apartments. No vast concrete squares— the hollow heart of most Soviet cities— competed with the outdoor cafés filling the numerous small gardens and courtyards along central Deribasovskaia Street. When Odessans weren’t shopping in the city center, they could be found on the city’s beaches and enjoying the year-round fresh fruit that was rare in the rest of Soviet Russia.28 A large, beautiful synagogue still constitutes one of the city’s main historical sites, its prominence a rarity in a country that since the 1950s had returned to its antisemitic past. Soviet authorities may have told Odessans that life was a hard struggle against capitalist imperialism and Russia’s backwardness, but few believed it. Instead, they were renowned for their good humor, quick wit, and love of schmaltz. Odessa, though, was hit particularly hard by the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from world trade in the 1930s and ’40s. It quickly went from being the fastest-growing city in late imperial Russia to the slowest growing of all large Soviet cities.29 The arrival of the Slava in 1948 and the Sovetskaia Ukraina in 1961 that transformed the city into the Soviet Union’s second

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whaling port constituted a resumption of Odessans’ seaward orientation. Whalers quickly took their place in the heart of the city. After complaints from Captain Solyanik that “the provision of housing is the main obstacle to the creation of a permanent cadre for the flotilla,” that state provided them a handsome building— called the Antarctic House— in the city’s center. Whalers also became important patrons, organizing, for example, a special fund to support the orphans of World War II.30 Even after Solyanik’s fall from grace in 1965, his son, Gennaddi, was able to marry the famous Odessa actress Svetlana Zhivankova.31 In Odessa’s sun-kissed streets, whalers and movie stars moved in the same glamorous circles. In fact, whalers didn’t just mix with movie stars; in Odessa, they were movie stars. In the postwar years, Odessa became a popular setting for Soviet films that played on the city’s reputation for music, humor, and cheerful criminality. The film White Acacia, released in 1957, was exemplary of the genre. Its most popular melody, “Song about Odessa,” still serves as a kind of unofficial anthem for the city. Every hour since the film’s release, the city clock has chimed out the tune.32 Directed by Georgy Natanson and Isaak Dunayevsky— two Jewish artists who had not grown up in Odessa but seemed able to capture its essence— the film tells a typically sappy love story. In this case, though, the lovers are whalers. White Acacia focuses on a young woman named Tonya, who longs to go to sea, and finally secures a place on board the Slava as a radio operator. The film splices in Slava footage from the Antarctic: waves crashing against the catcher boats, albatrosses in their endless glide across the waves, distant snow-covered shores. White Acacia then recreates one of the signature events of every Antarctic voyage— the “Neptune ceremony” at the crossing of the equator. Video from Slava shows sailors in blackface and King Neptune in full costume parading across the deck as the fleet director Solyanik delivers a patriotic speech. Tonya seizes the moment and steals all the whalers’ hearts with a song to the ocean and her beloved Odessa. Through the magic of film, White Acacia brought Russian viewers from every corner of the empire directly onto the Soviet whaleship, where, instead of blood and gore, they found song, dance, and Odessan jokes. After a dangerous Antarctic storm blows in and Tonya confesses her love to the catcher boat captain, Konstantin, the film concludes on a happy note as the weather clears and the fleet catches a bonanza of whales. The filmmakers, displaying their and their audience’s lack of experience with live whales, use Slava footage showing sperms whales being harpooned

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Whalers on Vladivostok’s Sovetskaia Rossiia celebrating the Neptune ceremony, performed at the crossing of the equator. Courtesy of welder-history.livejournal.com.

and rolling in death agonies, followed by scenes of fin whales being lashed to the catcher boats. The Slava steams back triumphantly to Odessa. The famous “Song about Odessa” plays through the closing credits, with words that many of its inhabitants felt captured the essence of life in the city, and of life on board a whaleship: When I sing about wide open spaces, About the sea, calling me to foreign places, About the gentle sea, about happiness and grief, I am singing about you, my Odessa!33

The boredom, the blood, the heated socialist competition, both its triumph and its shame— everything that gave Soviet whaling its special flavor wafted away on that gentle breeze of blooming white acacias. When I met Odessa’s former whalers three decades after the end of their industry, their whaling memories closely resembled the timeless, harmless plot of White Acacia. But, after the end of the Soviet empire, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and the subsequent civil war, the barely hidden reality is just as complex as it was during Soviet times. When I departed from my arranged meeting with Odessan whalers in 2015, the event’s cameraman accompanied me. A short man bent low by a backpack

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full of equipment nearly outweighing him, he told me he was part of the city’s remnant Jewish population. Life, for him and for the city, had not been easy since 1991. As we walked through the city’s Kulikovo Square, he pointed out the Trade Union building, where the year before, during the height of tensions over the annexation of the Crimea, an unexplained fire had killed forty-two pro-Russian demonstrators. This was the bloodiest day in Odessa’s history since World War II. Later, we met up again with the whalers and resumed talking about the golden Soviet days, the pleasantries interrupted only momentarily when one of the whalers accidentally ran over the cameraman’s foot with his car. Violence, and a more uncertain reckoning with the past, bubbled just below the surface. Reminders of war and violence were even more apparent in Kaliningrad, the Baltic port that served as the Soviet Union’s third whaling center. This former jewel of the Prussian Empire (when it was known as Königsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant) had been so devastated during World War II that its docks still lay in ruins when its factory ship, the Yuri Dolgorukii, first voyaged to the Antarctic in 1960. The Yuri Dolgorukii itself bore the fresh remembrance of that war that launched the Soviets into the Antarctic. It was a former cruise liner that during the war had served as a transport ship, the SS Hamburg, for the Nazis. While helping evacuate East Prussia as the German armies retreated in 1945, it struck a mine and sank in the Baltic, taking to their deaths thousands of women, children, and elderly.34 After lying on the bottom of the sea for five years, the ship was raised and East German dockyards converted it for use as a Soviet whaler. As in Odessa, Far Easterners from the Aleut fleet were quickly moved to Kaliningrad to train the inexperienced locals. The Yury Dolgorukii committed some of the worst violations in the Antarctic over the next fifteen years. Its proceeds helped strip the city of any lingering Prussian character and turn it into one of the Soviet Union’s most brutalist modern cities. Once the citizens of Vladivostok, Odessa, and Kaliningrad had finished celebrating the returning of the whaleships, a more ambivalent relationship with their prey began. On the waterfronts, dockworkers unloaded the vast tanks of liquefied whales into waiting vats. Then, railways carried the products to the country’s urban centers. Commonly, more than 2 percent of the whale oil was spilled and lost during these port transfers. That equated, in 1946, to 116 tons of fats lost to wastage, and reached 500 tons per year during the peak whaling decades of the 1950s and ’60s.35 Thus, the equivalent of about eight fin whales every year slowly seeped into the

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cities’ docks and streets, their journey ending invisibly in the spaces between their homes and Soviet homes. Other parts of whales remained in the cities as meat for the local stores. Many Vladivostokans remember eating whale sausage, whale fillets, even whale hot dogs sold on street corners. The production of whale meat for hungry Russians had served as one of the industry’s chief justifications and an alluring source of state profit since Far Easterners had pressured the Soviet government to support whaling in the 1920s. Despite the fond memories, the meat never quite lived up to these hopes. Quality issues plagued the Aleut, whose canned whale meat often literally went to the dogs, and these problems grew worse when whalers started going much farther for whales in the Antarctic. Hunters felt that whale meat would spoil within eighteen hours from the moment of the whale’s death.36 But if whale carcasses were not pumped full of air within forty to fifty minutes after harpooning, the heat within the body would already encourage rampant bacterial growth. For that reason, whalers sometimes began pumping even before the whale was dead, causing the animals scarcely imaginable agony.37 Even with such measures, every year, large percentages of the whales’ meat was found to be inedible. Just as serious a problem for Soviet whale meat, however, was the fact that although whalers often praised its quality, most Russians did not really like to eat it. Soviet tastes did not easily adjust to the dark, oily cuts. This was not for lack of effort. Soviet industrial scientists, especially in Odessa, worked hard to make palatable dishes out of the piles of meat brought back from the Antarctic. They broiled and canned meat from the spinal cord, peritoneum, kidneys, heart, and anything else big enough to throw into a vat. Expert tasters found most of the meat quite good.38 But it was all for naught, since Soviet consumers still avoided whale meat in favor of riverine fish, far more familiar to the Russian palate. By the 1970s, Vladivostok’s Dal’kitzvertrest explained that “frozen integumentary baleen fat is in very weak demand, but we are taking measures to sell it. Baleen whale tongues cannot be sold, as there is no demand.”39 Instead, throughout the Soviet Union’s whaling history, most whale products went to feed other animals, from birds to foxes to baby cows (in the last case, calves often feeding on other calves).40 As for human consumption, most Soviet whale meat was exported. In addition to the Japanese market, Moscow shipped “concentrated whale meat bullion” to West Germany and whale meat to Finland.41 These exports represented a return to the old tsarist dreams of

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using whales for foreign hard currency, and not the earlier Soviet plans of using it for self-subsistence. If Soviets plans for whales changed over the decades, those living in its whaling ports also modified their ideas about the creatures. In 2016, another former whaleship worker, Anna Berdichev’ska, wrote about her only voyage to the Antarctic, on board the Sovetskaia Ukraina in 1984: That voyage was excitement and horror. . . . Everything was alive, natural, perfect . . . until the firing of the harpoon gun. And suddenly the world changed, helplessly resisting the violence of humans. The ocean boiled and foamed, turning an unnatural purple color, as the ocean giant struggled against the line. “If a whale could scream in pain, like a human, we would all go insane here,” V. Angelin once told me. But whales die silently, and that makes the horror of what is happening even sharper.42

These words were the sort I had wondered if I would hear in Odessa. They were sentiments familiar from the environmentalist movement and sporadically visible in whalers’ own recollections. They were also sentiments I would see repeated in twenty-first-century Vladivostok, where graffiti implored the world not to kill whales and unknown activists painted blood on a whale sculpture in a playground and sarcastically entitled it “Monument to Whalers.”43 How did some Soviet citizens make this journey from the lighthearted wistfulness of White Acacia, from the timelessness of song and poetry, to that sudden rupture Berdichev’ska felt the moment a whale was harpooned? This was a journey that resulted from the many different kinds of journeys whales themselves made, deeper into the country, into the homes of millions of Soviets, far from the oceans that birthed them. For, if whale meat failed to conquer the Russian market, large quantities of whales nonetheless entered Soviet daily life in other forms. They came both in bodily form and in the pages of fiction and popular science. The relationships Soviets cultivated with these animals straddled an ineffable boundary between the mundane and the magical, between cruelty and compassion, indifference and enchantment. The contradictions within that relationship, just as much as the contradictions in capitalism or communism, could not persist forever, and by the 1970s new ways of thinking about whales penetrated the Soviet Union. Most Soviets’ contacts with whales were simultaneously hidden and

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pervasive. The blubber and bones that boilers had rendered into oil and meal below decks on distant oceans became emulsifiers in edible products such as pastries and mayonnaise sold in the no-nonsense Produkty (Food products) stores found throughout the Soviet Union. In the pharmacies, an increasingly clean and healthy Soviet population could find soap made from whale fat, vitamin A from whale livers, insulin from the pancreas, and cholesterol from the whales’ brains.44 Spermaceti and ambergris taken from sperm whales went into perfumes with names such as “White-Stoned Moscow,” “Comet,” and “Yaroslavna” (all these aphrodisiacs, however, failing to halt the decline in Soviet birthrates).45 Some planners hoped to replace egg whites with whale oil, and even use whale skin for footwear.46 Above all, though, the unfathomably large whales of Antarctica and the North Pacific were transformed into humble sticks of margarine. A lack of edible fats had been a major concern in the post–World War II world, and the Soviet Union had perhaps more need of these fats than any place on Earth. Accordingly, the trains bearing whale oil from Odessa and Vladivostok delivered it mostly to margarine factories. There, chemists injected hydrogen into the oil, and the process of hydrogenation transformed whales into a light-colored solid without fishy taste or odor. By the 1950s, whale oil constituted around 25 percent of all Soviet margarine production, which had become far cheaper, and far more common, than real butter.47 “High in calories and easily digestible,” as industry literature promoted it; margarine also melted at 86˚F, making it spreadable in the typically overheated Soviet apartments.48 In an attempt to make comprehensible the scale of whales’ contribution to the national diet, one popular book explained that the fat of one large whale could “provide enough cooking oil to make bliny [thin Russian pancakes] for Maslenitsa,” the popular Shrovetide holiday, for “the entire population of St. Petersburg.”49 Spread liberally on those same bliny or on a slice of dark rye bread, whales, in the most unrecognizable form imaginable, seeped into the Soviet private sphere. Whaling planners stressed the superior efficiency of producing margarine from whales compared to other animal fats. The scientist Sleptsov pointed out that in 1948 alone, the quantity of whale oil procured by the Slava and the Aleut was equal to that of two million pigs or two million sheep.50 Others noted that workers needed far fewer hours to catch whales than to raise domestic animals. This, of course, ignored whales’ years of growth in the polar seas— work that industrial whalers effectively stole from the ocean’s ecosystems. This was a theft increasingly subsidized in

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An image from the children’s book Whale on the Line, showing— in the form of cheerful skiing blobs— the various products taken from baleen whales’ bodies, including fat, meal, internal parts, and meat. The bottom text reads, “The whaling industry provides many products valuable and necessary for humans.” S. Grigor’ev, Kit na line (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo detskoi literatury, 1963).

the Soviet Union by increasing production of another oil, Siberian petroleum, taken as a free gift from the ground and used to power ships down to the bottom of the globe. However, Marxist economic theory, which recognized only human labor as a meaningful producer of value, left little space or thought for such accounting. Capitalist theory did little better on this question, placing great emphasis on the value of ownership and finding it difficult to assess the value of things unowned.51 Capitalist whalers, at least, recognized the problem of scarcity, which became acute by the mid-1960s. Even when Soviet fisheries officials noted in 1963 (the year the final large new factory, the Vladivostok, was delivered) a “sharp decline in the economic indicators of the fleet’s work,” they continued to ask for an increase in whale products.52 The important constituencies in Vladivostok, Kaliningrad, and Odessa, too, pressured Moscow to continue to invest in the whaling fleets that provided good jobs and local pride, a form of pork-barrel politics common in the supposedly centrally

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dictated plan. Thus, while plant-based whale oil substitutes became common in the West, whales continued to provide cheap margarine in Russia. As a result, whales continued to play an intimate part in Soviet life long after they had physically withdrawn from everyday Western reality to become noble Moby Dicks or peaceful armless buddhas. In the 1970s, the so-called Mit’ki, radical counterculturalists who attempted to renounce everything Soviet (including, most important, jobs that demanded any significant labor), survived by almost exclusively eating cheap Produkty margarine.53 Their attempts to keep their integrity by disengaging from the Soviet system, ironically, were subsidized by one of the state’s most dishonest industries, manned by some of its most satisfied workers. Whales also appeared, if briefly, in one of Russia’s most beloved movies, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won an Oscar in the US for best foreign film in 1981. It showed, in an unusually frank way, the difficulties Soviet people (especially women) faced in everyday life at the tail end of the period of exceptional economic growth that began the 1950s. The movie focuses on a group of female friends to whom Soviet life delivers mixed professional and romantic fates, with real happiness elusive. As the women commiserate, one describes an impossibly happy friend “whose husband hunts whales [and] runs a beauty products business on the side.” When asked what the perfume is made from, she whispers something— spermaceti, as Russian viewers would have understood— in her friend’s ear, and they both dissolve into laughter.54 Whales and whaling suggested unusual success in a complex modern world and provided the sexual frisson that Soviet films could never approach head-on. Whaling may have starred in Odessa and made cameos in Muscovite cinema, but whales had an even larger presence in Soviet fiction. Especially from the 1940s to the ’60s, the height of whaling’s popularity, writers of all stripes delivered whaling tales to the country’s voracious readers, who had a special appetite for books about the distant ocean. Many of these books were written for children. In the 1960s, during the fleet’s great expansion, two books, Boris Emel’ianov’s The Whaler and His Friends and S. Grigor’ev’s Whale on the Line, explained and celebrated the industry in terms Soviet children could understand. Grigor’ev’s book was particularly encyclopedic. Splashed with happy watercolors and smiling whales, it dove into all aspects of the industry over the last five centuries. Grigor’ev began with the bad old days of sail whaling, which for Russians evoked little of the glory found in Moby-Dick. “Every year,” he explained, “foreign ships

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gathered on our shores. They killed whales in the thousands.”55 Today, though, when the children’s homeland had become one of the world’s premier whaling nations, things were different. The Soviet Union’s clean, new modern whaleships had replaced the old, dirty sailing ships. Soviet ships were equipped with fast chaser boats, radar, and helicopters for spotting whales. Of course, some whales, such as humpbacks, had grown so scarce that their hunting was forbidden. For that reason, “Soviet whalers comply strictly with the international rules for whaling, and continuously call on foreign harpooners to do the same.”56 For a book published in 1963— the final year of the Soviets’ illegal, secret, near total, destruction of the Area V humpbacks— this was an astounding claim. Whaling literature brought the innocence of childhood and the cynicism that had begun to pervade adult Soviet life into startling proximity. Whale on the Line posed another contradiction for the country’s youth: it delved into the fine detail of whales’ lives, especially the pain of their deaths. The book noted how blue whales and fin whales would gather around a wounded comrade, noticing its distress, and how humpbacks would ignore the danger and throw themselves into the aid of each other, “swimming around the wounded one, asking what happened to him.” Then, when the whale began to lose consciousness and sink, they would try to support it with their fins. Grigor’ev also described the whale’s “final death agony,” when pain and desperation would drive it to leap out of the water with the last of its remaining strength.57 Even if Soviet children were being fed cynical lies about whaling’s sustainability, they had to face the reality that the whales at the end of that line were complex, social animals, capable of emotional and physical pain. The juxtaposition of hunting with scenes of tenderness for animals was in fact common in Soviet children’s literature.58 Even Grigor’ev might have asked himself, though: would their sympathies forever remain with the hunter? For adults, ocean-adventure novels were one of the Soviet Union’s most popular genres. Books such as The Sea Calls or To Distant Seas regularly satisfied Soviets’ well-developed taste for adventure and the exotic.59 Deep in the Moscow subway, in the middle of the Eurasian plain, every day, millions of commuters sat or stood with cheap cardboard hardbacks, thumbing the brown printed pages that transported them to Tahiti or plunged them leagues beneath the sea. But one such book stood above the rest, both at the time and in memory, the closest thing Russia’s whaling industry ever

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had to a Moby-Dick: the 1950s whaling trilogy written by the Vladivostok journalist Anatolii Vakhov. The Soviet whale scientist Dmitri Tormosov once told me, “When I read Vakhov, I knew immediately that I had to go on a whaleship.”60 Such was the power Vakhov’s novels exerted on the Soviet imagination— a power that came as much from a grand ambition to recapitulate the entire history of Russian whaling as much as from literary flair. Vakhov grew up in Vladivostok, studying Chinese in school before becoming a reporter. He was in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade, from which he escaped, living for months behind enemy lines. He based his first book, The Fearless Nine (1944), on the partisan band he came to know during that time, and the book bought him a measure of fame. Vakhov found his true calling, however, when he returned to the Far East and in 1951 published The Tragedy of Captain Ligov, the first Soviet work of fiction to take up the country’s whaling history.61 Spouts on the Horizon followed soon thereafter; The Storm Does Not Still came out in 1955, completing a trilogy that transported hundreds of thousands of landlubbing Russians to the open ocean and to their whaling past.62 The years during which Vakhov wrote his trilogy were tricky ones for Soviet novelists. Stalin died in 1953, but the country’s intellectual and artistic direction remained unclear at least through the onset of Khrushchev’s Thaw in 1956. The doctrine of “Socialist Realism”— which counterintuitively demanded that all artistic production represent Soviet life as it could be, rather than as it actually was— held sway. And during the time that Vakhov was writing Ligov, an aggressive anti-cosmopolitanism and national chauvinism permeated Soviet life and especially its literary culture. These were the same forces that had convinced Sleptsov to claim absurdly that Norwegians had exterminated the sea cow. By choosing the heavily politicized whaling industry as his subject, Vakhov could hardly escape such pressures. In fact, there is no indication he wanted to escape them. Patriotism came easily to the war-tested Vakhov, and his trilogy liberally rewrote Russia’s whaling history to bring the elements of international rivalry and Russian victimization to the fore. His books fictionalized, in order, Otto Lindholm’s attempts to found a whaling company in the 1850s on the Sea of Okhotsk (Vakhov also incorporated elements of another early Russian whaler, Akim Dydymov, into the depiction), the 1920s Norwegian conces-

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sion in the North Pacific, and the creation of the Aleut fleet in the 1930s. In Vakhov’s telling, the Finnish Swede Lindholm became Captain Oleg Nikolaevich Ligov, Russified and patriotic. The opening scenes find him arguing with tsarist officials in St. Petersburg about the urgent necessity to chase American whalers from Russian waters in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Americans, led by brutal harpooners named Wesley and Stardson, are controlled by a monopolistic corporation in San Francisco run by the devious Robert Dailton (authentic English names were not Vakhov’s forte). The Americans personify a troika of Bolshevik nightmares: they are trying to undermine the bargaining power of an international league of harpooners (here standing in for the broader proletariat); they attack and often kill the Native Tungus people of the Sea of Okhotsk, nominally Russian subjects; and they destroy any whale they come across without any thought for conservation. The Storm Does Not Still substitutes Germans and Norwegians for the evil Americans, as the Vega concession of the 1920s turns out to be a front for protofascists trying to exfiltrate anti-Bolshevik White Army veterans hiding in the wilds of Northern Kamchatka. Finally, in Spouts on the Horizon, the real-life German harpooner Otto Kraul becomes “Otto Graul,” a spy working for the Americans and the Nazis, taking lots of pictures of Petropavlovsk, and trying to convince the Soviets running the Aleut fleet that whaling will never be profitable. The Soviet whalers, on the other hand, are scrappy crews, multicultural, gender inclusive, and full of rough-hewn workers on a course for self-enlightenment. The Chinese cook Li-Ti-Sian and an African American whaler find refuge from the brutality and racism of shore life on board the Aleut. Despite humble origins, the Soviet whalers are keen readers, devouring Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as listening raptly to lectures on whales— one part of the novels that rings true to life.63 Naturally, the whalers also enjoy harmonious relations with the North Pacific’s Indigenous people, delivering whale meat to the grateful Chukchi, who reciprocate by helping the whalers discern the whales’ local migration routes. Reviewers criticized Vakhov for creating lifeless characters, even though they admitted he did faithfully depict the social types that Socialist Realism was tasked with describing.64 For most readers, though, the pathos and the adventure seemed to more than make up for any deficiencies in character development. The books’ most important achievement was to cast Russia’s messy whaling history as a coherent national drama, one

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beset by the foreign enemies that the standards of the time demanded. In truth, these were not hard to mine from the industry’s actual history, even if Vakhov exaggerated liberally. The result was, in the guise of adventure novel, to nurse the same historical grievances that animated the Slava and Antarctic cheating. If Soviets gained their most powerful impressions of contemporary whaling from the saccharine film White Acacia, they formed their notions of its history from Vakhov’s strychnine novels. Two scenes from Vakhov’s trilogy suggest both instructive parallels and departures from Melville’s Moby-Dick that encapsulate dominant Soviet views about whales before the 1970s. First, In Fountains on the Horizon, Vakhov has a sperm whale ram the Aleut. While Melville’s Pequod sinks, though, the Soviet ship is undamaged, and chaser boats race off and kill the whale.65 Second, Captain Ligov, frustrated to be without harpoons when he catches sight of a sperm whale out of his reach, turns into something resembling Melville’s demonic Captain Ahab. His “eyes flushed with a hunter’s passion [azart],” Ligov hopelessly and repeatedly shoots at the distant whale.66 In both scenes, Moby-Dick’s moral valences are reversed: the whale does not escape, and Ligov remains a hero despite his insensate rage. Ligov’s tragedy comes not, like Ahab, with death, but in his frustrated ambitions to rid Russian seas of foreigners. Nor was Vakhov alone in these inversions. Soviet literary critics commonly understood Captain Ahab as a hero in the mold of others, like Prometheus, who struggled against the limits that god, religion, or “blind force”— as personified by the white whale— had set on humanity.67 God was, thankfully, dead, and Ahab had killed him. Vakhov’s sperm whale could not escape, in part because the reality of modern whaling revealed that the whale’s triumph was nearly impossible. The fact that whales stood little chance against twentieth-century machinery threatened to rob industrial whaling of much of the drama it possessed for earlier audiences, leaving whaling literature tensionless and bland. This is one reason Vakhov placed a strong emphasis on Soviet whalers’ recordbreaking feats. In The Storm Does Not Still, he has the nineteenth-century Russians besting foreigners by setting transport speed records, an anachronism that better reflected later Soviet “record mania.”68 Record-breaking, in fact, was the very topic that had first drawn Vakhov to whaling, when in 1949 he profiled the Aleut fleet’s most prolific harpooner, F. D. Prokopenko.69 This focus on superhuman feats, including superhuman killing, reinserted some drama into an industry that had hopelessly tipped the scales between humans and whales.

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Another plot tension, Ligov’s passion— his azart— also spoke in effective tones to Soviet audiences, and provides a key to understanding the popular enthusiasm for whaling. Azart, especially its association with hunting, is a word unique to the Russian language, and at that time had almost entirely positive meanings for all sections of Russian society. In stark contrast to Europe and North America, hunting never possessed aristocratical connotations in Russia. Instead, hunting and the love of the hunt were recognized to belong in like measure to the elite sportsman, the common hunter, and the nomadic people Russia had conquered in Siberia and the Far East.70 Hunting was the rare bridge between class and culture in an empire rent with deep divides. Hunting manuals and periodicals enjoyed huge popularity in imperial and Soviet Russia, as they still do in Russia today. Nor was hunting seen as antithetical to conservation; in fact, the hunter’s azart was thought to spring at least somewhat from an appreciation of the beauty of the hunt. Soviet harpooners commonly used the same language Vakhov did to describe their own activities. As the famous harpooner Petr Zarva wrote about his first kill on board the Aleut, “On that day, my heart first beat with the hunter’s azart, and it still beats like that twenty years later whenever I throw a harpoon into a gigantic animal of the sea.”71 Whale on the Line, the children’s book, claimed that, for Soviet harpooners, “hunting was an art,” while also insisting that these hunters valued conservation.72 The deep contradictions in this pairing are not hard to see. Manic hunting and strict conservation hardly worked together, either in the abstract or in reality. But, Soviets’ class-spanning hunting culture helped inure them to the damage done by their harpooners’ killing sprees; in England, aristocratic notions of “sportsmanship”— a notion absent in Russia— caused some observers of whaling to condemn the industry because whales did not have a fighting chance.73 That concept did not register in the Soviet Union. Further contradictions sprang from Soviet ideology. A hunter’s personal azart endowed whaling with individual and societal value, but the role of the harpooner was actually fairly minor on board the modern, collectivist Russian whaleship. Even those most invested in the Soviet cult of harpooners, like Grigor’ev, admitted that “the success of the hunt does not depend solely on the harpooner. The entire crew helps him. Could harpooners hunt so well if the entire hunting apparatus was not always in order?”74 Or as Zenkovich had written with barely suppressed discomfort: “There is no

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hunt to compare with that of the giants of the sea, even if the hunters have many modern advantages and are protected from accidents.”75 Surrounded by extensive machinery and aided by gunpowder, diesel engines, radar, helicopters, and an entire crew of mechanics, sailors, and domestics, the harpooner faced relatively little danger and little prospect of real failure. This fact could have been a positive for Soviet readers, since collective labor was precisely what the Soviet Union celebrated; the individual’s contributions became meaningful only when they supported the kollektiv. However, tales of collective labor did not seem to attract whaling’s authors or satisfy their readers. None were able to resist the atavistic lure of the sole harpooner and his azart. Twentieth-century humans everywhere romanticized modern human labor on the ocean, even as it was replaced by machinery.76 For Soviets, though, the contradictions were even keener. Having missed the heroic days of open-boat whaling, literate Russians wanted very much to imagine that the Sovetskaia Rossiia was just a bigger, faster Pequod, Ligov a more successful Ahab, that the harpooner fired his gun alone but for ocean and prey, and that his prey would last forever. For some time, it seemed the ideas of Vakhov, Grigor’ev, and others would last forever, too. The Tragedy of Captain Ligov went through at least six reprintings, including as recently as 2008. Its hard- edged patriotism, Far Eastern regional pride, and dramatic international intrigue continue to resonate with the Russian public. Still, Soviet literary tastes were not homogenous, nor were they unchanging. Vakhov abandoned whaling as a topic after his trilogy, and while whaling continued to be a popular theme in newspapers and magazines, no fiction writers with Vakhov’s sense of purpose emerged to take his place. Just as in the West, popular ideas about whales began a stunning transformation in the Soviet Union— there, perhaps five years later, in the early 1970s rather than in the mid-1960s in North America.77 But, if the timing looked similar, changes in Soviet ideas had as much to do with developments on that side of the Iron Curtain as anything happening in the West. Most strikingly, in the 1970s, Soviets finally seriously engaged with Indigenous conceptions of whales that had long been available to those interested. During that decade, the well-known Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu, whose previous novels about life in Chukotka had toed the ideological line, turned his attention to whaling. His two popular novels, A Dream in Polar Fog (1972) and When the Whales Leave (1977), cut Rytkheu’s umbilical connection to the party by offering Soviet readers a novel view of human-

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cetacean relations. A Dream in Polar Fog made the first tentative steps, narrating from a Chukchi point of view the experience of nineteenthcentury sail whaling near their shores. American whalers are still clearly villains, but the story takes an unexpected turn when a Canadian whaler is marooned in Chukotka, marries a local woman, and ends up becoming a valued member of Chukchi society. His redemption comes at least in part through developing a respectful attitude toward the whales he helps kill to feed the village. Rytkheu’s second book of the decade, When the Whales Leave, a retelling of Chukchi creation myths, went well beyond the conventional boundaries of Socialist Realism, which rejected such stories as superstitious anachronism. When the Whales Leave tells the story of a Chukchi ancestor woman who marries a whale. Half the couple’s offspring are humans, the other half whales, and the two species live in peace for generations until one of their descendants, Armagirgin, forgets humans’ old kinship with sea creatures. He kills seals and other creatures wastefully, and then commits the ultimate taboo: killing one of his brothers, a whale. The deed sunders the species’ bonds and spells disaster for both. Armagirgin dies and the whales leave Chukotkan shores for good.78 While in other places Rytkheu described the Chukchi as active whalers, his Armagirgin story was remarkable for suggesting to Soviet readers that there was perhaps something immoral about killing whales in any numbers. It certainly gave voice to conceptions other than the Soviets’ exclusive insistence on azart, scientific planning, and the maximization of human benefit. In 1977, the same year as his When the Whales Leave, Rytkheu also helped introduced the Soviet Union to new Western ideas about whales, writing the introduction to the Soviet translation of the Canadian author Farley Mowat’s controversial A Whale for the Killing (1972). The book had helped galvanize antiwhaling sentiment in the West, and the mere fact of its publication in the Soviet Union was a sign of new exposure to Western environmentalism. (Just the previous decade, Soviet authorities had restricted access to Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring.79) The publication of Western environmental literature mirrored the Soviet Union’s increasing participation in a global turn toward conservation, represented by its participation in agreements such as the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Fur Seals (1972) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1974). According to the historian Stephen Brain, Soviet leadership signed such treaties at least in

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Chukchi processing a gray whale. Yuri Rytkheu, “Son v Nachale Tumana,” Roman-Gazeta 11 (1972).

part to burnish a green image that could be useful in Cold War ideological competition.80 That leadership likely could not have anticipated the impact of Mowat’s book in the Soviet Union. A Whale for the Killing relates the true-life plight of a fin whale trapped in a saltwater pond near a small Newfoundland village, whose inhabitants cruelly and pointlessly shoot the whale and cut it with boat propellers. Mowat’s desperate attempts to save the creature fail. Rytkheu, who knew Mowat personally thanks to their shared interest in the circumpolar North, informed Soviet readers that people around the world “to a great degree share the author’s anxiety about the shape of our planet.” The book’s afterword, written by the Soviet marine biologist A. S. Sokolov, drew readers’ attention to some of the book’s more radical points. As Sokolov wrote, “Mowat sufficiently convincingly shows that the attempt to reap the greatest possible economic gain from natural resources for the benefit of humans has gone too far.” He also noted that Mowat “‘raises’

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the whale to the level of the human.” Sokolov left readers to make their own judgments on this claim, but he did insist that “today humans should not accept the arrangement of things so that their role is to kill animals and the role of the animals is to be killed.”81 The Soviet-edition cover art for the book even incorporates typical Western countercultural images, with a whale exhaling brightly colored flowers. Had Vakhov not died in 1965 of a heart attack in a Moscow hotel when he was only forty-seven, the translation of Mowat’s book might have done the trick. In fact, by the late 1960s, similar ideas had become widely available to Soviet readers in the form of popular science, which drew on the remarkable research being done by the country’s leading cetologists. In 1967, Yablokov, Sergei Kleinenberg, and Vsevolod Belkovich published Our Friend the Dolphin, which popularized Soviet research on dolphins’ sophisticated social lives.82 Seven years later, the first edition of Avenir Tomilin’s In the World of Whales and Dolphins (1974) appeared, expressing views far removed from the author’s earlier support for dolphin killing in the Black Sea. In his new work, Tomilin discussed the American scientist John Lilly’s radical but influential speculations about dolphins’ extraordinary intelligence. Tomilin rejected any conclusions that “put dolphins on the pedestal of humanity,” but, in the process, he made Soviet readers aware of such ideas.83 In any case, Tomilin himself had published evidence of dolphin sociability and intelligence decades before Lilly, even if no one in the West had paid attention to them. In his 1974 book, Tomilin came to the qualified but still novel conclusion that “a careful and rational relationship is necessary with our . . . friends in the ocean, smart and observant, prepared to serve humans no less faithfully . . . than our old four-legged friend the dog.”84 Soviet scientists had been discussing cetacean intelligence and advocating for their conservation for nearly half a century by then. Now they were introducing the country as a whole to whales much more intelligent, familiar, and docile than Russians had encountered before. Tomilin was speaking to an audience that had in some ways run ahead even of the scientists. In the profligate 1960s, while the Antarctic hunts and Soviet falsifications were peaking, the marine mammologist Kleinenberg had told the Communist Party that the Black Sea dolphin hunt should be stopped. He waited in vain for a response. One day, though (probably in 1965), the Central Committee received a collective letter from the workers at an electrical equipment factory near Leningrad that read, “We have become familiar with professor Kleinenberg’s remarkable works [and] de-

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mand that the dolphin hunting in the Black Sea be stopped— let Professor Kleinenberg and his students study these wonderful animals.”85 Amazingly, the party agreed. On March 14, 1966, the Soviet Union instituted a ten-year ban on the killing of all small cetaceans, and forced satellite states Bulgaria and Romania, who also conducted hunting in the Black Sea, to do the same.86 Westerners would be perplexed by this ban for years. As Greenpeace wrote to Canadian officials in Ottawa in 1975, the year of their first antiSoviet protests: “Perhaps one of the strangest paradoxes of this whole situation is the fact that in spite of its ruthless pursuit of the larger cetaceans, the Soviet Union has since 1966 banned the killing of dolphins. This step was taken on the grounds that these animals are an intelligent life form, and in the words of Aleksandr Ishkov, Soviet Minister of Fisheries, ‘the marine brother of man.’”87 Actually, Ishkov was loosely paraphrasing scientists such as Tomilin, Kleinenberg, and Yablokov, while eliding the fact that the Soviet public had pressured the party to change its whaling policies. Ishkov’s dolphin hunting ban was an unacknowledged tribute to the fact that the ground was beginning to change under the party’s feet. Tomilin’s In the World of Whales and Dolphins urged that a ban similar to that for the Black Sea dolphins be enacted on all whaling in the North Pacific for the next fifty to one hundred years.88 Sleptsov had urged something similar as early as 1946. And, by the late 1970s, the Soviet public had internalized such messages. In fact, the larger dynamics of environmental activism recognizable in the whaling discourse had been building in Soviet society since the late 1950s, around the same time Vakhov’s novels appeared. That was when controversy over party plans for the development of Siberia’s Lake Baikal had galvanized a nascent environmentalist coalition of scientists, novelists, and hundreds of interested citizens who expressed their complaints in letters to newspapers. The historian Nick Breyfogle calls this campaign the “watershed” of Soviet environmentalism, after which large swaths of society began to question the government’s prioritization of economic growth over environmental health.89 From the 1970s, Soviet citizens also began visiting their nature reserves (zapovedniki) and new national parks in greater numbers, prompting many to defend these special places when government policies threatened them.90 By that time, millions had joined the Soviet Society for the Protection of Nature, and if that organization’s influence was compromised through its links to the state, student brigades and other more informal organizations took up

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local environmental concerns.91 The Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes hardly stopped pursuing ruinous environmental policies, but they increasingly had to contend with angry citizens. Baikal and the zapovedniki occupied a special place, both in Soviet hearts and in environmentalist lore. The Antarctic whaling grounds could not call up the same emotions. But the North Pacific might. In 1977, “Stories about Whales,” by the Vladivostok whaler-journalist Vladimir Troinin, presented a mixture of whale biology and personal reminiscence in the city’s popular publication, Pacific Ocean Bearings. There, Troinin described Chukotka gray whale feeding strategies and their “mental agility” in using freshwater and the tides to free themselves of parasites, painting a similar picture of whale intelligence as did Tomilin. His later children’s book describes whales as peaceful and vulnerable, “distressed, defenseless against the powerful blows of the waves and the strong cold wind.”92 Even closer to home, Troinin reminisced about once seeing a small whale swimming within sight of shore in a “large Primorsky city” (clearly Vladivostok). Children pelted it with rocks when it surfaced. Onlookers took the animal for a sperm whale, but the whaler Troinin recognized it as a minke. He had often observed minkes ( just then becoming the target of the Soviet and Japanese hunts) while at sea, and noted their “goodnatured” personalities. Troinin hoped his account would accomplish two things for the inhabitants of the Far East: that it would help his readers henceforth recognize minkes when they saw them, and— in an unmistakable echo of Mowat— “that they would not throw rocks at the whales, as the kids did on that May day” when the minke swam past.93 Troinin’s works might be considered the decisive counterblow against Grigor’ev’s muscular children’s book, Whale on the Line, and the first published opposition to whaling in its Soviet birthplace, the Vladivostok that had built so much of its wealth and identity from these same giants. This increasingly dominant picture of whales as threatened, weak, and good-natured creatures eroded some Soviet notions of whaling that in retrospect look very vulnerable. Since at least the 1700s, Russians had had access to alternative ideas about whales, especially from their colonial possessions in the North Pacific. Now, with writers such as Rytkheu gaining visibility as non-Russian voices on whales, these ideas began to penetrate the Soviet Union, throwing into question Marxism’s unabashed anthropocentrism. Soviet writers had always stressed whales’ sociability and charisma, but combined with their danger and power, such character-

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istics had only inflamed the hunter’s azart. Now, however, this azart began to look pitiful since whaling had become such a matter of routine, since whales were revealed to be both smart and defenseless, and since they had become brothers of man or man’s best friend. After all, who felt a passion to harpoon a dog? The wave of literary, scientific, and citizen voices criticizing whaling gathered, ironically, just as the Soviet government went silent on the topic. In contrast to the exuberant press coverage of the Aleut, Slava, and Sovetskaia Ukraina, from the mid-1970s newspapers began avoiding the topic altogether. In fact, the word whale in any connection with whaling was banned from Soviet newspapers. Even something as innocuous as the Odessa harpooner Vladimir Angelin’s poetry came under official suspicion. Censors changed his mention of “whalers” to “fishermen,” and “autumns” to “summer,” since naming the season might reveal the true subject of the poems to those in Odessa who knew the time of the whalers’ departure.94 The new policy was clearly a reaction to the shifting international winds and the decreasing value of the industry. There was little to celebrate— whaling no longer served as good propaganda or diplomacy— and there was still much to hide, even after international inspectors began sailing on Soviet ships in 1972. As a result, nothing was done to combat the growing public sentiment against killing whales. In 1985, a reader of the popular journal Arguments and Facts, N. Kostenko from Leningrad, asked provocatively whether the Soviet Union’s whaling policy was as progressive as that of its other environmental stances, or as progressive as that of the Americans. M. Ivashin, the industry’s leading scientist defender, replied by pointing out that American whalers and other capitalist countries had destroyed whale stocks first and that the IWC’s Scientific Committee did not agree with the passage of a moratorium on whaling. Readers of Vakhov and believers in socialism’s scientific rationality knew this story. Nonetheless, Ivashin conceded for the first time in print that the Soviet Union was going to “pause” whaling after the 1987/88 season.95 Soviet citizens such as Comrade Kostenko had played their part in leading Soviet authorities to this conclusion. However, as with much of Russia’s whaling history, the reasons for such a consequential decision stretched deep into the past, and went deep below the surface.

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A Whale Is Not a Fish: Back to the North Pacific

In retrospect, the end of Soviet whaling started coming into focus on two different days. The first was June 27, 1975, when Greenpeace activists located the Dal’nii Vostok off the coast of California. The other had come two decades earlier, on February 25, 1956, when the Congress of Deputies approved the Soviet Union’s sixth Five-Year Plan. That date is famous in Soviet history because it was the day Nikita Khrushchev unexpectedly delivered his so-called Secret Speech, whose harsh criticism of the legacy of Stalinism shocked the assembled delegates. However, for all its mundane bureaucratic language, the plan that was approved hours earlier was just as consequential for Russian history, and especially for the global history of the oceans. Not only did it call for the construction of seven new floating whaling factories, it also approved the investment of ten billion rubles to rapidly expand its deepwater fishing capabilities. Fish catches were planned to increase to 157 percent of current levels through the “development, on a greater scale, of intensive fishing in the open sea . . . with large modern fishing vessels . . . fitted out with refrigerators and appliances for processing fish.”1 Soon, Soviet factory trawlers would be scouring the globe for new fisheries to feed the country and earn hard currency on the export market.2 Greenpeace’s protests were explicitly designed to end Soviet whaling; in a less obvious way, so was the country’s fisheries expansion. The concurrent, intertwined growth of Soviet fishing and whaling hid the fact that the two industries were not entirely compatible. In fact, the Fisheries Ministry had planned from the outset to one day convert whalers into fishers. But

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this never happened to the extent hoped. Instead, the fishing industry’s interests slowly began to cannibalize those of whaling, until, by the 1980s, planners decided they had little choice but to scrap the whalers altogether. To understand why the Soviet Union felt compelled to make this decision— one that helped save the world’s whales just in time—we must return to the birthplace of Russian whaling and the site of its ultimate clash with Greenpeace: the North Pacific. While the spectacular additions to the Antarctic whaling fleets garnered the bulk of Soviet and global attention, after World War II, whaling also expanded in the North Pacific. The first growth came with a number of new shore stations in the Kurils. This chain of islands is among the wildest of Soviet frontiers, an arc of frenetic volcanic and tectonic activity leaping out of the sea to meet the fierce North Pacific storms. It was here in November 1952 that an early-morning tsunami killed up to five thousand people in the islands while entirely destroying the whaling factory Podgornyi, along with 218 of its 300 employees.3 This was the greatest loss of life the Soviet whaling industry ever suffered, but it was nothing compared to the toll taken on the Kurils’ sperm whales. Sleptsov’s research subjects were so quickly decimated that the last of the Kuril Island station was forced to close in 1964, due to diminished catches.4 Instead, in a reversal of the region’s long-standing geographies of exploitation, most of the North Pacific whaling would take place far from Russian shores. In the early 1960s, the Antarctic catches turned quickly south; scouting vessels from Vladivostok’s TINRO pushed into Alaskan waters, where they discovered large, relatively unexploited populations of humpback whales. A few years later, scouts ventured even further south, charting large aggregations of sperm whales off the coast of California and in the waters north of Hawaiʻi, one of the most isolated stretches of ocean in the Pacific. The North Pacific humpbacks the Soviets discovered, like those they had recently obliterated in the Antarctic, undertook complex, longdistance migrations throughout the ocean. In the winter, Alaskan humpbacks migrated to California, Mexico, and especially Hawaiʻi, where they mated and gave birth in warm, shallow lagoons. There were likely more than 15,000 humpbacks making these annual voyages in the early twentieth century.5 Modern shore whaling stations set up by Americans and Canadians in Hawaiʻi, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest killed significant numbers of them. British Columbia whalers were the most active, killing

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some 24,000 whales of various species between 1908 and the 1960s.6 By the time of the Soviets’ arrival, though, only three stations— in Richmond, California; Warrenton, Oregon; and Coal Harbour, British Columbia— remained, each of which killed only a few dozen whales annually.7 Observers had begun noting increasing numbers of humpbacks in Hawaiʻian lagoons, a population recovering from low levels in the 1930s.8 Around 1965, the first Hawaiʻian whale-watching club, the Wailupe Whalewatchers, began sponsoring informal trips to view the humpbacks in their waters.9 Many similar organizations were springing up along North America’s Pacific coast to watch the steadily increasing numbers of gray whales, nearly driven to extinction in the nineteenth century. Even if Japan continued to whale intensely in the western Pacific, from these shores the industrial era of North Pacific whaling appeared to be dribbling to an end, with the return of the whales at hand. But North Americans had not known of the Soviet exploratory voyages, and they were at best only dimly aware of Vladivostok’s buildup. Their awakening came in scattered bursts. Alaskan Fish and Wildlife official Rex Thomas photographed Soviet catcher boats cruising through narrow Umnak Pass in the Aleutian Islands in 1962, and later observed chunks of whale blubber floating in the sea.10 That year, the Sovetskaia Rossiia, which previously whaled in the Antarctic, had instead turned east and attacked Alaska’s humpbacks south of Unalaska, off the southern coast of Kodiak Island, in the open sea in the Gulf of Alaska, and just north of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands.11 The next year, 1963, Alaska fishermen reported Soviet whaling ships hunting within a half mile off islands near Kodiak: “Eye witnesses saw one whaler with freshly killed whale alongside. Another whaler was in act of firing its harpoon.” Alaska Senator Bob Bartlett introduced a bill allowing the Coast Guard to seize the vessels, while local Kodiak representative Gil Jarvela pressured the state of Alaska and the US Defense Department to “promptly halt such invasions of Alaskan territorial waters.”12 Canadians soon observed a similar scene: in 1963, an unidentified factory ship and nineteen catcher boats were seen 250 nautical miles off Vancouver Island. That same year, a Canadian chaser boat from Coal Harbour encountered one of the Soviet factories not far off the southernmost tip of Haida Gwaii.13 The Soviet assault had tripled, with the Vladivostok and Dal’nii Vostok joining the Aleut and Sovetskaia Rossiia in the North Pacific. But the runaway expansion quickly exhausted itself. The fleet could hardly find any humpbacks after 1965.14

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Of course, the whales also disappeared nearly completely from the Canadians’ catches. Nor did many come back to Hawaiʻi. Where around 10,000 humpbacks can be seen today, observers in the 1970s estimated only 250 to 600 animals were present.15 Contemporaries pointed to the Soviet whalers and the 3,400 humpbacks they reported killing to the IWC in 1962 and 1963.16 Actually, they had killed in excess of 7,000, more than 59 percent of which had been pregnant. The scientist Alfred Berzin, who sailed with the fleets, described the transformation of North Pacific waters like this: “In the early morning there was a ‘forest of humpback whale blows from horizon to horizon around our science vessel. But in a few years in this area one could find only floating humpback whale carcasses (without skin and blubber) from horizon to horizon.”17 It was a mirror image of the Antarctic Area V disaster of 1959–1963, when the humpbacks that migrated past Australia and New Zealand had mysteriously disappeared. The Soviet fleets hadn’t stopped with humpbacks. Two years after Rex Thomas had seen the first catcher boat in Umnak Pass, another Soviet catcher killed fourteen protected gray whales in that same area, within sight of land. The Soviets killed another 124 in the Bering Sea in 1967. The fleets had also started targeting rare North Pacific right whales in the Sea of Okhotsk, killing more than two hundred each year in 1963 and 1964, and 126 in one aggregation in the Sea of Okhotsk in 1976.18 Later surveys estimated that less than thirty of those animals remained afterward.19 Bowheads, too, fell to the Soviet whalers, unreported, in the hundreds in the North Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk. The Soviets had settled their historical scores: grays, right whales, and bowheads were the same whales that had drawn American whalers to Siberian shores in the 1840s. The whales that had been killed in such numbers that Russian imperial authorities complained of American immorality. They were now the whales that helped feed the Soviets’ expansion into waters Americans considered their own and the whales whose remnants the Soviets seemed determined to eliminate in Russian oceans. Had the Soviet Union reversed the course of history, or rather brought about its culmination? The emerging, unexpected picture of widespread whale population collapse in the North Pacific set off alarms for Western governments wanting to protect their own whaling stations. Unlike in the Antarctic, where many nations had been intensively whaling since the 1920s, here it seemed abundantly clear that the Soviet expansion, along with contemporary Japanese increases, were to blame. To manage the clear collapse— and given

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the continued weakness of the IWC— Canada, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union called special meetings in Honolulu in 1966 and 1967. There, Japan argued against “any proposal which aims to set Japan’s total catch quota . . . on a parity with the Soviet Union’s total pelagic catch quota, because such proposal is totally in disregard to the past historical catch records etc. of the two nations.”20 The Japanese were trying to extend whaling’s history, reminding the Soviets again of the decades of their oceans being ransacked by others. To a country premised on the need to bring history to an end, no argument could have been more calculated to infuriate. The Soviets countered with their own conceit: that their whalers followed the advice of scientists, while the Japanese did not.21 Meanwhile, Canadian representatives noted that unlike the Soviet fleets, its shore station at Coal Harbour could not move its operations when whales grew scarce. Thus, they and their US counterparts proposed setting aside a coastal zone reserved for their hunting alone, an idea that held no appeal for the Japanese or Soviets.22 As a result, the Honolulu meetings yielded no agreement on a North Pacific quota for fin whales, the species with the most remaining commercial promise. Participants did recommend to the IWC that humpback and blue whale catches be prohibited, which they were after 1966.23 Not that this mattered much to the Soviet Union. In addition to continuing to take humpbacks, they also continued to kill North Pacific blue whales every year through 1972, without reporting any.24 In the middle of writing this chapter, I joined a whale-watching cruise out of Monterey Bay, California. I expected to see humpback whales, today again the most common visitors to this summer feeding hot spot. But I was thrilled when, within sight of Pebble Beach golf course, two whirling backs with prominent fins broke the water, followed by a column-shaped spout far higher and thinner than that of a humpback. Two fin whales, the second largest whale species in the world. Their pinwheeling form helped me understand why some writers— erroneously— claim that the English word whale comes from “wheel.” Fin whales had formed the backbone of the Soviet whaling industry in the Antarctic in the 1950s and in the North Pacific in the 1960s. Soviet whalers had described fin whales as particularly callous about their offspring; instead of rushing to their children’s defense when one was harpooned, as humpbacks did, fin whale mothers usually fled. I had a hard time picturing that. The two I was watching were a mother-calf pair and they synchronized their movements perfectly, always

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staying within a few feet of each other. I thought of my own family, whose generations had navigated the same changing world these fin whales had; my father’s first experience with whales came at an Oregon whaling station in the early 1960s, at the height of their slaughter. My own had come in the early 1980s, whale watching in Southern California, only one year before the commercial moratorium came into effect. The pair of fin whales shrank accustomed notions of space and time, connecting the three of us across the leagues of ocean separating us from the Arctic, its summer sun still sustaining their bodies and adding life to this bay. These whales also connected me, and many others who had grown up with the remnant whale populations on the Pacific coast of North America, to the Soviet Union and to the whalers who had followed the animals from Vladivostok all the way to these shores. Over 726,000 fin whales died in the twentieth century, more than any other whale species.25 The Soviets had killed 14,167 out of the 46,000 fin whales taken in the North Pacific, hunting down group after group of fins until they became so rare that they were no longer, in the words of planners, “of industrial interest.”26 Today, however, they are on the rebound.27 The fact is, these whales and their history connect us to a time when almost no one on either side of the Pacific cared about their destruction. Aside from North American and Japanese whalers, some patriotic Alaskan citizens, and the far-out whale lovers, few in the 1960s and early ’70s were really bothered by how many whales the Soviets were killing. Knowledge of Soviet cheating may have mattered very little as well. This can be seen clearly in government responses to the Soviets’ incursions into the northeastern Pacific. In 1970, Clarence Weberg, director of International Fisheries in Alaska, where Soviet whaling had been most intense, saw the presence of Soviet whaling fleets as an opportunity. He hoped the US government might offer assistance to the ships, wondering if “Soviet whaling support activities can be used for ‘trading stock’ in future negotiations.”28 Weberg, in other words, was prepared to welcome Soviet whaleships into American ports as they destroyed the last of the whales that swam in the North Pacific. As the new decade began, to American officials, whales meant little more than possible negotiating leverage. To their and the Soviets’ surprise, this was about to change, and very quickly. For what did Weberg want to trade the last of Alaska’s whales? Fish. In fact, he had first sensed the opportunity for such a trade when negotiators discussing a Soviet– American fisheries treaty wondered whether whales

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counted as “fish” and thus might also be subject to any regulations the countries agreed upon.29 The conflation of fish and whales had a long legal history in the United States, and Russians, too, remanded exploitation and management of cetaceans into their Fisheries Ministry. Humans’ tendency to lump fish and whales together would have profound implications for the fate of the world’s whales, which is why the Soviets soon began trying to separate them. For, less celebrated than their whalers’ global expansion, Soviet fishing vessels had also conquered the ocean. Between 1948 and 1970, the Soviet Union had increased its catch of oceanic fish from 1.6 to 7.8 million tons, and by 1975 they possessed the world’s largest fishing fleet, with about 4,400 ships.30 With 86 percent of its fish taken from the ocean by 1970, this also represented a significant departure from Russia’s customary reliance on freshwater fish caught in its own rivers.31 Most relevant for its whaling industry, from 1960 the USSR had started catching a large percentage of its fish off the US coast. This expensive expansion was supported by a major increase in investment in fishing vessels and processing machinery starting in 1959, the implementation of the plan agreed on during the famous 1956 Congress.32 In some ways, the new fishing fleets resembled the whaling fleets, with large refrigerator ships serving as floating factories for the smaller catcher vessels. They differed, however, from their whaling counterparts, in being far more dangerous, far less sanitary, and— if informers were to be believed— far more corrupt. In addition, fishermen were paid much lower wages than the more prestigious whalers.33 Soviet fisheries expansion into the North Pacific yielded large quantities of Pacific cod, salmon, herring, and halibut, in addition to king crab. The goal of this massive investment was not only to provide fish and fish-based margarine, soap, and textiles for the domestic market, but also to bring in valuable foreign currency.34 Here, the Soviet Union saw some success, exporting in 1975 over 91 million rubles’ worth of fish to nations around the world, especially Cuba and the Ivory Coast in Africa, and another 35 million rubles’ worth of canned fish, principally to Eastern bloc European nations. Between 1966 and 1975, the Soviet Union’s fisheries earned 90 million rubles (4.8 trillion US dollars in 2020) in foreign exchange, some of which came— to the outrage of Alaskan fishermen— from sales on the US market.35 North Americans had detected the Soviet fishing fleets off their shores in 1963, a year after the first sighting of the whalers in Alaska. The year

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1966 was a real turning point, though: the first year when large numbers— twenty-six— of Soviet vessels showed up along the coast of Washington State. They fished for Pacific perch from mid-May, then moved on to hake not far from Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor. The next year, the United States instituted a twelve-mile exclusion zone on their coast, but the Soviet vessels continued to fish near shore.36 As with whales, much of the fishing activity took place in Alaskan waters, and the Soviet boats’ tendency to accidentally destroy US crabbing and halibut gear was especially aggravating.37 In 1963, Alaska’s governor, William Egan, called for more US naval warships to the “Alaskan Sea Frontier” to police the 155 “Red Ships” seen off Kodiak Island. Senator Bartlett reported that there “are more Russians surrounding the U.S. in fishing boats than Soviet soldiers in Cuba and that they pose a greater threat.”38 An old idea soon cropped up— the Russians were not only trespassing, but were also particularly ecologically reckless. A Russian-speaking Estonian immigrant to Alaska was able to listen in to Soviet fishing conversations, and he reported that they were dumping large amounts of dead perch back into the ocean because of difficulties delivering them to the factory ships.39 Some feared that armed confrontations between US crabbers and Soviet trawlers were imminent.40 The Soviet fishing expansion was provoking far greater outrage than had the appearance of whaling vessels. Meetings with Soviet fisheries officials largely resolved conflicts around gear, but as more Soviets vessels continued arriving on West Coast shores, local fishermen lobbied for more protection.41 In 1970, they petitioned Washington State Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson to exclude Russian fishers from the West Coast entirely, with many hoping for a two-hundred-mile limit, similar to the exclusive economic zones that many other countries around the world had by then instituted.42 According to the fishermen, the Soviet boats fished twenty-four hours a day, and sometimes five boats side by side, dwarfing American fishing power and posing a real threat to the smaller American boats. Afraid of being run over by the four-hundred-foot-long mother ships, the Americans had to leave the fishing grounds— grounds they considered their own.43 Senator Magnuson, a fierce protector of Pacific Northwest interests, emerged as the strongest voice against Soviet fishing in American politics. In 1973, he did propose a two-hundred-mile territorial limit to the US Congress. He knew his proposal had no immediate chance of success, since the US tuna industry wanted to maintain access to South American coastal

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waters and blocked any attempts to nationalize the oceans. But, timing the proposal to coincide with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s visit with President Richard Nixon, Magnuson sent a signal that the United States was prepared to take serious action against Russian fishing.44 Magnuson and other West Coast senators put some teeth behind their threats. In 1971, the US Congress had passed the Pelly Amendment to the 1967 Fishermen’s Protective Act, allowing the country to restrict imports from foreign nations whose citizens fished in what the United States considered “a manner or under circumstances which diminish the effectiveness of an international fishery conservation program.” While initially directed neither against the Soviet Union nor whaling, the amendment lent itself well to combat both. US officials first threatened to invoke it in 1974, after both Japan and the USSR objected to the IWC’s quota of five thousand Southern Hemisphere minke whales. But the move was largely a feint. The Ford administration feared what an actual embargo on fish would mean for American consumers, and hoped mostly that the threat would “lead to a more positive attitude in the June meeting of the IWC.”45 It worked. Japan and Russia scrambled to reduce their planned whale kills, and in early 1975, President Gerald Ford declined to enact sanctions.46 The Pelly Amendment threat had been effective because, behind its confident fisheries expansion, the Soviet Union was in fact panicking. Despite increasing revenues from its new oil fields in Western Siberia, and despite friendlier commercial relations with the West, by the mid-1970s the Soviet economy was faltering. Relying ever more on imports to provide the quality consumer goods they were not producing, the Soviet Union had turned to exporting mainly raw materials— oil, gold, timber, and now fish.47 It was critical that these sectors continue to bring in hard currency. From inside the Kremlin walls, things looked grim. On June 13, 1975, Fisheries Minister Ishkov called his colleagues together for a sobering survey of the state of Soviet fisheries. “From all sections,” Ishkov reported glumly, “the Far East, the North, and the West— it’s very unpleasant.” Despite the increasing catches, fishing had problems with profits. Having sunk heavy expenditures into the fleet, Fisheries needed to convert to a “stringent economical regime” on board while expanding the sale of fish as much as possible.48 But with the fishing expansion so dependent on access to distant oceans, global politics posed uncontrollable threats. Earlier that year, at the Geneva Conference on the Law of the Sea, world leaders had seriously discussed a universal two-hundred-mile territorial limit, an outcome as worrying to

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At the podium, Fisheries Minister Aleksandr Akimovich Ishkov— nicknamed the “eternal” minister for his long dominance of the ministry— greets returning Odessan whalers. Holding the flag is Igor A. Baranov, then general director of Odessa’s Antarktika organization that ran the Antarctic fleets. Courtesy of Star Publishers, Kherson, Ukraine.

the Soviets as it was to some Americans. If such a zone came into effect and the Soviet fleet had to leave foreign coastal waters, Ishkov predicted, “we will lose everything.”49 Difficult negotiations with the United States around fishing regulations in the North Pacific were to resume in July 1975, with the Soviets desperate to get an agreement.50 And, in previous negotiations, the Americans had made it clear that whales were “of related concern.”51 Perhaps the Soviets, too, were ready to trade whales for fish. For as fishing made its rapid but perilous climb, Soviet whaling was plummeting. The shift to the North Pacific had brought only respite, not relief, from the Antarctic disaster. Presented with more unmistakable signs of decline, after banning the hunting of North Pacific humpbacks and blue whales, the IWC also prohibited sei whales in 1971 (though not in the Western North Pacific until 1975), and then fin whales in 1975.52 In response, the Soviet North Pacific fleet ratcheted up catches of sperm whales while turning to the even smaller Bryde’s whale. Neither species delivered anywhere near the tonnage of fats that the large baleen whales had, though the Soviets did continue to find a market for sperm whale products in Japan. In the Antarctic, sei whale hunting was banned in 1977, leaving only minkes and sperm whales as prey.53 Minke whales, at 12,000 pounds, are hardly

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the “cockroaches of the sea” that Japanese whalers termed them, but they are ten times smaller than the smallest blue whales, thirty times smaller than the largest, and just as expensive to catch.54 Though the Aleut fleet had finally retired in 1967, six Soviet fleets, created to kill tens of thousands of large baleen whales every year, were still prowling the oceans. So, economizing measures ruled the 1970s, with planners looking for ways to cut diesel fuel use as well as the consumer goods made available to whalers.55 In 1975, Ishkov’s Fisheries Ministry asked to be allowed to cut the number of catcher boats in the Antarctic and North Pacific “in order to improve economic indicators in the future.”56 Soon, job losses followed. The Yuri Dolgorukii complained throughout its 1974/75 season that it could not catch enough sperm whales, especially with the Sovetskaia Rossiia nearby, even though it searched up and down the coast of Peru as well as the Antarctic. That year it began experimenting with catching fish.57 It would never return to the Antarctic, nor to whaling— a loss the citizens of Kaliningrad thought of as a “real life tragedy.”58 No wonder, then, that when American officials considered trading Alaskan whales for fish, they quickly discovered they had less leverage than they thought. By the 1970s, they had the clear “impression that the matter [whaling] is not very important to the Soviet Fisheries Ministry.”59 Not only were large whales increasingly scarce and prohibited, but by the 1970s, the Soviet ships had begun better adhering to IWC regulations. This was, in part, because in 1971 the IWC had finally instituted a program of stationing international observers on board whaleships. First proposed in 1955, the Soviet Union had long blocked a vote on the measure.60 The Soviets’ motives to delay were clear: the Soviet cetologist Alfred Berzin had predicted in 1961 that an observer scheme would mean the end of large whale catches, noting that 60 percent of that year’s take had been illegal.61 However, prominent scientists, including Tomilin and Yablokov, strongly supported the international observer scheme, and international oversight became less objectionable as whales disappeared from the ocean.62 Even once observers finally came on board, though, the Soviets and Japanese commonly stationed each other’s observers on board their vessels, ensuring that oversight was never too intrusive. The attitude of Japanese inspector Reichi Kanno, on board the Sovetskaia Ukraina in 1979/80 may be taken as representative: Kanno was, the Soviet crew reported, “goodwilled, friendly and tactful, and really loves Soviet songs.” He found no infractions to report at the end of the season.63

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Still, Soviet observance of IWC quotas improved measurably in the 1970s. Government officials instructed fleet directors in 1973 to “act openly” in interactions with the IWC. Scientists reported internally that Soviet ships now passed up forbidden baleen whales, even if undersize whales remained a problem.64 The IWC, too, was changing. In 1974, members accepted the so-called New Management Procedure, which finally began to manage whales by individual stocks instead of overall population. It also mandated reductions in quotas if scientists found that any individual population was being exploited beyond its maximum sustainable yield (MSY). This system was far from perfect— stock sizes themselves were very difficult to measure, much less their MSY— but it represented huge advances over the old scheme of blue whale units. It was on the basis of this reorganization that Soviet officials in the mid-1970s still talked confidently of “scientific” management of the admittedly much smaller world whale stocks. By 1975, the Soviets had become better citizens of an improved management regime. They had reason to feel confident that their reduced, mostly compliant whaling might continue indefinitely. Fishing was where the real concerns lay. That illusion would be shattered just midway through that year.

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Greenpeace and the View from the Dal’nii Vostok

It was with particular displeasure and concern that, early on a Saturday morning, June 28, 1975, the Kremlin got news that one of its Pacific factory fleets, the Dal’nii Vostok, had been harassed by Westerners in small inflatable boats— or zodiacs— about fifty miles off the coast of California. The zodiacs had even maneuvered in between the catcher boats and sperm whales, trying to keep the Soviet harpooners from firing. The men in the zodiacs had also been equipped with cameras. The zodiacs and the film belonged to Greenpeace, the upstart Vancouver-based environmentalist organization that had gained a measure of fame in the early 1970s by attempting to block US nuclear tests at Amchitka Island, Alaska. That campaign had failed, and Greenpeace had entered a moment of crisis, torn between anti–Vietnam War activists who wanted to keep a focus on the peace, and others— mostly “freaks” and hippies— drawn much more to the green. Casting about Vancouver in 1973 with grandiose but still vague ideas about saving the world from nuclear Armageddon and ecological ruin, Bob Hunter, one of Greenpeace’s intellectual leaders, met Paul Spong, a New Zealand neurobiologist who had studied captive killer whales at the Vancouver Aquarium. Spong, like Yuri Rytkheu in the Soviet Union, knew Farley Mowat and his work protecting whales, and he was moving toward similar— if more mystical— activism.1 One day in early 1974, while Spong played his flute to his favorite captive orca, Skana, Hunter joined them poolside. When Hunter put his hands into the tank to touch Skana, the whale grasped his head with its mouth and held it for a few terrifying, exhilarating moments. Indescribable, irre-

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sistible feelings coursed through Hunter— fear, loneliness, power, awe— leaving him shaken and dazed. “Could it be,” Hunter wondered, “that there were serene super beings in the sea who had mastered nature by becoming one with the tides and temperatures?”2 If so, then the peaceful, intelligent whales’ great tragedy was that they “had not foreseen the coming of small vicious monsters from the land whose only response to the natural world was to hack at it, smash it, cut it down, blow its heart away.”3 It was a moment and an insight that pushed Hunter and Greenpeace more radically, and with more certainty, in a direction they were already moving. From abstract nuclear threats to highly personal whales, from one enemy, the United States, to a new one, the Soviet Union. Had the Soviets known of the frenetic late-night meetings hatching strategy in Vancouver’s hippy enclaves after Hunter’s Skana encounter, they might have been bemused, but not overly concerned. In those months, Hunter and Spong oversaw the transformation of Greenpeace’s mission from combating threats to human survival to a commitment to save other species, regardless of the impact on humans. Greenpeace called this outlook “planetary consciousness,” and it prepared the group to take drastic action. As Hunter wrote, Spong “could see in the destruction of the whales a greater evil than the mere destruction of a given subspecies of humans, of whatever race, religion, or nationality.”4 What, then, were whalers’ wealth and well-being compared to the existential threat facing several species of whales? It was a perspective that would also soon provoke serious tension between the environmentalists and Indigenous people, and one that— however much some Soviets valued whales’ lives— was heresy to anthropocentric Marxism. If, in 1974, the Russian public was reading Tomilin’s In the World of Whales and Dolphins, learning about some of the same ideas of cetacean intelligence that animated Spong and Hunter, they were still far more accustomed to an older style of conservation that prized moderate use and human benefit. To many Russians, and to many other people throughout the globe in 1974, Greenpeace’s obsession with whales’ lives seemed more like decadent self-absorption. Moscow certainly was aware of the growing influence of the environmentalist movement in the West. In 1971, the US organization Friends of the Earth had first presented the idea of a complete whaling moratorium to the IWC, with the Soviet Union present. The following year, thousands of members of environmental NGOs had attended the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, wielding unprecedented influence

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with national governments. In Stockholm, UN members unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution in favor of a ten-year moratorium on global whaling.5 Although Japan abstained from the vote and the Soviet Union boycotted the Stockholm conference entirely, environmentalists’ influence on whaling issues was on global display. When both whaling nations voted down the strong conservation measures proposed at the 1973 IWC meeting, environmentalists focused their ire even more intently on Japan and the Soviet Union.6 More recently, the growing power of environmentalists had hit closer to the Kremlin gates. During negotiations on Pelly Amendment certification, American officials had informed the Soviets that “conservation groups” were keen to use Pelly as a lever to force the USSR to agree to conservation measures at the IWC.7 Indeed, in 1974 environmentalists had called for the first boycott of Soviet goods. Soviet officials admitted they were “concerned about the reactions of Americans towards its whaling industry” and asked that the boycott be delayed.8 For the time being, Moscow avoided any unpleasant repercussions from the growing tide of environmentalist ire. Through 1974, environmentalists seemed mostly to be targeting the Japanese. That year, Spong launched a long-anticipated “whale tour” through Japan, trying to convince the public there to abandon its support for whaling. The “Greenpeace Whale Show,” Spong estimated, reached some thirty million Japanese.9 But the Canadian government’s Tokyo embassy, which was discreetly monitoring Greenpeace’s activities, reported that Spong’s tour was a failure, and that he had departed the country bitter and disappointed. The embassy despaired that the “average” Japanese would “fail to distinguish between Spong position and CDN [the Canadian] position,” a sign that antiwhaling environmentalists still enjoyed little support from their own governments, even as their public profiles gained in stature.10 Spong apparently intended to head to the Soviet Union after the Japan show, but he never made it.11 Instead, under the guise of conducting research on sperm whale biology, he talked his way into viewing the files of Norway’s Bureau of International Whaling Statistics and there discovered the coordinates of the Soviet and Japanese whaling fleets in the North Pacific from the previous year.12 This was just the information Greenpeace needed in order to gain even the smallest chance of completing the audacious operation they were planning: confronting the whaling fleets on the high seas. When Greenpeace piloted the former fishing trawler Phyllis Cormack

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out of Vancouver in April 1975, the mission seemed as starry-eyed and unpromising as its leaders. Despite possessing last year’s fleet coordinates, as well as a Czechoslovak crew member who spoke rudimentary Russian, a sporadically working radio to pick up chatter from the whalers, and some hopeful portents from the I Ching (the Chinese divination tool that some in Greenpeace used religiously), the crew faced daunting challenges. When Greenpeace announced its intentions, the Japanese Whaling Association condemned the voyage and ordered its whaling fleets to avoid a confrontation. Their public relations arm scoffed at Greenpeace: “It is like a religion. It’s not normal.”13 The Soviets, though, maintained a studied silence, a tactic they would adhere to like a religion. Still, Greenpeace suspected the Soviets were on their guard. An acquaintance passed on information that the Canadian government “was feeding Russians regular reports” about Greenpeace’s location, while the Canadian Fisheries Minister expressed support for the whalers.14 But Greenpeace welcomed even the negative press, for it drew attention to their cause even before they located the whalers, or even if they failed altogether. For two months, it seemed they would fail. In May, the crew cruised two hundred miles off Haida Gwaii hoping to intercept the Soviets. They heard Russian voices on the radio but could not tell if they came from whalers, fishermen, or someone else entirely.15 To keep the press interested, Hunter penned a fantastical story about how the voyagers might witness a battle between giant squids and sperm whales (ironically, only Soviet whaleships had been eyewitnesses to such events in the last fifty years).16 The activists waited patiently, though, putting their faith in Spong’s intelligence predicting that the Russians would be whaling off the coast of California in June. On June 18, they swung south, beginning their run for the Mendocino Banks. The International Whaling Commission was just about to begin its annual meeting, in London, scheduled for June 23 through 27. A clash with the Soviets during that week would gain maximum attention. Meanwhile, the Soviet fleets were experiencing a difficult 1975. After leaving Vladivostok, both the Dal’nii Vostok and the Vladivostok had spent the spring catching pollock in the Sea of Okhotsk.17 The crew could not have missed the irony that the once-proud whaling fleet now occupied half the season catching fish less than two feet long. When on May 20 they turned east for Alaska, planners reminded the fleets to beware of tangling with American crab pots and to immediately return to the ocean any gear they accidentally damaged.18 Above all, they needed to avoid antagonizing

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the American capitalists, whose goodwill had become necessary for Soviet prosperity. At the same time, research vessels pushed out ahead, further east and south into the Pacific, in search of new whaling grounds to replace the Gulf of Alaskan and British Columbian whales the fleets had annihilated over the previous seasons.19 Of the two fleets, the Dal’nii Vostok sailed under a particularly evil star. Five separate accidents befell its crew members, none worse than the night when the machinist V. I. Kurilov disappeared at sea after an evening of heavy drinking.20 Kurilov had demonstrated signs of psychosis, but no one had taken any actions to keep him safe. Captain Yu. M. Borisov, decorated the previous year for overfulfilling the plan, was now reprimanded for his weak “political-education work in relation to drunkenness.”21 These were old problems in the fleet. New ones were about to arrive. On June 11, Fisheries Minister Ishkov issued reminders to the whaling fleet that they were to follow the established rules on whale conservation.22 The timing suggests strongly that Moscow knew Greenpeace was closing in, which they were. On June 25, the crew of the Phyllis Cormack spotted a Soviet fleet— not whalers, but fishermen— just outside the twelve-mile limit off the coast of California, their gigantic steel ships dwarfing the small American boats working the same waters. Through one of the American boats, Greenpeace managed to establish radio contact with shore and receive news that Canada, Russia, and Japan had all voted at the IWC to increase whale quotas for the next year. With time running out and only seven beers remaining on board, in desperation they headed further out to sea to find the whalers.23 During the night of June 27, the last day of the IWC meetings, forty miles south-southwest of Cape Mendocino, California, Greenpeace picked up the word “Vostok” on the radio. The next morning, they awoke to the scene they had imagined for months but hardly believed they would ever see. As Hunter described it: On the horizon was a towering gray shape, the factory ship Dalniy [sic] Vostok, some 750 feet long, more like a floating apartment complex than a ship, and spread out, moving in circles like a pack of mechanized wolves, were at least half a dozen white-topped harpoon boats with red-on-black hammer-and-sickle symbols on the smokestacks. They were badly rusted— patchworks of orange anticorrosive splashed on blunted black metal hulls.

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They moved jerkily, swinging around with bursts of smoke, darting forward, stopping, making abrupt course changes: hunting.24

Greenpeace sprang into action. Hopping into three separate zodiacs, eight crew members sped toward the Russian boats. Almost immediately, they came upon a juvenile sperm whale, lying dead in the ocean, eye staring blankly up into the sun. Paul Watson, one the most passionate of the crew, jumped out of the zodiac onto the dead whale. “I felt lost and lonely upon the ocean with that dead whale child,” he later wrote. “I reached up and slowly closed the lid over its vacantly staring eye.”25 Later measured from photographs, the dead whale turned out to be twenty-three feet long, seven feet below the IWC minimum. Scientists on board the Dal’nii Vostok admitted in their report that year that “violations of the IWC rules grow.”26 Ishkov’s warnings to the ship had not sufficed. A Soviet catcher boat roared up to zodiacs, and the crew stared down at the activists. Though they knew about Western environmentalists, the hippies were still a shocking spectacle to the Soviets, their long hair and tatty clothes a rare sight in Moscow, much less Vladivostok. The KGB officially termed hippies “individual representatives of youth who have not entered the labor process and active social life,” and since 1967 a special unit had been actively fighting their domestic influence. Soviet society at large considered them to be apolitical, mostly consumed with cheap booze, deviant sex, and the Beatles.27 Now, seeing the zodiacs appear as if from nowhere early that morning, and hearing the shouts in English, the Soviet whalers must have suddenly realized just how close they actually were to the West. As the catcher boat Severnyi sped close to the zodiacs, its crew lined the decks to catch a glimpse of the protesters. Hunter returned the curious gaze. Drawing closer to the factory ship, he was astonished to see a volleyball net set up. The sight was all the more incongruous since the whale carcasses being winched up the slipway and butchered on decks stank so much that half the Greenpeace crew vomited over the gunwales. Hunter tried to guess the Soviet crew’s mindset: “The Russians— at least the deckhands— were plainly amazed. They had been at sea probably at least a couple of months, routinely going about their business in a battered giant rust-bucket. . . . It was dull, stinking work, with few breaks in the monotony. . . . But now— here was something to break the monotony: a little wooden fishing boat appearing out of nowhere with a strange brightly

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painted sail, and two tiny space-age bullet boats.”28 How could Hunter have known anything of the frenzied socialist competition— tempered, but not extinguished, by the decades— and the presence of some of the world’s greatest whale scientists, including, possibly, Alfred Berzin, who signed that year’s scientific report and would later help publish the details of Soviet cheating?29 If the Dal’nii Vostok’s crew was not yet sufficiently surprised, the Phyllis Cormack pulled alongside the factory ship and, in the calm seas, two Greenpeace activists broke out guitars and began singing: We are whales, living in the sea Come on now, why can’t we live in harmony? We’ll make love above the ocean floor. Waves of love come crashing on the shore.

The Russian crew “started clapping in tune with the music. The lady in the bikini waved.” But when Greenpeace began playing recordings of humpback whale songs, Hunter thought he saw the mood change, first to bewilderment, then to anger. The Czechoslovak George Korotva announced in broken Russian that they were Greenpeace, they represented the United Nations’ call for a ten-year moratorium on whaling, and that they had come to stop the Soviets from whaling. “Get fokked,” came the response from the Dal’nii Vostok, according to Korotva.30 Ending a conversation that was deteriorating anyway, more sperm whales appeared and the Soviet catcher boats resumed their chase. Pursuing the boats at full speed, Hunter and Watson managed to position their zodiac between whale and harpoon. The captain of the Soviet catcher Vlastnyi made a slashing motion across his neck and sped his boat directly toward the zodiac. Barely missing them, the Vlastnyi’s wake pushed Hunter and Watson out of the way. Moments later, a harpooner fired over their heads and killed a large sperm whale. The Soviet fleet then steamed south, faster than Greenpeace’s fishing boat could follow. But having filmed the confrontation, the environmentalists had the video footage that two days later, on June 29, would be shown by news stations around the world. In their living rooms, viewers saw the Soviet harpoon flying over the head of the Greenpeace zodiac and striking the sperm whale. Then they saw a harpooned whale thrashing, its blood filling the sea, as the Soviet vessel winched it in.31 Suddenly, the Soviet Union

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had become the face of modern whaling, an industry whose bloody reality millions of people now saw all too clearly. Witnessing Greenpeace’s triumphant arrival in San Francisco, the chagrined Canadian attaché wrote that the “public relations impact for their anti-whaling cause” had been “highly successful.”32 The unfortunate Dal’nii Vostok steamed back to Vladivostok for repairs not long after meeting Greenpeace, while its fellow Far Eastern fleet, the Vladivostok, continued whaling in the North Pacific for four more months.33 At the IWC meeting that week, the Soviet commissioner I. V. Nikonorov announced that the country would retire one of its three Antarctic fleets (the Yuri Dolgorukii) after the season, part of its “considerably decreased whaling during recent years.”34 But Greenpeace’s meeting with the Dal’nii Vostok had come too late to merit any mention at that meeting. It was left to Joanna Gordon Clark of Friends of the Earth, in her closing remarks to the commission on June 27, to warn “that if the Governments of the world do not take charge of the world’s whales, the moves that have already been begun by nongovernmental groups to take direct action on behalf of the whales are certain to increase.”35 But how had the blow landed in Moscow? The major newspapers, Izvestiia and Pravda, at first completely ignored the event. A few days later, Izvestiia responded obliquely— in the way the Soviet press often danced around inconvenient news— assuring the Soviet public that no one need fear that whales might go extinct, thanks to “timely and decisive measures taken by whaling nations.”36 The following year at the IWC, the Soviets still refused to respond to Greenpeace, at least publicly. That year, 1976, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada did claim jurisdiction two hundred miles out to sea, but treaties still allowed Soviet fishers part of the catch in American waters. Environmentalists made sure not relax any of the pressure to end whaling. At the 1977 IWC meeting in Canberra, Australia, they brought the confrontation directly to the meeting hall. Greenpeace representatives, attending the IWC for the first time, announced to the delegates: “If the International Whaling Commission fails this year” to enact a moratorium, “Greenpeace will be back on the oceans; it will be expanding.”37 This was too much for the Japanese, who complained about the environmentalists’ provocations to the assembly. The Soviets remained silent, still determined to ignore the activists and the swiftly turning tide of global opinion. Forty-four years after the first Greenpeace confrontation, in 2019, during

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an extraordinarily warm Moscow December, I opened recently declassified Soviet government records from 1975. From the time as a kid I first heard about Greenpeace’s story, I couldn’t stop wondering about the Soviets’ reaction to this moment. The Greenpeace confrontations elevated whaling into the signature environmental issue of the late 1970s and early ’80s, with “Save the Whales” buttons and stickers ubiquitous in the West Coast US where I grew up. The global spotlight fell on the Soviet whalers even more intensively than during Solyanik’s days, but now with a punishing glare. As this chapter explains, environmentalists significantly hastened the end of industrial whaling. Clearly, some Soviet officials had felt the pressure, and all the whalers understood they had become international pariahs. But most pursued a stubborn silence. In years of archival research, I had uncovered only a few mentions of these events so portentous for human and whale history. Now, finally gaining access to the deliberations of the highest Soviet officials, I thought I might finally hear them speak for themselves. On my last day in Moscow, I finally located the records from that week in June. The friendly archivist helped me rush an order for the microfilms to be delivered to the reading room that overlooked the Kremlin. But even as I started scrolling through the film and the sun began its early descent, just a day before the winter solstice, I wasn’t sure I would find what I had been seeking. Had Moscow even cared enough about whaling by then to discuss it? But then I saw it: when the Council of Ministers met in the Kremlin on July 3 and 4, 1975, point 62 on their agenda was “Work on Problems and Ferments of Ecology.”38 An unusual way to put it, couched in the Soviets’ habitually indirect language, but certainly about Greenpeace. I scrolled through pages and pages of that day’s deliberations, which recorded the tedium of running an empire and fighting a Cold War. Finally, reaching point 61, I turned the wheel once more, and stared in disbelief: the next page showed point 63. The discussions on “Problems and Ferments of Ecology” had been removed from the microfilm by the censors. Even all these decades later, the Russian state preferred silence. But other evidence does remain. In Moscow, on June 29, the day Greenpeace reached shore, Fisheries Minister Ishkov exploded at his subordinates. The actions of unnamed “heroes,” he began sarcastically, who “continually . . . violate not only the buffer zone, but also the fishing and territorial boundaries of the USA and Canada” were imperiling fisheries negotiations with those countries. “We have to sharpen discipline,” Ishkov

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insisted, “and have to say with our entire voice— the heads of fishing and fishing fleets have to answer for all of these disturbances.” He also demanded to be given a chart of daily updates on the fleets’ positions near the North American coast, and was enraged to hear that some fishing boats had been reporting false locations.39 While Ishkov was not addressing the Dal’nii Vostok’s meeting with Greenpeace, the Fisheries Ministry was clearly on tenterhooks that week regarding any bad publicity in the West. The Soviets’ access to North Pacific fish depended on good relations. The Dal’nii Vostok, part of an increasingly marginal industry and caught red-handed with undersize sperm whales, could be counted among these “heroes,” endangering Soviet access to fish in exchange for inconsequential gain. The Dal’nii Vostok’s meeting with Greenpeace was, for Ishkov, not about whales but about the fish that might be the conflict’s casualty. Ishkov’s headaches soon intensified. To hit more directly at the Soviet economy, in August 1975 Greenpeace attempted to organize a boycott of the Soviet fishing fleet when it came to Vancouver to reprovision two months after the California confrontation. Soviet fishermen contravened it by reassuring the Canadian provisioners that they would not supply whaleships.40 The following year, 1976, Greenpeace’s new ship, the James Bay, waited for the Soviet whalers again off the coast of Mendocino. When the Soviets failed to appear, Greenpeace boasted, with characteristic exaggeration, that “as a result of the international pressure we helped to generate, half the Pacific Ocean is now free of whaling ships for the first time in modern history.”41 In fact, the Soviet fleets that year had decided to concentrate on a newly discovered population of large sperm whales north of Hawaiʻi. Greenpeace discovered one fleet the next month, in late July, eight hundred miles northeast of Honolulu.42 It was again the Dal’nii Vostok. This time the harpooners, instead of menacing the protesters, refused to fire their harpoons in their presence. Hunter speculated orders had come to avoid confrontation, “perhaps at the level of the Kremlin.”43 Though I have never found evidence to corroborate Hunter’s guess, it is likely Ishkov was responsible for this change in response. In August 1977, for a third straight year, Greenpeace found the Soviet whalers in the North Pacific. That year, their zodiacs actually managed to ride up the Dal’nii Vostok’s stern slipway and converse with the stunned crew on board. “The whales are your comrades,” Paul Spong informed them as he handed out Russian-language literature and whale pins.44 A Soviet catcher boat crew even helped another zodiac full of Greenpeace

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Greenpeace Russian translator Rusty Frank (far right), from the boat Ohana Kai, hands out buttons to Soviet whalers aboard the Dal’nii Vostok in 1977. The younger whaler asked to come back with her to the Greenpeace ship. Greenpeace/Rex Weyler.

activists aboard. The encounter apparently divided the crew; many applauded Greenpeace, but the captain intervened with a gesture the activists understood as a stern no.45 That year’s confrontations, finally, prompted the Soviets scientists on board to mention them in their official report.46 Greenpeace’s confrontations seemed to split the official Soviet response as well. The 1976 encounter had been timed especially well, coinciding with the friendly visit of a Soviet naval destroyer to Vancouver, part of a larger attempt to inculcate goodwill toward Russian fishing vessels. But Soviet officials in Canada panicked when presented with news of the Greenpeace encounter north of Hawaiʻi. Nikolai Makarov, chargé d’affaires of the Ottawa Soviet embassy, who was on board the destroyer in Vancouver, suddenly announced to the Canadian press that the Soviet Union planned to stop whaling within two years.47 Two days later, the Ottawa embassy confirmed Makarov’s announcement. And, back in Vancouver, the squadron commander, Rear Admiral Vladimir Varganov, called Greenpeace a “highly respected” organization and claimed, incorrectly, that a similar antiwhaling group existed in the Soviet Union.48 Greenpeace activists were triumphant, concluding that their actions had been “economically crippling” and thanking the Russian government “for listening to the voice

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of its neighbors.”49 Paul Watson was less diplomatic— he was arrested for protesting the Soviet destroyers with a placard reading “Stop the Soviet sea rapers and whale killers.”50 Claims for the imminent end of Soviet whaling no doubt reflected Moscow’s desire not to let whaling scandals jeopardize Soviet access to West Coast fishing grounds. But, in their panic, officials in Canada had gotten ahead of the Kremlin. Fisheries officials quickly denied Makarov and Varganov’s claims, though they conceded that by 1980 they would be doing very little whaling because of the ever-shrinking whale populations.51 Makarov claimed to see no disagreement between himself and Moscow, and now clarified that he did not approve of Greenpeace’s methods.52 Spong cited “other sources,” presumably within Russia, who assured him the two-year timeline was indeed correct and that Greenpeace’s missions were a “large factor . . . in that decision.”53 In fact, internal Soviet rifts about ending whaling predated the Greenpeace confrontations. In early 1974, a group of scientists had asked the party’s Central Committee to look into the question of shuttering the whaling industry completely. The next year, in April 1975, the prominent marine mammologist Aleksei Yablokov proposed to the Fisheries Ministry that they prohibit the catching of female sperm whales, which by then made up a large proportion of the Soviets’ North Pacific catch. Ishkov rejected the idea, retreating to bland assertations that the Soviet Union should do nothing before a “wide discussion” of the matter in the IWC’s Scientific Committee. Instead, he told Yablokov that the ministry would concentrate on publicizing what he claimed were the Soviet Union’s many progressive measures of whale conservation.54 Yablokov’s warning had come only two months before Greenpeace zodiacs would film Soviet vessels and the world would watch footage of them killing undersize sperm whales. After the Greenpeace confrontations, scientists continued to lead the Soviets’ increasing momentum toward ending whaling. In 1978, Viacheslav Zemsky, a top cetacean scientist and Russia’s delegate to the IWC’s Scientific Committee, announced again that the Soviet Union would end whaling in the next five years, first in the North Pacific and then in the Antarctic. Whale products, he explained, had come to play a “minuscule” role in the Soviet economy, even if some parts of the country still depended on them.55 IWC observers from other nations had begun to consider the Japanese, not the Soviets, the principal obstacle to a moratorium, since the Soviets “seemed to think that whaling was no longer economically feasible.”56

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In 1978, the Vladivostok made its last North Pacific whaling voyage, while the Dal’nii Vostok deprived Greenpeace of any more targets by retiring after the 1979 season. Both ships were repurposed as fishing vessels before being scrapped in the late 1990s.57 Remaining Soviet whalers developed Greenpeace paranoia; in 1984, the Antarctic fleet, for example, tried to hide its progress through the Black Sea based on rumors that the activists— in fact nowhere nearby— were waiting for them.58 But Soviet whaling did not end in two years, as Spong’s sources had predicted, or even the five that Zemsky had claimed. Instead, just as the North Pacific momentum slowed to a halt, a new issue arose that would complicate Greenpeace’s ideas about whaling and— in a strange way— bring the story of Soviet whaling back to its beginnings. The first inklings of new controversy appeared at the 1977 Canberra meeting of the IWC, the same meeting at which Greenpeace first addressed Soviet delegates directly, a meeting that some consider the turning point toward passage of the commercial moratorium.59 That year, the IWC’s Scientific Committee proposed setting a zero quota for the aboriginal bowhead hunt in Alaska. The hunt, an important part of Iñupiaq life, had gone on quietly throughout the IWC’s existence, but new fears of declining bowhead numbers brought it new scrutiny. The zero- quota proposal put the United States, hitherto the primary supporter of the moratorium, but also a defender of its citizens’ interests, in an awkward position. After some debate, US officials decided to support the right of Iñupiat in Alaska to kill bowheads— a stance that put the country in opposition with IWC’s scientists and many ordinary Americans. It was also, as Kurk Dorsey has memorably put it, “a bad day for many environmentalists when they were forced to acknowledge that some of the people who were supposed to be leading by example liked to eat the animal that symbolized a planet in peril.”60 Whaling nations seized the opportunity to press their own claims. In order to reach an acceptable compromise, the United States convinced the IWC to call a special meeting in Tokyo in December 1977, where it paired discussions of both bowhead and North Pacific sperm whale quotas. The regulations hammered out in Tokyo allowed a limited bowhead hunt in exchange for raising the sperm whale quotas in the North Pacific, from 763 to 6,444, allowing the Soviet fleets much larger final kills before it retired. It seemed to many that the United States had sold out its support for the moratorium, which had appeared imminent.61 Even though sperm whale hunting would be banned entirely just a year later, the bargain, as

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environmentalists complained to the US Congress, “effectively neutralize[d] the U.S. on most whaling issues” and relieved pressure on the Japanese and the Soviets.62 The agony of the world’s whales would continue for another decade. Environmentalists soon identified a new Soviet target: that country’s own Indigenous hunt in Chukotka, across the Bering Strait from Alaska. This final theater of confrontation between environmentalists and Soviets would bring to the surface some deep contradictions both sides had preferred to ignore. For the Soviets, Chukotka represented a cherished link with traditional whaling, but was also a showpiece for the promises of industrialization and central planning. In the 1960s, as part of a reorganization of Indigenous life throughout the Soviet Union, planners had consolidated Native villages into larger, urban conglomerations. Though hooked to the electric grid and provided central heating, many of the consolidated towns were located in places unsuited for subsistence hunting and gathering, and Indigenous nutrition and tradition often suffered.63 In the new cities, unskilled labor, mink farming, and the sale of marine mammal products on the Russian market increasingly replaced subsistence hunting. Soviet planners, citing the high numbers of whales Chukchi hunters struck and then lost, decided the time was ripe to step in and do the job for them. In 1969, Moscow assigned a modern catcher boat (the Zvezdnyi), captained by Russians, to catch gray whales and deliver the meat and fat to the consolidated towns.64 This ended the Chukchis’ thousands-years-long tradition of whaling for themselves. Soviet whaling officials congratulated themselves for their humane actions, which they claimed were more efficient, resulted in fewer whales actually being killed (because the modern catching boat almost never lost its prey), and relieved Chukchi collective farmers of the “rigorous and dangerous job” of whaling.65 In truth, Chukchi responses were mixed. Some welcomed this kind of modernization, happy to have a reliable supply of whale meat deposited on shore every year and divided according to “traditional norms of sharing and cooperation.” Others found the loss of subsistence practices, traditional skill, and communal ventures frustrating, even demoralizing.66 Meanwhile, from 1977, a new generation of talented Soviet cetologists, including Igor Krupnik and Lyudmila Bogoslovskaya, initiated a long-term project of chronicling Chukchi and Yupik whaling history, tradition, and lore. Muddying any hard distinction between modern and Indigenous whaling, the captain of the Zvezdnyi, L. M. Vtorogov,

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also helped document traditional Chukchi whaling practices, and provided interested Chukchi with new information about whale migration patterns far from their shores.67 Yuri Rytkheu’s novels celebrating long-standing Chukchi relationships with whales also appeared around the same time. The Soviet Union, bent for so long on uncompromising modernization, finally turned its interest to traditional whaling— just as it was eliminated. For many years, Chukotka had also been part of a never-resolved IWC debate about what constitutes “aboriginal” or “subsistence” whaling. During the commission’s first gathering in 1946, the late-arriving Soviet delegation made only one serious demand: that an exception to the ban on gray whale hunting be made for the Chukchi, who depended on the species for food.68 IWC commissioners assured the delegation that subsistence kills were still allowed, but the Soviet representative pressed for further clarifications. Explaining that whaling was very difficult in the North Pacific, he noted that sometimes the Soviets used modern catcher boats to kill whales on behalf of the Chukchi.69 This request was contrary to the prevailing notion of aboriginal subsistence, which insisted on the use of “traditional” technology, forbidding the use of firearms and motorized boats.70 But to satisfy the Soviets, the commission quickly rearranged its wording to forbid only “industrial treatment.” This was a significant change in global conceptions and legislation of Indigenous whaling. In 1980, an IWC Working Group had again broadened its definition of aboriginal whaling to include “trade in items which are by-products of subsistence catches.”71 The whale meat that the Chukchi fed to their mink farms probably qualified as subsistence under this definition. But not in the eyes of environmentalists. In the early 1980s, they began asking what the Chukchi were doing with the nearly two hundred gray whales the Soviets were taking on their behalf. The number seemed far too large to feed the small human population.72 Accustomed now to secrecy, Soviet officials and scientists carefully avoided giving clear information about Chukchi whaling, even though an honest accounting of the mink farms might have satisfied the IWC.73 In truth, probably nothing would have satisfied environmentalist organizations that had increasingly come to oppose whaling in any form. And, regardless, the Soviet Union remained an appealing target. Paul Watson, a veteran of the earlier Soviet campaigns and now head of his own breakaway organization, Sea Shepherd, attended the 1980 IWC meeting, where he learned that the Soviets were refusing to allow international inspectors

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into Chukotka. Watson also says he established contact around that same time with the Soviet marine mammologist Aleksei Yablokov, who had long spoken out against irresponsible whaling, and who confidentially agreed with Watson that the Chukotka gray whale hunt violated IWC rules and was unnecessary.74 Again, Soviet scientists were playing a key, but mostly hidden, role in ending industrial whaling. Following the 1980 IWC, Watson developed a plan more audacious even than the open-sea confrontations with the Soviets in the 1970s. He would pilot his boat, the Sea Shepherd, directly to Chukotka, which had been strictly off-limits to foreigners since 1946. There, Watson would again position himself between the Soviet whalers and their prey. In 1981, raising money and recruiting volunteers on the fly, he sailed up the North American west coast to the Alaskan town of Nome, and then, on August 9, crossed the Bering Strait. Failing to locate the Zvezdnyi, he quickly directed a switch to an even riskier strategy— he landed zodiacs full of untested volunteers on shore at the Chukotkan village of Lorino. As Watson described the scene the crew encountered: Piles of fresh whale meat littered the area with some very un-aboriginaltype women employed with hacking the hunks of meat into smaller pieces with some mean-looking flensing knives. We were close enough to see their blondish hair and backs with bandanas and to notice some of them had blue eyes. So much for the aboriginal justification for the hunt. The amazing part was that the women seemed completely unconcerned with our presence.75

As soon as the locals realized that these visitors were not the Soviet scientists they had probably taken them for, they called the military, which arrived in helicopters shortly thereafter. When the environmentalists retreated, film in hand, the Soviets hurried a naval ship out to intercept them and demand surrender. At the crucial moment, just as it seemed the Soviets might fire on the Sea Shepherd, Watson reported that a gray whale broke the surface between the ships.76 The Soviets retreated; Watson thanked the whale, and the Sea Shepherd was free.77 The Sea Shepherd distributed pictures of the mink farm proving that not all whale meat was going to human consumption, but the story attracted little attention. So, in 1983, Watson’s former organization, Greenpeace, repeated the invasion of Soviet soil. This time, they made sure to be arrested

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by landing their zodiacs on shore near the mink farm and handing out antiwhaling leaflets. The internment of seven of the activists in a Chukotka prison made them, briefly, global celebrities.78 Told they faced prison terms of up to seven years, in fact their captivity turned out not to be too frightening. The “Siberian Seven” received frequent visits from curious Chukchi and were fed hearty bowls of soup that all agreed was delicious. Only later were they told the soup had contained whale meat. Guards tried to reassure them that the whaling was, in fact, done for the benefit of the Chukchi, but otherwise seemed unconcerned with Greenpeace’s antiwhaling activities.79 To everyone’s surprise, after just seven days, the Soviet Union handed them over to Alaskan officials in the middle of the Bering Strait. Two months after the handover, the Soviet military would shoot down a Korean airliner that had violated Russian airspace not far from Chukotka. The Siberian Seven had been exceptionally fortunate. But that good fortune ended upon their return to American soil. Alaskan Iñupiat and Yupik who were attempting to reestablish links with long-lost relatives in Chukotka were incensed by Greenpeace’s actions. They feared that such a brazen violation of Russian borders would lead the Soviets to mistrust their own intentions. They also thought Greenpeace’s antiwhaling provocations might imperil Alaskan Native whaling’s tenuous existence. “Don’t you consider the local people or what they might say?” one community member, Jenny Alona, asked in a pointed letter to the crew. This forced the activists into an uncomfortable reckoning. As one crew member, Nancy Higgins, admitted, “I understand [the importance of whaling to them] much more than I did. . . . We have to respect human rights as well as the rights of whales. I don’t know what the answer is in terms of the whales, but I do know that the whale is very important for those people to live.”80 During his time in Nome, Watson, too, had incensed Iñupiaq whalers, revealing some of the limits of their campaigns’ appeal. Soon after the 1983 Lorino campaign, Greenpeace renounced its opposition to Indigenous whaling, though Sea Shepherd’s position only hardened.81 The years of environmentalist action against whaling had changed both sides, while revealing that the Soviet Union’s whaling heritage encompassed more nuance than Westerners had understood.82 In fact, the two Lorino campaigns and the issue of Indigenous whaling had served, more than anything, to defuse the pressure on Soviet whaling. In 1982, Billy Neakok, an Iñupiaq whaler from Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), Alaska, wrote to US President Ronald Reagan objecting to the enforcement

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of what he considered that year’s punitively low IWC bowhead quota. He also sent a copy of the letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, telling Reagan that he had kept the Soviets informed for the purposes of “détente.”83 The real reason was yet another delicious irony in the history of Soviet whaling: Alaska Native whalers were prepared to court Soviet support in order to pressure the US government in defense of their own autonomy. The environmentalists had brought the Soviet Union and Alaska’s Native population into de facto alliance— a brief, belated fulfillment of the Russians’ anticolonial aspirations that had animated Russian whaling ventures from the Russian-Finnish Whaling Company to the Aleut, but which had so foundered in Chukotka. Neakok’s letter came just a few months after the IWC reached its most momentous decision. In 1982, ten years after its first proposal, the IWC voted to enact a moratorium on commercial whaling, to come into effect after the 1985/86 whaling season. But the decision had hardly settled the matter. Japan and the Soviet Union filed objections to the moratorium and thus, by the rules of the convention, were not bound by it. In 1983, the Soviet commissioner chided the IWC for not sticking to its science, which did not support the need for a complete moratorium. Commissioner Nikonorov placed the blame for the decision on the “various ‘anti-whaling campaigns,’” whose demands for the total banning of whaling “distract our attention from a deep ecological crisis” taking place more broadly in the oceans.84 Many Western whale scientists privately shared the Soviets’ frustration.85 With the United States compromised by its support of bowhead whaling and environmentalist campaigns picking controversial targets, the last vestiges of Soviet whaling seemed locked in indefinite limbo. But, although no one suspected it in 1983, the Soviet Union already stood on the brink of its own extinction. In early 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded the hardline Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev was comparatively youthful and surprisingly idealistic for a country that had grown increasingly cynical about its own commitment to Marxism-Leninism. And while he possessed little background in environmental issues, his commitment to defusing the Cold War through cooperation with the capitalist West opened him up to new ideas. The 1986 meltdown and massive release of radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear plant helped Gorbachev, and many others in the Soviet Union, realize that the country’s environmental protections were woefully inadequate.

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Gorbachev never publicly commented on his country’s whaling fleet, but unofficial discussions with the United States about whaling were frequent. From at least 1980, pushed by environmentalists, officials at the US embassy in Moscow pressed the Soviet Fisheries Ministry to end the industry.86 The US also had a new tool at their hands. In 1979, frustrated with American presidents’ reluctance to use the Pelly Amendment, Oregon Senator Robert Packwood had successfully passed a new amendment allowing the US Congress to automatically cut fisheries allocations to foreign countries violating conservation treaties, without waiting for presidential certification.87 Pelly was now the Packwood- Magnuson Amendment, and it was no longer just a bluff. By Gorbachev’s time, the Soviets were catching only small minke whales in the Antarctic— a species almost everyone agreed existed in great abundance, and was perhaps even increasing with the decimation of the larger whales. But in 1985, the US Congress determined that the Soviets’ Antarctic catch of 2,762 minke whales had been excessive, and they detected in Russia “no commitment to bring itself into present or future compliance with IWC decisions.”88 In fact, the Soviet catch had not exceeded the overall Antarctic quota established by the IWC, but Soviet whalers had taken more than the share they had agreed on with Japan.89 Nonetheless, on April 1, 1985, the same month Gorbachev came to power, the US Congress invoked the Packwood- Magnuson Amendment to reduce Soviet fishing allocations in its waters by 50 percent. A year later they eliminated the other half as well. Whaling had finally cost the Soviets their fish.90 Ishkov, who had feared this outcome since 1975, was spared the responsibility. Like Solyanik years before him, he had been caught in a corruption scandal, the so-called fish mafia case of 1979, in which he and others had been found to be stealing expensive caviar from government stores. Unlike Solyanik, Ishkov escaped arrest through Brezhnev’s clemency, but was living out the last two years of his life as a pensioner when Soviet fishermen were finally forced to leave US waters.91 The combined pressure of the US Congress, the global media— and the environmentalists influencing both— finally paid dividends. Before the IWC’s 1985 meeting in Bournemouth, England, the Americans feared the Soviets might withdraw altogether from the commission because of the moratorium. Instead, in a surprise statement, USSR Commissioner Nikonorov announced, finally, the Soviets’ acceptance that whaling was over:

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The Soviet delegation is authorized to inform the International Whaling Commission about an important decision of the government of the USSR. The Soviet Union plans a temporary stop in the Antarctic commercial whaling from 1987/1988 season due to technical reasons.92

ECO, the environmentalists’ mouthpiece at the IWC, was delighted: “For a one-time hardline whaling nation,” they wrote, “that’s pretty good.”93 It was, but Nikonorov had left the door open for a return. So, over the next several years, the US Department of State continued to insist that the United States would not allow Soviet fishing in American waters until the Soviets formally dropped their objection to the IWC moratorium.94 In April 1987, a delegation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) undersecretary, Antonio Calio, met with Soviet counterparts in Moscow. The Soviet Union met that spring with uncharacteristic indecision, the future of Gorbachev’s reforms uncertain, cracks already showing in the union, hardliners gathering strength for a response. Meanwhile, environmentalists were enjoying unprecedented influence in the Kremlin. The marine mammologist Aleksei Yablokov, Paul Watson’s informant and a longtime opponent of the Fisheries Ministry, had been named chair of the “Commission on the Protection of Nature.” Longsuppressed environmental problems were coming to light, threatening to destabilize the country further. Later that summer, residents of the Russian city of Kirishi would stage mass protests demanding the shutdown of the local chemical plant, which had killed dozens of their children over its decades of operation.95 After Calio’s meeting with representatives from the Ministry of Fisheries, he continued to the airport, ready to depart. There, Vyacheslav Zilanov, a former fishing boat captain from Murmansk and now head of the ministry’s foreign affairs department, pulled Calio aside for a private talk. He told Calio that a decision had been made “at the highest level, above the Ministry of Fisheries,” to immediately cease all whaling, except aboriginal. Many “senior scientists,” including Yablokov, had supported the decision.96 Was Gorbachev himself this “highest level”? Perhaps the new cadre of environmentalist politicians had taken advantage of the growing ruptures in the Soviet bureaucracy? Greenpeace boasted that the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had told them in advance this decision was coming.97 Whoever made the decision, it accomplished what the So-

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viets wanted most: they were again allowed to fish in American waters. There were few better markers of how dramatically the world had changed since the Greenpeace protests. If at the beginning of the 1970s Americans had been ready to trade Alaskan whales for fish, a decade and a half later, few questioned the rightness of trading fish for Antarctic minkes. During the 1986/87 season, Odessa’s Sovetskaia Ukraina, the final remaining Soviet factory ship, caught 3,028 minke whales in the Antarctic.98 At 9 o’clock in the morning on April 11, 1987, ten days before Zilanov spoke with Calio, the last whale was harpooned. A minute of silence followed, and then a bouquet of flowers was thrown into the ocean in the memory of dead whalers.99 Some several dozen Soviet whalers had perished at sea since the Aleut killed its first whale in October 1932. During that same time, at best count, 541,766 whales, who received no commemoration, had died from Soviet harpoons. Altogether, Soviets had taken roughly one of every six whales killed in the twentieth century, despite missing the large Antarctic hunts of the 1910s to the 1930s. After World War II, when 99 percent of their own kills took place, the Soviets had been the world’s most prolific whalers, and the only whaling nation to kill every species of whale they came across, regardless of whether the animal they targeted was one of the last scattered members of its tribe.100 The Soviets were taking stock themselves of this history, and its conclusion. On board the Sovetskaia Ukraina, the cetologist Nikolai Doroshenko noted ruefully that the environmentalists, especially Greenpeace, had managed to overrule scientific opinion at the IWC to enforce a moratorium rather than a sensible quota; there were still minke whales, and plenty of them, to be caught in the Antarctic.101 Andrei Rukhliada, vice director of the Sovetskaia Rossiia during its spectacular illegal hunting spree in the early 1960s, thought scientists and economics, along with environmentalists, had all played important roles: “The effectiveness of hunting fell dramatically. Biologists of many nations sounded the alarm, and the ‘Green’ movement joined them.” As history had shown, none of these factors alone would have been enough to stay the Soviets’ hands. Rukhliada added a bittersweet postscript: “The last epoch of whaling had come to an end, but in the hearts of whalers and many inhabitants of Vladivostok and Odessa . . . the memory of this period will last forever.”102 That memory, though, was already being contested. Children in Vladivostok were no longer throwing rocks at whales. Muscovites on the subway were reading books written by their own scientists about friendly whales

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T-shirt commemorating the Joint Soviet– American Operation to Save the Alaskan Gray Whales.

and dolphins. Staff on the last Antarctic whaling flotilla, still singing “My Odessa,” could barely stomach the sight of killing. They, too, had played an important role in bringing this story to an end. The forces that had defined the history of Soviet whaling met one last time the year following the Sovetskaia Ukraina’s last hunt, this time in completely unexpected ways. In October 1988, three gray whales became trapped in the ice north of the village of Barrow, Alaska. Discovered by three Iñupiaq whalers, who decided after some discussion not to kill them, the whales’ desperate plight captured the imagination of whale-loving Americans and large parts of the rest of the globe. News media covered the story every night. Greenpeace activists flew north to try to help rescue the whales. They also put in action the plan that would ultimately save two of the three whales. Greenpeace’s Washington office sent a telex to contacts

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in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, asking that a Russian icebreaker smash open an escape route into the ice-free Bering Sea. Arthur Chillingarov, who in 1997 would famously plant the Russian flag at the bottom of the ocean under the North Pole, okayed the request from the Soviet whalers’ old nemesis.103 Though the smallest of the whales died under the ice, the other two were able to navigate their way through the hole the Soviet ship created and into the open ocean. Just a year after concluding their own commercial whaling (and with an aboriginal hunt killing gray whales still ongoing), the Soviets had become whale savers in league with Greenpeace. Fittingly, the Vladivostok ship that finally freed the whales was the Vladimir Arsen’ev, namesake of the Far Eastern explorer, scientist, and onetime marine mammal specialist who conducted the research crucial for the beginning of the Soviet whaling industry in the 1920s, and who also warned that whaling had never been carried out sustainably. In a sense, the two gray whales that survived their encounter with the ice that year had Arsen’ev to thank for their good fortune. They might have also blamed him in part for the fifty-five previous years of torment of their ancestors and kin around the world— surely among the worst fortunes any creature has ever experienced.

CONCLUSION

In May 1994, seven years after the Sovetskaia Rossiia returned for the last time to Odessa, three white-haired Russian scientists arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to attend the forty-fifth meeting of the International Whaling Commission. They were not very many miles away from the first Soviet whale catch, at the offshore Islas Revillagigedo, in 1932. The exotic sounds of reggae and the unfamiliar glare of the tropical sun streamed into their seaside hotel. Greenpeace was in town, too, staging a huge event on the beach nearby, still advocating for better whale protection.1 The scientists had filled their suitcases with bottles of vodka and Russian bread, comfort foods that helped tether them to home in this distant land. And, just like thousands of Soviet whalers before them, they would pack the empty suitcases full of foreign goods to sell back in Russia and impress family and friends. The men nervously checked their papers and prepared for one of the biggest moments of their lives. All of them had been abroad before. Dmitri Tormosov, Viacheslav Zemsky, and Yuri Mikhalev had all docked at foreign ports during their time working on board whaleships. But those visits had all been carefully controlled, planned by others and watched by the KGB. Now the Soviet Union was gone, relegated to the dustbin of history. No one was watching the scientists during their trip to Mexico. And while whales had again drawn them abroad, this time the Russians had come for a very different purpose. Commercial whaling had ended, and whale populations around the globe were recovering. Some— like Northern and Southern Hemisphere humpbacks— were rebounding remarkably quickly. Others, like

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blue and fin whales, were barely coming back at all. But the Russian scientists knew that some unfinished business from the decades of industrial whaling remained. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, new possibilities had opened up. For a few short years, the Russian state pursued a policy of exceptional transparency, throwing open secret archives to domestic and foreign researchers alike and admitting to a host of sins from the Soviet era. The cetologist Aleksei Yablokov had played a prominent role in this phenomenon. In 1988 he had established Greenpeace’s first office in the Soviet Union, and gained a reputation as “grandfather of Russian environmentalism.”2 As it had for Gorbachev, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident shook Yablokov particularly hard, and he worked tirelessly and courageously to research and expose the huge amounts of nuclear radiation the Soviet Union had blithely dumped into the surrounding oceans. He also possessed some of the secret Soviet whaling data and knew others who had more. One of those was Dmitri Tormosov, an unassuming marine biologist from Kaliningrad and an old acquaintance of Yablokov. Working dutifully on board the Yuri Dolgorukii for thirteen years, Tormosov collected socalled whaling passports, true records of the size and sex of every whale the ship caught. Horrified by the loss of scientific data when the records were falsified and the originals thrown away, Tormosov preserved the passports in his basement.3 Over the years, he assembled 57,000 such records— detailed testimony to one fleet’s illegal actions. Tormosov’s collection was unique; trustworthy data from the other fleets had been retained only in part in classified reports. When Yablokov found out about the collection, he asked Tormosov to join a new working group he had formed as Yeltsin’s minister for the environment in 1993. Many in Russia opposed Yablokov’s desire to make the data public, among them powerful figures such as Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, as well as officials at the still-recalcitrant Fisheries Ministry. When Yablokov asked Fisheries for more data, he was told that all the old information had been eliminated. The ministry instructed its branches in Vladivostok and Kaliningrad (Odessa was now part of the independent Ukraine) also to resist any inquiries. Later, Fisheries would even ask the attorney general to launch criminal charges against Yablokov for publishing state secrets. But, Yablokov found powerful protectors in his fellow academician, the minister of environmental protection, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, as well as Yeltsin. To gather data on whaling falsifications, Yablokov called

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on old friends and trusted scientists such as the sperm whale specialist Alfred Berzin and the Antarctic experts Yuri Mikhalev and Viacheslav Zemsky to join him and Tormosov.4 Together, they looked through whatever data they had retained with the intention of finally revealing the scale of Soviet illegal whaling to Russia and to the rest of the world. They were, however, desperately short of money. Russia was in full economic collapse by 1993, with the “shock therapy” instituted by the Yeltsin government destroying the remnants of Soviet production without yet rebuilding anything in their stead. Many Russians were being paid in theater tickets instead of cash, and Russian scientists were suffering as much as anyone. Here Yablokov’s long-standing contacts with Western scientists, and in particular his old friendship with the American cetologist Bob Brownell, saved the project. Convincing colleagues at the US State Department that the world needed to know about the Russian data, Brownell helped organize funding for the scientists.5 That is how Tormosov, Mikhalev, and Zemsky all found themselves with tickets to Mexico in 1994, about to reveal one of the Soviet Union’s darkest secrets.6 When the IWC’s Scientific Committee met in Puerto Vallarta, the revelations poured out. Zemsky led the report, which focused on the Soviets’ secrets catches in the Antarctic.7 The new information invalidated most of the data that IWC scientists had relied on since the 1960s. Based on official catch records, all had assumed that historical whale populations were relatively small and that many species had nearly fully recovered since the moratorium. Now scientists realized many thousands more humpbacks had once lived in the Antarctic than they thought, and that present populations might still be only pale shadows of the past. And, if catches of other species had been similarly underreported, the horrifying levels of destruction might finally provide some solid clues why some populations were failing to bounce back.8 Zemsky, Mikhalev, and Berzin returned to the IWC meeting in Ireland the following year and revealed more information, including from the especially terrible years of the early 1960s. They promised more to come.9 In Moscow, Yablokov and the others published two extraordinary volumes of essays and corrected catch numbers for every species.10 The Russian American marine biologist and dogged researcher Yulia Ivashchenko combed the remaining archival records and unearthed ever-expanding numbers of illegally killed whales. In total, the Soviet Union had killed around 170,000 more whales than they had reported since 1946, or ten

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From left to right: Dmitri Tormosov, Yuri Mikhalev, Yulia Ivashchenko, and Viacheslav Zemsky. The Russian scientists who revealed the extent of the Soviet cheating, along with Ivashchenko, the Russian American biologist who conducted crucial archival research, at a marine mammal research meeting. Aleksei Yablokov was not present, and Alfred Berzin had unfortunately already passed away. Courtesy of Phil Clapham.

times the number of blue whales estimated to be alive anywhere in the world in 2021.11 Scientists realized that the status of nearly every stock of whales had to be reevaluated. The entire history of modern whaling and whales would need rewriting. The 1990s began as a decade of environmental optimism, with Russia participating in a series of global summits. For a few years it seemed like the international community might seriously address its pressing ecological problems, such as the global warming that many were starting to see as an apocalyptic threat. However, that optimism quickly boiled away as lobbies formulated to combat any sort of fundamental change in doing business. A similar disillusionment came over many of the Russian scientists who had exposed Soviet cheating. In the same way Gorbachev had expected his concessions to the West to be reciprocated, they expected their revelations to bring forth the same openness from other nations about their whaling history. Russia had not prostrated itself and bared its soul out of masochism, but out of the hope that a better world could be built out of such painful humiliation. Instead, no one else came forward. Even the Japanese, whom the Soviets were sure had been cheating,

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remained silent. By 1995, Russian delegates at the IWC were asking that Yablokov’s data be deleted from the record.12 Today, the Odessan Mikhalev bitterly resents this lack of reciprocation from Japan and others. Tormosov, on the other hand, regrets nothing.13 Despite the objections, what the Russian scientists managed to save was a painful but essential part of the history of the great whales. Blue whales, fin whales, humpback whales, sperm whales, seis, and minkes everywhere experienced a twentieth century that looked, sounded, and felt so different from the one humans experienced. While humans lived longer and in far greater numbers than ever before, whales went through an unprecedented horror. Nearly every single year from the 1910s through the 1970s they saw and heard hundreds and sometimes thousands of their companions writhing and groaning in pain before dying and disappearing. For a period in the early 1960s, just as human economic growth peaked, the killing came nearly without pause or refuge. The oceans turned red, and, in a transformation that must have been just as strange for the whales, they grew silent. But then, against all expectation, from the 1970s, whale songs slowly began again to fill the oceans. Whales had survived the twentieth century. Without the Soviets’ history, we would never have grasped how deep was the abyss, nor how remarkable the return. The Soviet Union did not survive the twentieth century. And while we can perhaps understand its history without whales, we cannot do so fully. The whales’ story helps reveal how high were Soviet hopes that communism would forge a better relationship with the natural world and how bitterly these hopes were disappointed, but also how deeply some Soviet scientists were able to peer into the lives of whales. Whaling also expressed some of the leitmotifs in Soviet history: resentment over their own late start in whaling, anger at the environmental ruin foreigners had caused in their oceans, and their gnawing suspicion of others’ continued malfeasance. For Russians, history has often been another word for grievance, and that history loomed large in whalers’ imaginations. Finally, whaling helps us make sense of the arc of the Soviet project: whalers’ feverish labor during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras and the corrosive rust the Dal’nii Vostok presented to the Greenpeace zodiacs mirrored important trends in the larger story of the Soviet Union, while pinpointing Khrushchev’s era of optimism as perhaps the most environmentally ruinous. Throughout it all, precarious tensions between economic urgency, collective identity,

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and a persistent recognition that whales were not mere numbers along the path to their fulfillment convinced many Soviets that what they were doing was wrong. Thus, two of the twentieth century’s defining stories turn out to be inversely intertwined. First was the rise, the repeated near destruction, and final fall of humanity’s most utopian experiment, the Soviet Union. Like most of that century’s ventures, it had fed itself voraciously from the nonhuman world. And no species suffered more than those underwater giants who strangely resembled humans, but whose fates twisted in the opposite direction. The leviathans’ desperate struggle to ward off extinction was the century’s second great drama, and it reflected the transposed image of the first. The fall, the repeated near destruction, the return of the whales.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, perhaps more than most, stands on the shoulders of others. Very little of what is related here would have been preserved if not for the heroic actions of the Soviet whale scientists Alexei Yablokov, Dmitri Tormosov, Vyacheslav Zemsky, Alfred Berzin, and Yuri Mikhalev. Both Tormosov and Mikhalev, who are still alive, generously shared with me further details and reminiscences during several interviews. In addition, dozens of former whalers from Odessa, Vladivostok, and Kaliningrad met with me on several occasions, giving me pictures, books, and poems from their own collections. Olga Grynko, Vera Knyazeva, Igor Baranov, Yuri Sergeev, and Yuri Borshchov were particularly helpful. I’ve tried to make sure this book handles their legacy, along with the whales’ history, fairly. Descendants of the whales these men and women hunted inspired me on many occasions, whether going out of their way to find me in the Hauraki Gulf, arriving just in time in the Johnstone Strait, propagating the species in the Bahía de Banderas, being surprised by me near Kodiak Island, eyeing me suspiciously in a Tongan lagoon, or avoiding me altogether in Cook Inlet. Their power, and their elusiveness, inspired this book. I’m sorry for what we did. Others provided crucial help along the way. Yulia Ivashchenko’s pioneering research in Russian archives provided the definitive account of the extent of Soviet cheating. Phil Clapham’s insight into whales’ lives was essential for unlocking important parts of this story. Their generosity with information and their hospitality helped me forgive their love of the Seahawks. Jason Colby provided not only a model of writing about whale history, but also no-nonsense stylistic advice, medicine that went down

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easier thanks to good bourbon. Bathsheba Demuth assisted and inspired, too, as will be apparent on many of these pages. The same is true for Amir Khisamutdinov and Yaroslava Alekseeva. My editor, Joseph Calamia, my agent, Farley Chase, and my copy editor, Johanna Rosenbohm, helped steer the book in far more sensible directions than I was sometimes inclined to take. Others who contributed particularly important information and insight for this book include Paul Watson, Rex Weyler, Alexei Kraikovskii, Jenya Anichenko, Nick and Cheryl Dean, Bob Brownell, Benjamin Beuerle, Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Marco DeJong, Chris Cook, Nancy Foote, Patricia Polansky, Sally Mizroch, Maria Enckell, Ian Halter, Carmel Finley, Rip Bulkeley, Alan Roe, and Graham Burnett. In the archives, I owe special thanks to those whose work too often goes unrecognized. They include Stella Duff and Cherry Allison at the IWC’s charming Red House, as well as others at the Russian State Archive of the Primorskii Krai, the Society for the Study of the Amur Region, the State Archive of the Odessa Region, the State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region, the State Archive of the Kamchatka Krai, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Archives New Zealand, the State Library of New South Wales, the Australian National Archives, the UK’s National Archives, the University of Washington Special Collections, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Alaska State Archives, the University of Alaska– Fairbanks Special Collections, the Dale W. Rice Memorial Library, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the US National Archives, and the Mark O. Hatfield Library. From the halls of academia I must mention Jonathan Scott, Felicity Barnes, Paul Schneider, Rochelle Constantine, John McNeill, David Armitage, Paul D’Arcy, James Beattie, Stephen Brain, Doug Weiner, Andy Bruno, Brett Rushforth, Julie Hessler, Marsha Weisiger, Allison Madar, Curtis Austin, Alessandro Antonello, Ruth Morgan, Adrian Howkins, Julia Lajus, Kevin Marsh, Justin Stover, Matt Romaniello, Ted Melillo, Martin Dusinberre, Mark Sokolsky, Mark Soderstrom, Nick Breyfogle, the Russia and Oceans Reading Group, the Sandefjord Whaling Museum, the University of Zurich, the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, the German Historical Institute, the University of Hawaiʻi, Trinity College in Dublin, and the Columbia University International History Graduate Seminar. Generous financial support came from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the University of Auckland, the University of Oregon, and Idaho State University.

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Outside the world of the university, I am deeply thankful for the refreshment and writing studios provided by Jon and Edie Cutting, Meaghan Balli, Emily Sanchez, Deborah and Sidney Jones, and Helmuth and Janie Jones, and the welcome distractions furnished by Phill, Melissa, Deacon, Greta, Ingrid, Max, and especially Genevieve, Everett, and Wynnee Jones. Red Leviathan is dedicated to the wonderful Hannah Cutting-Jones. She was sitting next to me on an airplane high above the Pacific Ocean at the moment I first conceived of this book. Since then, we have together encountered sperm whales, humpbacks, and orcas, as well as a feast of changes. She is next to me still, two children and a PhD of her own later, our shared life a decade and a half older, mine immeasurably richer.

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ABBREVIATIONS

In citing archives in the notes, abbreviations have generally been used. Archives frequently cited are listed below. Please note that many of the Russian archives are ordered by fond and delo, which do not have direct equivalents in English. ANZ GAKK

GAKO GAOO GAPK NA NAA NARA op. RGADA RGAE

Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kamchatskogo Kraia / State Archive of the Kamchatka Region, Petropavlovsk– Kamchatskii, Russia. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kaliningradskoi Oblasti / State Archive of the Kalningrad Region, Kaliningrad, Russia. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Odeskoi Oblasti / State Archive of the Odessa Region, Odessa, Ukraine. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Primorskogo Kraia / State Archive of Primorsky Region, Vladivostok, Russia. National Archives, London. National Archives of Australia, Canberra, Australia National Archives Records Administration, College Park, MD. opis’ (folder) Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Dvnikh Aktov / Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow. Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhive Ekonomii / Russian State Archive of the Economy, Moscow.

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RGANI RGASPI

TINRO

VNIRO

Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii / Russian State Archive of Recent History, Moscow. Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’noi i Politicheskoi Istorii / Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow. Tikhookeanskii Nauchno-Issledovatelskii Institut Rybnogo Khoziastva i Okeanografii / Pacific Ocean Scientific Research Institute for Fisheries and Oceanography, Vladivostok, Russia Vserossiiskii Nauchno-Issledovatel’skii Institut Rybnogo Khoziastva I Okeanografii / All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Fisheries and Oceanography, Moscow.

NOTES

PREFACE 1

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3

4

5

6 7

8 9 10

Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement from 1971 to 1979 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2011), 223. Charles Homans, “The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century,” Pacific Standard, November 12, 2013. See Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020). Giggs is more pessimistic about whales in the twenty-first century than I am. Robert C. Rocha Jr., Phillip J. Clapham, and Yulia V. Ivashchenko, “Emptying the Oceans: A Summary of Industrial Whaling Catches in the 20th Century,” Marine Fisheries Review 76, no. 4 (2014): 37– 48. See Nick Dean and Cheryl Dean, The Witness Is a Whale (Spindrift Images, Terra Mater Factual Studios, and Mark Fletcher Productions, 2021). Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 142. Yuri Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere: Biology, Whaling and Perspectives of Population Recovery (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019), 43. Yuri Mikhalev, pers. comm., Odessa, Ukraine, August 7, 2017. Rocha, Clapham, and Ivashchenko, “Emptying the Oceans.” See, among others, Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Gerald Elliott, A Whaling Enterprise: Salvesen in the Antarctic (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1998); J. N. Tønnessen and A. O. Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling, trans. R. I. Christopherson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Hiroyuki Watanabe, Japan’s Whaling: The Politics of Culture in Historical Perspective, trans. Hugh Clarke (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2009).

226

N O T E S T O PA G E S x v– 5

11

12

13

Yulia Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling: Past History and Present Impacts” (PhD diss., Southern Cross University, 2013); Bathsheba Demuth, The Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: Norton, 2019). Some particularly insightful works on Soviet relationships with the natural world include Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917–1929 (New York: East European Monographs, 2005); Paul Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013); Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutoniam Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bathsheba Demuth also notes the parallels between these two leviathans. See Demuth, Floating Coast, 304.

CH A P T ER ONE 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16

Ernst C. Webermann, The Whale Fishery in Russia. Part I: A History of the Whale Fishery (Moscow, 1914), 10. George L. Hunt et al., “The Barents and Chukchi Seas: Comparison of Two Arctic Shelf Ecosystems,” Journal of Marine Systems 109–10 (January 2013): 43– 68. Victor Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. Marcia Levenson (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 206. The narwhal’s tusk is actually a tooth. S. E. Kleinenberg, ed., Kitoboinoi Promysel Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow: Izdatel‘stvo Rybnogo Khoziastvo i Okeanografii, 1955), 5. Webermann, Whale Fishery in Russia, 10. Webermann, 15. Webermann, 16. Webermann, 16. Webermann, 21, 22. Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 206. Mikhail Konstantinov Sidorov, “Estestvennieia bogatstva Severa Rossiia,” Mirskoe Slovo 2– 4 (1867), 43. Webermann, Whale Fishery in Russia, 24–26. Webermann, 22; A. Kraikovskii, Iu. Alekseeva, M. Dadykina, and Iu. Lajus, “The Organization of Pomor Hunting Expeditions to Spitsbergen in the 18th Century,” in LASHIPA: History of Large Scale Resource Exploitation in Polar Areas (Grönigen, 2012), 8:1–15. Louwrens Hacquebord, “The Hunting of the Greenland Right Whale in Svalbard, Its Interaction with Climate and Its Impact on the Marine Ecosystem,” Polar Research 11 (1999): 379. Webermann, Whale Fishery in Russia, 23. Alexei Kraikovski, “‘The Sea on One Side, Trouble on the Other’: Russian Marine Resource Use before Peter the Great,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2015): 39, 65.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 –1 2

17

18

19

20

21

22 23 24

25 26

Iu. Bespiatyh, Archangelsk na Kanune i v gody Severnoi Voiny, 1700–1721 (St. Petersburg, 2010), 131. Aleksei Kraikovski, “Profits from under the Water: The International Blubber Market, Russian Monopolistic Companies and the Idea of Whaling Development in the Eighteenth Century,” International Journal of Maritime History 3, no. 1 (2019): 34– 49. Alexei Kraikovski, “Good Fisheries vs. Bad Fisheries: Ideological and Scientific Base for the Governmental Projects of Modernization of Russian System of Marine Harvesting in the Eighteenth Century,” in Environmental History in the Making, ed. Joanaz de Melo et al. (New York: Springer, 2017), vol. 7. M. M. Dadykina, A. V. Kraikovski, and Iu. A. Lajus, Pomorskie Promysly na Shpitsbergene v XVIII— nach. XIX v. Issledovanie. Dokumenty (Moscow: Al’ians-Arkheo, 2017). Alexei Kraikovski, “‘Promysel starat’sia umnozhit’:’ deiatel’nost’ Sal’noi kompanii A. D. Menshikova i morskie promysly na Russkom Severe, 1704–1721 gg,” Menshikovskie Chteniia 5, no. 12 (2014): 71–77. Webermann, Whale Fishery in Russia, 36. Webermann, 52. Mikhail Chulkov, Istoricheskoe Opisanie Rossiiskoi Kommercii (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1782), vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 416. Chulkov, Istoricheskoe Opisanie Rossiiskoi Kommercii, 416. RGADA, fond 397, inv. 1, file 221, p. 1 back.

CH A P TER T WO 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

8

9 10

11

Adelbert von Chamisso, Reise um die Welt mit der Romanzoffschen Entdeckungsexpedition in den Jahren 1815–1818, 2:286; Marie-Theres Federhofer, Chamisso und die Wale (Norderstedt: Verlag der Kulturstiftung Sibirien, 2012), 21, 29; Adelbert von Chamisso, “Cetaceorum Maris Kamtschatici,” in Nova Acta Physico-Medica Academiae naturae Curiosorum (1824). Lydia T. Black, “Whaling in the Aleutians,” Etudes/Inuit/Studies 11, no. 2 (1987): 7– 50, 13. Federhofer, Chamisso und die Wale, 31. K. N. Nosilov, “Na kitoboinom parokhode iz puteshestviia po Severu,” Chital’naia narodnoi shkoli (St. Petersburg: Tipo-Litografiia K. L. Pentkovskago, 1911), 27. Nosilov, “Na kitoboinom parokhode,” 20. Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 1. Margaret Lantis, “The Alaskan Whale Cult and Its Affinities,” American Anthropologist 11 (1938): 438– 64. Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land: Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and Its Rituals (New York: North Point Press, 1993). Demuth, Floating Coast, 25. Ivan Veniaminov, Notes on the Islands of the Unalashka District, 223; Lydia Black, “The Nature of Evil: Of Whales and Sea Otters,” in Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game, ed. Shepard Krech III (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 129, 130. Veniaminov, Notes on the Islands, 277; Rozenberg to Main Office, November 23, 1852, NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, no. 758, vol. 33, roll 58.

227

228

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2–2 0

12

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36

Kirill Timofeevich Khlebnikov, Notes on Russian America, Parts II-V: Kad’iak, Unalashka, Atkha, the Pribylovs, trans. Marina Ramsay, ed. Richard Pierce (Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1994), 189. Kleinenberg, Kitoboinoi Promysel Sovetskogo Soiuza, 12. “Whalers’ Contacts with Peoples of the Okhotsk Shores,” New Bedford Whaling Museum Archives, Henderson Collection, MS 125, box 11, series C, pp. 2–8, 8, 20, 22. Letters from the Russian consulate at Honolulu to P. S. Kostromitinoff, Russian Vice Consul in San Francisco, February 4 and 27, 1861, NARA, RG 261.3, Records of the Imperial Russian Consulates in the United States and Canada, 1862–1922, roll 160, nos. 9, 10. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 222. Main Office to Teben’kov, April 11, 1850, NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, vol. 18, roll 18, no. 551, p. 435. V. Zbyshevskii, “Zamechaniia o kitolovnom promysle v Okhotskom more,” Morskoi Sbornik 4 (April 1863): 231. Extract from notes furnished to the minister of finance in a confidential letter from the Governor General of Eastern Siberia, March 1846, NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Received, vol. 16, file 247– 48, np. Quoted in Dolin, Leviathan, 208. Demuth, Floating Coast, chap. 2. Main Office to the Department of Manufacturing and Domestic Commerce, May 8, 1846, copy of letter, NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Received, vol. 16, file 247– 48, pp. 249– 51v. Sven Anderson, ed., “Valfångardagböcker förda på Åbo-skeppen Suomi och Turku under 1850 talet,” Meddelanden från Sjohistoriska museet vid Åbo akademi 12 (1971): 18. Otto Lindholm, Beyond the Frontiers of Imperial Russia (Javea: Alexander de Haes Tyrthoff, 2008), 41. NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, vol. 19, no 537 (April 12, 1851), pp. 661– 62. NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, vol. 33, no. 758 (November 23, 1852), p. 256. NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, vol. 34, no. 510 (August 18, 1853), p. 186. NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Received, vol. 20, no. 520 (April 11, 1852), p. 213. NARA, Records of the Russian-American Company, Communications Sent, vol. 34, no. 510 (August 18, 1853), p. 186. Lindholm, Beyond the Frontiers, 70, 71. Otto Lindholm, “Kitoboinoi promysel,” Russkoe sudokhodstvo 54, no. 33 (1888): 13. Lindholm, Beyond the Frontiers, 193, 241. Otto Lindholm, “Whales and How Tides and Currents in the Okhotsk Sea Affect them,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography Technical Report, trans. Lydia A. Hutchinson (San Diego, 1965), http://www.escholarship.org./uc/item/8j93s3pv. Lindholm, “Kitoboinoi promysel,” 29. Amir Khisamutdinov, Kitoboinyi Promysel na Dal’nem Vostoke: Zametki na Poliakh (Vladivostok: DVFU, 2018), 31. Lindholm, Beyond the Frontiers, 184, 245, 246, 283.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 –2 9

37 38 39

40 41 42

43

44

Khisamutdinov, Kitoboinyi Promysel, 32. Khisamutdinov, 28. Jane Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 9. Jones, Empire of Extinction, 230. Lindholm, “Kitoboinoi promysel,” 29. T. D. Smith, R. R. Reeves, E. A. Josephson, J. N. Lund, and H. Whitehead, “Sperm Whale Catches and Encounter Rates in the 19th and 20th Centuries: An Apparent Paradox,” in Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, ed. D. J. Starkey, P. Holm, and M. Barnard (London: Earthscan, 1998), 149–73. A. Ya. Maksimov, “Kitoboi,” in Na Dalekom Vostoke: Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1898), 2. Oleg Maksimov, Dnevnik Kitoboia (Russia: Zhivem, 2016), 19.

CH A P TER THREE 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Ilya Ehrenburg, quoted in Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 372. Ivan Sablin and Daniel Sukhan, “Regionalisms and Imperialisms in the Making of the Russian Far East, 1903–1926,” Slavic Review 77:2 (Summer 2018): 340, 349; John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 147– 59. Amir Khisamutdinov, “Vladimir Arsen’ev: His Works, Colleagues, and Family,” Sibirica: The Journal of Siberian Studies 19:3 (Winter 2020): 1–14. A. A. Khisamutdinov, Vladivostok: Etiudi k istorii starogo goroda (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo universiteta, 1992), 279, 280. “Doklad nachal’nika komandorskikh pushnykh promyslov K. Kulagina . . . ,” 1926, GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 18, pp. 1, 2. “Instruktsiya o poriadke proizvodstva kit . . . ,” 1924, GAPK, fond 633, op. 4, no. 85, p. 163. “Instruktsiya o poriadke proizvodstva kit . . . ,” 1924, GAPK, fond 633, op. 4, no. 85, p. 167. “Instruktsiya o poriadke proizvodstva kit . . . ,” 1924, GAPK, fond 633, op. 4, no. 85, p. 25. “Materialy nauchnoissledovannykh rabot po morskim promyslovym zhivotnym . . . ,” 1917–1922, GAPK, fond 633, op. 4, no. 100, p. 46 ob. “Materialy nauchnoissledovannykh rabot po morskim promyslovym zhivotnym . . . ,” 1917–1922, GAPK, fond 633, op. 4, no. 100, p. 47. “Kontsesionnyi Dogovor,” GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 3, p. 2. “Kontsesionnyi Dogovor,” GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 3, p. 3. V. K. Arsen’ev to Dal’ryba, August 1923, GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 3, pp. 5– 6, 10. V. K. Arsen’ev to Dal’ryba, August 1923, GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 3, p. 22; A. T. Mandrik, Istoriia Rybnoi Promyshlennosti Rossiiskogo Dal’nego Vostoka (Vladivostok: Dal’nauk, 1994), 131. “Kitoboinyi Promysel ‘Vega,’” GAPK, fond 633, op. 5, no. 3, pp. 39, 42. “Nebyvaloe khishchnichestvo v nashikh vodakh,” Izvestiia, August 20, 1926.

229

230

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 9 –3 6

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

“Materialy o rabote kitoboinogo aktsionernogo obshchestva ‘Vega,’ za 1925–1927,” GAPK, fond 633, op. 7, no. 19, p. 70. “Materialy o rabote kitoboinogo aktsionernogo obshchestva ‘Vega,’ za 1925–1927,” GAPK, fond 653, op. 7, no. 19, p. 53. The committee specifically recommended forbidding “capitalist” whaling. “Materialy o rabote kitoboinogo aktsionernogo obshchestva ‘Vega,’ za 1925–1927,” GAPK, fond 633, op. 7, no. 19, pp. 39 ob, 40. Daniel Francis, The Great Chase: A History of World Whaling (New York: Viking, 1990), 209. Ivan Yegorchev, preface to Vladimir K. Arsen’ev, Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, trans. Jonathan C. Slaght (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), xiii, xiv. “Postanovleniia TsIK i Soveta Narodnykh Komimisarov . . . ,” GAKK, fond 106, op. 1, delo 484, p. 66. I. V. Viter and A. A. Smyshlyaev, Gorod nad Avachinskoi Bukhtoi: Istoriia Goroda Petropavlovska-Kamchatskogo (Petropavlovsk-kamchatskii, 2000), 135. According to the historian Viacheslav Ivanitskii, the future fleet captain Aleksandr. Dudnik supplied the name, meaning it to honor his adopted region of the Russian Far East and especially to memorialize a group of forlorn Aleuts he had met there. See Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan (Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochnii Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1990), 68– 82. Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan. Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 197– 98, 265– 66. B. A. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’sto Geograficheskoi Literatury, 1954), 1. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 24. Zenkovich, 44, 45. Otto Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt (Berlin: Herbig, 1939), 79. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 81. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 31. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 82. “Sovetskoe Kitoboinoe Sudno ‘Aleut’ v Tikhom Okeane,” Sovetskaia Sibir’, October 9, 1932. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 86. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 47. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 90. Kraul, 91. Kraul, 91. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 44, 47, 117, 119. “Russian Whaling Fleet Arrives on Way Home to Vladivostok,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 30, 1932. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 76, 78. “USSR Whaling Fleet Arrives for Brief Stay,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 29, 1932. “USSR Whaling Fleet Arrives for Brief Stay.” Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 93. “Russian Whaling Fleet Arrives on Way Home to Vladivostok.” “Russian Whaling Fleet Arrives on Way Home to Vladivostok.”

N O T E S T O PA G E S 3 6 – 4 5

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

“Russian Singers on KGU Tonight,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 3, 1932. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 95. “Russian Whaling Fleet Arrives on Way Home to Vladivostok.” Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 94. “Soviet Whalers Anchor off Port,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 7, 1932. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 91. Kraul, Käpt’n Kraul erzählt, 96.

C H A P T E R F O UR 1 2 3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22

23

Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 100–104. Zenkovich, 111. G. Klinov, “Ob otvazhnom kapitane,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakhdal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo morskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni admirala G. I. Nevel’skogo, 2014), 56, 57. Amir Khisamutdinov, The Russian Far East: Historical Essays (Honolulu: A. A. Khisamutdinov, 1993), 84, 85. Khisamutdinov, The Russian Far East, 106– 9. David Nordlander, “Capital of the Gulag: Magadan in the Early Stalin Era, 1929–1941” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill, 1997), 290– 91. Stephan, Russian Far East, 208, 185. Mark Sokolsky, “Taming Tiger Country: Colonization and Environment in the Russian Far East, 1860–1940” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2016), 313, 314. Demuth, Floating Coast, chap. 10, also develops this idea. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1934, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1. delo 3. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1934, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1. delo 233, p. 2. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1934, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1. delo 233, p. 5. B. A. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” Trudy Dal’nevostochnogo Filiala AN SSSR (1936), 31. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1 delo 3, p. 63. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1935, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 1, p. 1. “Otchety kitoboinoi bazy Aleut o nauchnoi rabote za 1934,” GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 223, p. 3. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 38. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 34. Zenkovich, 34. Zenkovich, 35. Zenkovich, 34, 35. M. M. Vadivasov, “Kitoboinyi Promysel SSSR na Dal’nem Vostoke v 1941–1944 gg,” Izvestiiya Tikhookeanskogo nauchno-issledovatel’skogo instituta rybnogo khoziaistva i okeanografii (1946), 22:244, 245, 253. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1933, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 2 22, p. 1.

231

232

N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 5 – 5 0

24 25

26 27 28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41 42

43

44

45

46

47

48

Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan, 100. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1933, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 222, p. 1. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 47. “Kachestvo nashei produktsii,” Garpun, November 24, 1940. “Godovoi Otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ po proizvodstvennoi deiatel’nosti za 1935 god,” GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 1, p. 16. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1., delo 3, p. 27. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1933, GAPK, fond 1192, op. 1, delo 222, p. 17. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1935, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 1, p. 12. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, p. 34. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, p. 37. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, pp. 48, 51. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 39. David Weller, Alexander Burdin, Bernd Wursig, Barbara Taylor, and Robert L. Brownell Jr., “The Western Gray Whale: A Review of Past Exploitation, Current Status and Potential Threats,” Journal of Cetacean Research Management 4:1 (2002): 7–12, here 9. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1., delo 3, p. 66. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 39. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1., delo 3, p. 122. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1., delo 3, p. 97. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 37, 38. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 39. One, A. A. Nefed’ev, wrote frequently of missing his wife and seeing her in his dreams, in “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot . . . Nefed’ev, A. A., 1933–1949,” Obshchestvo izucheniia Amurskogo kraia (OIAK), op. 3, delo 59, p. 29. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1936, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1., delo 3, p. 11. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, p. 15, 16. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, p. 17. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 58. Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 157.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 0 – 5 8

49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61 62

63

64

65

66

67 68 69

70 71 72

Francis, The Great Chase, 191. Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 367. Didrik Dyrdal, “‘Whaling and the Extermination of the Great Whale’: Norwegian and British Debate about Whale Stocks in Antarctica, 1913–1939,” Environment and History 25 (2019): 87–115. Quoted in Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan, 119. A. N. Iakuna, ed., Kitoboinaia Slava Soiuza (Kherson: PKF “Star,” 2016), 77, 79; Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan, 120. Kitoboinaia Slava Soiuza, 76. Ivanitskii, Zhil Otvazhnii Kapitan, 121. Ivanitskii, 122. Klinov, “Ob otvazhnom kapitane,” 58– 60. Steven Edward Merritt, “The Great Purges in the Soviet Far East, 1937–1938” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, March 2000, v, 483.) “Vziat’ ot promysla vsyo,” Garpun, July 20, 1938. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 12. “Na khodu ispravit’ nedochety,” Garpun, August 1, 1938. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1938, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 4, p. 7. “Godovoi otchet kitoboinoi bazy ‘Aleut’ . . . ,” 1940, GAPK, fond 1196, op. 1, delo 8, p. 5. Sergei Kovalev, Zagadki Shestogo Kontinenta, 279; “The Department of State to the Embassy of the Soviet Union Memorandum, Washington, May 2, 1945,” in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, Europe, Volume V, Document 890. Yu. M. Kogan, “Kitoboi,” in Zvezda Rybaka (Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochnoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1982), 111. Yu. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakhdal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2013), 100, 101. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 26–29. Khisamutdinov, Russian Far East, chap. 5. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 2, 16, 18, 48, 109, 143. Stephen Kotkin considers such internalization of Stalinist categories common among Soviet people, terming it “speaking Bolshevik”; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, esp. chap. 5, “Speaking Bolshevik.” See also Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 43. Nefed’ev, 133, 136. “Uporiadochit’ sluzhbu sviazy,” Garpun, September 17, 1938.

CH A P TER FI V E 1 2

Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 473, 474, 492, 493. “Washington— Informal Inter-agency Committee on the Regulation of Whaling (IICRW), July– October 1946,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC, record unit 7165, box 8, p. 265.

233

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N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 8– 6 5

3 4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20

21 22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29

30

31

32

Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 506. “O razvitii kitoboin. Promysla na dal’nem vostoke,” RGAE, fond 5446, op. 24a, no. 614, p. 3. RGAE, fond 9242, op. 1, no. 324, pp. 66, 67. Mark Edele, Stalinist Society, 1928–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 184. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945– 1957 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). “Ob uchastii SSSR v kitoboinom promysle v Antarktike, 1939 [incorrect date]”, RGAE, fond 410, op. 2, no. 1603, p. 3. “Ob uchastii,” 17. Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, 512–27. Report on the International Whaling Conference Held in London, November 20 through November 26, 1945, Smithsonian Institution Archives, record unit 7165, box 8, pp. 268, 287. “O material’nom obespechenii rabotnikov . . . ,” GARF, fond 5446, op. 50, no. 3968, p. 15. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 68. RGASPI, fond 84, op. 1, delo 96, pp. 126, 127; Rip Bulkeley, “Wikinger— Empire Venture— SLAVA: Chronology 1945–1946” (unpublished manuscript, 2005). Irina Gan, “‘The First Practical Soviet Steps toward Getting a Foothold in the Antarctic’: The Soviet Antarctic Whaling Flotilla Slava,” Polar Record 47 (2009): 21. “Question of Supply of Equipment for the Whaling Factory Ship ‘Empire Venture,” NA, BT 11/3184, np. “Details of Soviet Whaling and Tanker Fleets and their Relations to Anglo-Soviet Trade, 1948,” NA, FO 371/71712, p. 28. Gan, “First Practical Soviet Steps,” 22. Bulkeley, “Wikinger— Empire Venture— SLAVA,” np; Gan, “First Practical Soviet Steps,” 23. Pavel Rozhkov, “The First Soviet Whalers in the Antarctic,” Sovetskaia Klaipeda, June– July 1948; quoted in Bulkeley, “Wikinger— Empire Venture— SLAVA,” 261. “Question of Supply of Equipment,” np. Gan, “First Practical Soviet Steps,” 22. “Reisovyi Otchet Antarkticheskoi Kitoboinoi Flotilii Slava, 1946–1947,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, delo 1, p. 180. L. S. Berg, “Russkie otkrytiia v Antarktike,” Nauka i Zhizn‘ 3 (1949). E. Shister, V Antarktiku za Kitami (Moscow: Goskul’tprosvetizdat, 1948), 5. “Reisovyi Otchet Antarkticheskoi Kiboboinoi Flotilii Slava, 1946–1947,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 1, delo 1, pp. 2, 176. See A. S. Brierley et al., “Antarctic Krill under the Sea Ice: Elevated Abundance in a Narrow Band Just South of the Ice Edge,” Science 295 (2002): 1890– 92. Rozhkov, “First Soviet Whalers,” 149– 51, 153– 54, 156– 62. “Reisovyi Otchet Antarkticheskoi Kitoboinoi Flotilii Slava, 1946–1947,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, delo 1, pp. 5, 176. Afanasii Purgin, “Vo imia Rodina,” in Slava: Zapiski sovetskikh kitoboev, ed. A. Kotliar (Odessa: Odesskoe oblastnoe izdatel’stvo, 1952), 56. “Sovetskie kitoboi,” Sovietskaia Baltika, January 20, 1948, http://www.polarpost.ru /forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=346&start=30. Aleksei Solynaik, “Piat’ reisov v Antarktiku,” in Slava: Zapiski sovetskikh kitoboev, ed. A. Kotliar (Odessa: Odesskoe oblastnoe izdatel’stvo, 1952), 15–18.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 6 6 –7 1

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43

44 45

46

47

48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57

58 59

60

61 62 63

Shister, V Antarktiku za Kitami, 46. Shister, 48. Sergeev, “Dolgii put k mechte,” 70. Yuri Mikhalev, pers. Comm., Odessa, Ukraine, August 7, 2017. Shister, V Antarktiku za Kitami, 51. “Protokoly partiinykh sobranii i zasedanii biuro pervychnoi partorganizatsii i tsekhov, 1946,” GAOO, fond 256, op. 1, no. 1, p. 1. Purgin, “Vo imia Rodina,” 56. “O raione bazirovaniia antarkticheskoi kitoboinoi flotilii,” RGAE, fond 9242, op. 1, no. 324, pp. 4– 9. “Reisovyi Otchet Antarkticheskoi Kitoboinoi Flotilii Slava, 1946–1947,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, delo 1, p. 180. “Reisovyi Otchet Antarkticheskoi Kitoboinoi Flotilii Slava, 1946–1947,” 181. “Instruktsiia delegatam na Mezh. Konf. Po regulirovaniiu kitoboinogo promysel,” RGAE, fond 9242, op. 1, no. 324, pp. 66, 67. Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 118. “Washington— International Whaling Conference, 1946 Conference Proceedings,” Smithsonian Archives, record unit 7165, box 9, p. 10. “Minutes of the Fourth Session, Nov. 29, 1946, Volume 2,” Archives of the International Whaling Commission, Red House, Impington, United Kingdom. “Washington— International Whaling Conference, 1946 Conference Proceedings,” Smithsonian Archives, RU 7165, box 9, International Whaling Conference Records, 1876–1953, p. 10. “Instruktsiia delegatam na Mezh. Konf. Po regulirovaniiu kitoboinogo promysel,” RGAE, fond 9242, op. 1, no. 324, p. 66. Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, chap. 4; “Minutes of the Seventh Session, Nov. 27, 1946,” in Proceedings of the 1946 Conference, 29, Archives of the International Whaling Commission, Red House, Imptington, United Kingdom. William Flory to W. C. Armstrong, memorandum, Soviet Participation in Whaling Conference, December 6, 1946, US National Archives, RG 43, entry 243, file USSR, p. 3. Southern Cross (Otago, NZ), February 9, 1949. Sleptsov, Giganty Okeana, 86. Sleptsov, 88. “Analiz kitoboinoi putiny 1945 goda,” RGAE, fond 410, delo 2, no. 3023, p. 10. “Predvaritel’nii otchet o rabote kitoboinoi flotilii ‘Slava’ v Antarktide,” RGAE, fond 410, delo 2, no. 3220, p. 54. Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 123. Ray Gambell, “International Management of Whales and Whaling: An Historical Review of Regulation of Commercial and Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling,” Arctic 46, no. 2 (June 1993), 99. Khodzhaev, “Ob uchastii,” 19. V. Kalinovski, “Pribrezhnii kitoboinii promysel v Iaponii,” 1948, RGAE, fond 410, op. 2, no. 3325, p. 1. “Predvaritel’nii otchet o rabote kitoboinoi flotilii ‘Slava’ v Antarktide,” RGAE, fond 410, delo 2, no. 3220, RGAE, fond 410, op. 3, no. 3220, p. 53. RGAE, fond 410, op. 3, no. 3220, p. 53. RGAE, fond 410, op. 3, no. 3220, p. 56.

235

236

N O T E S T O PA G E S 7 2– 80

64 65 66

67 68

69

70 71

RGAE, fond 410, delo 2, no. 2833, p. 5. Solyanik, “Piat’ reisov v Antarktiku,” 24. “Vystuplenie na torzhestvennom sobranii po povodu vstrechi ‘Slava,’” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 1, no. 2744, p. 62. Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere, 33. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243– 48. J. A. Gulland, “The Management of Antarctic Whaling Resources,” Journal of Conservation 31, no. 3 (1968): 330– 41. S. A. Kovalev, Zagadki Shestogo Kontinenta (Moscow: Veche, 2011), 279– 93. Quoted in Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 9.

C H A P T E R SI X 1

2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20

Conversations with veterans of the Soviet whaling fleet, August 7– 8, 2017, Odessa, Ukraine. On Khrushchev-era consumerism, see Lewis Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Steven Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everday Life after Stalin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). “Upravlenie Kitoboinoi Flotilii. Perepiska, 1950,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 1, no. 2762, p. 9. Paul R. Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148. G. I. Khanin, “The 1950s— the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 8 (December 2003): 1191, 1193. I. A. Baranov, “Vtoraia Antarkticheskaia KF ‘Sovetskaia Ukraina’: Zhizneopisanie legendarnogo kapitana A. N. Solianika,” in Kitoboinaia Slava Soiuza, ed. A. N. Iakuna (Kherson: PKF “Star,” 2016), 284. “Godovoi Otchet Slava 1963–1964,” GAOO R-7004, op. 3, no. 22, p. 16. “Report on Visit to Norwegian Whaler Kosmos II,”NA, OF 37/1/94878, p. 1. “Russian Whalers in Melbourne,” Australian Women’s Weekly, May 13, 1964. Australian Women’s Weekly, May 13, 1964. Sergeev, “Dolgii put k mechte,” 69. Sergeev, 71. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). “K prebyvaniiu sovetskoi obedinennoi antarkticheskoi kitoboinoi flotilii . . . 7.7.64,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 16, no. 275, p. 178. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava 1957–1958,” GAOO, fond R-7004, op. 3, no. 12, pp. 26–28. “Unexpected Visitors,” Otago Daily Times, April 15, 1958; “Little Information on Activities of Whaling Fleet,” Marlborough Express, March 18, 1964. “Soviet Whaling Vessels in Waters near Tasmania,” Australian National Archives— Canberra, 64/3131, np. “Graphic Russian Film of Whaling Fleet,” Dominion, April 19, 1958. Alfred Berzin, “The Truth about Soviet Whaling: A Memoir,” Marine Fisheries Review 70, no. 2 (2008): 42. Maksimov, Dnevnik Kitoboia, 32, 45, 55, 93.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 8 1– 84

21 22

23 24

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

33 34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41

42

43 44

Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 154. “1954– 5 Antarctica Whaling Season: Alleged Contravention of Opening Date by Soviet Slava Expedition. New Zealand House, London, 11 March, 1955,” ANZ, International Affairs— Economic Affairs Commodities—Whaling— General, 1955–1956, ACIE 8798, record no. 104/6/9/1. For the Slava’s retrofitted pipes, see E. I. Chernyi, “Neskol’ko shtrikhov k portretu sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla,” in Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla, ed. A. V. Yablokov and V. A. Zemsky (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 27. “Alleged Soviet Whale ‘Poaching’,” Wellington Evening Post, April 9, 1955. “1954/55 Antarctica Whaling Season: Alleged Contravention of Opening Date by Soviet Slava Expedition. New Zealand House, London, March 28, 1955,” ANZ, International Affairs— Economic Affairs Commodities—Whaling— General, 1955 – 1956, ACIE 8798, record no. 104/6/9/1. “International Whaling Commission: Seventh Annual Meeting, Moscow, July 18–23, 1955,” ANZ pt. 14, International Affairs— Economic Affairs Commodities— Whaling— General, 1955–1956, ACIE 8798, record no. 104/6/9/1; parentheses in the original. Elliott, Whaling Enterprise, 93. “International Whaling Commission: Seventh Annual Meeting, Moscow, July 18–23, 1955,” ANZ. “International Whaling Commission: Seventh Annual Meeting, Moscow, July 18–23, 1955,” ANZ. “International Whaling Commission: Seventh Annual Meeting, Moscow, July 18–23, 1955,” ANZ. Hector Whaling Limited, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Directors, n.d. [late 1955?], NA, Ministry of Agricultural Affairs, 209/83 FGB 4364. Salvesen to Melsom Ch of Havlfangstselskapers Forbund, Sandefjord, NA, Ministry of Agricultural Affairs, 209/1436 FGB 13423. Department of External Affairs, inward cablegram, June 26, 1959, Australian National Archives, A463, 1956/120, International Whaling Convention, p. 49. Elliot, Whaling Enterprise, 125. F. Golov’ev, “Ekho ‘Misterii o kitakh,” in Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla, ed. A. V. Yablokov and V. A. Zemsky (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 16. Golov’ev, “Ekho,” 17; “Reisovyi Otchet Sovetskaia Ukraina,” 1960–1961, GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, no. 19, p. 21. “Reisovyi Otchet Sovetskaia Ukraina,” 1960–1961, GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, no. 19, p. 10. Chernyi, “Neskol’o shtrikhov k portretu sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla,” 28. V. Shparlinksii, “Sovremennoe sostoianie i perspektivy razvitiia kitoboinogo promysla SSSR, 1956,” RGAE, fond 410, op. 2, no. 12768. Maksimov, Dnevnik Kitoboia, 95. Purgin, “Vo imia rodiny,” 35. A. N. Iakunina, ed., Azcherriba: Organizatory rybnogo khozaistva i al’manakh promyslovykh kapitanov (Kherson: OOO “PKF ‘Star’ Ltd,” 2012), 233. P. A. Zarva, “‘Aleut’— ‘Slava,’” in Slava: Zapiski sovetskikh kitoboev, ed. A. Kotliar (Odessa: Odesskoe oblastnoe izdatel’stvo, 1952), 98. Zarva, “‘Aleut’— ‘Slava,’” 102. S. Grigor’ev, Kit na line (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo detskoi literatury, 1963), 20.

237

238

N O T E S T O PA G E S 8 5 – 9 2

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53

54

55 56

57

58 59 60

61

62 63

64

65

66

67 68

69

70

“Godovoi Otchet Aleut, 1941,” GAPK, fond 119, op. 1, no. 9, p. 4. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 172. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 129. Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, 29. “Materialy po kitoboinomu promyslu v Antarktike za 1963–1965 gg,” GAPK, fond 42, op. 1, d. 9, p. 82. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava,” 1952–1953, GAOO, R. 7004, op. 3, no. 7, p. 50. Shister, V Antarktiku za Kitami, 45, 46. Doklady na Sessii Uchenogo Soveta Instituta (Moskva: Glavnoe Upravlenie Gidrometeorologicheskoi Sluzhby, 1957), 4, 6, 7, 8. “Brief Review of the Research Work Undertaken by the ‘Slava’ Whaling Fleet of the USSR,” Proceedings of the IWC Seventh Meeting, Moscow, July, 1955, Archives of the International Whaling Commission, 28. S. K. Klumov, “O Lokal’nosti Kitovikh Stadov,” in Trudy Instituta Okeanologii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk, 1955), 18:7. Doklady na Sessii Uchenogo Soveta Instituta, 7. A. V. Nudel’man, Soviet Antarctic Expeditions, 1955–1959 (Sovetskie ekspeditsii v Antarktiku 1955–1959 gg (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1966), 9. C. W. Beklemishev, “Southern Atmospheric Cyclones and the Whale Feeding Grounds in the Antarctic,” Nature 187 (August 6, 1960): 530– 31. Beklemishev, “Southern Atmospheric Cyclones and Whale Feeding Grounds,” 530. Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 172–76. International Commission on Whaling, Eleventh Report of the Commission (London: Office of the Commission, 1960), 16. M. M. Sleptsov, “Usloviia Sushchestvovaniia Kitoobraznykh Zonakh Smesheniia Kholodnogo (Kuril-Kamchatskogo) i Teplogo (Kurosio) Techenii,” in Kitobraznye Dal’nevostochnykh Morei (Vladivostok: Ministerstvo rybnoi promyshlennosti SSSR, 1955), 127. Sleptsov, “Usloviia Sushchestvovaniia,” 131. S. K. Klumov, “Report of the Expedition on Marine Mammals in the Far East in 1955,” in Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions in the North Pacific, 1955–1978, by Y. V. Ivashchenko, P. J. Clapham, and R. L. Brownwell (Lincoln, NE: US Department of Commerce, 2006), 6. “Perepiska s TINRO i ego filialami po nauchnym voprosam, 1952,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 3, no. 340, pp. 27, 40. V. A. Arsen’ev and V. A. Zemskoi, “Perspektivy pelagicheskogo kitibojnogo promysla v Antarktike,” 1958, RGAE, fond 410, op. 2, no. 6462, p. 9. B. Zenkovich, “Kity i Kitoboinii Promysel v Antarkticheskikh Moriakh,” Trudy Vsesoiuznogo nauchno-issledovatel’skogo instituta morskogo rybnogo khozaistva i okeanografii (VNIRO) 25 (1953), 22. Berzin, “Truth about Soviet Whaling,” 6. S. K. Klumov, “Preliminary Report of the 1956 Expedition,” in Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions in the North Pacific, 1955–1978, by Y. V. Ivashchenko, P. J. Clapham, and R. L. Brownwell (Lincoln, NE: US Department of Commerce, 2006), 8. “Zapiski ob itogakh pervogo promyslovogo reisa v Antarktiku kitoboinoi bazy Sovetskaia Ukraina,” RGANI, fond 5, op. 43, no. 85, p. 37. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava 1952–1953,” GAOO, R. 7004, op. 3, no. 7, p. 61.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 9 3 – 9 9

71 72

73

74 75

76

77

78 79 80 81 82

83

84

85

86 87 88

89

90 91

92 93

“Reisovyi Otchet Slava 1958–1959,” GAOO, R. 7004, op. 3, no. 13, p. 136. “Zapiski ob itogakh pervogo promyslovogo reisa v Antarktiku kitoboinoi bazy Sovetskaia Ukraina,” RGANI, fond 5, op. 43, no. 85, p. 28. “Reisovyi Otchet Sovetskaia Ukraina, 1959–1960,” GAOO, fond 7004, op. 3, no. 315, pp. 1, 23. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava 1959–1960,” p. 19. Ryan Tucker Jones and Marco de Jong, “Bill Dawbin, Tasman Diplomacy, and the Great South Pacific Humpback Collapse of 1960–1962,” Journal of Pacific History 55, no. 4 (2020): 492– 519. “Zapiski ob itogakh pervogo promyslovogo reisa v Antarktiku kitoboinoi bazy Sovetskaia Ukraina,” RGANI, fond 5, op. 43, no. 85, p. 30. Phil Clapham, Yuri Mikhalev, Wally Franklin, David Paton, C. Scott Baker, Yulia V. Ivashchenko, and Robert L. Brownell Jr., “Catches of Humpback Whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, by the Soviet Union and Other Nations in the Southern Oceans, 1947– 1973,” Marine Fisheries Review 71, no. 1 (2009): 8. “Reisovyi Otchet Sovetskaia Ukraina 1959–1960,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, no. 19, p. 23. International Commission on Whaling, Eleventh Report, 3. International Commission on Whaling, Eleventh Report, 4. International Commission on Whaling, Eleventh Report, 5, 26. International Commission on Whaling, Twelfth Report of the Commission (London: Office of the Commission, 1961), 4. Bill Dawbin to Marine Department, August 9, 1961, State Library of New South Wales, Dawbin Collection ML 691/98, box 85a. Bill Dawbin to Marine Department, August 20, 1962, State Library of New South Wales, Dawbin Collection ML 691/98, box 85a, pp. 1, 2. Frank Zelko, “Bravo for the Pacific: Nuclear Testing, Ecosystem Ecology, and the Emergence of Direct Action Environmetnalism,” in Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World, ed. James Beattie, Ryan Tucker Jones, and Edward Melillo (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022). “Reisovyi Otchet Slava, 1961,” GAOO, fond R-7004, op. 3, no. 16, p. 41. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava, 1961,” 48. Quoted in Phil Clapham and Yulia Ivashchenko, “Too Much Is Never Enough: The Cautionary Tale of Soviet Illegal Whaling,” Marine Fisheries Review 76, no. 1–2 (June 2014): 7. A. Rukhliada, “Dalnevostochnye Kitoboi v Antarktike,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakh-dal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo morskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni admirala G. I. Nevel’skogo, 2014), 53. Clapham et al., “Catches of Humpback Whales,” 40. Sidney Holt to Bill Dawbin, May 21, 1963, State Library of New South Wales, ML 891/98, Dawbin Collection, box 5(39). Conversation with Yuri Mikhailev, Odessa, Ukraine, August 7, 2017. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleraiton: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).

C H A P T E R SE V EN 1

Paul Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 272; Khanin, “The 1950s— the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” 1188, 1198, 1201.

239

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N O T E S T O PA G E S 9 9 –1 0 9

2 3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35

36 37 38

Khanin, “The 1950s— the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” 1201. Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Anne E. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 115. “O material’nom obespechenii rabotnikov . . .” GARF, fond 5446, op. 50, no. 3968, p. 12. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London Penguin Books, 1988), 311; “Spravki po 5 reisu kitoboinogo flotilii Slava 1950–1951,” RGAE, fond 8202.1, op. 1, no. 2024, pp. 30– 32. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR, 1945–1991 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 66. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 36. Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy. “Gorzhus’, shto byl kitoboem,” Gazeta Vladivostok, September 19, 2008. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 48. “Vot ona, svoboda!,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, May 16, 1968, 2. “V kollektive prishel novichok . . . ,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, September 28, 1967, 1. “Na pervom zanyatii,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, October 12, 1967. GAOO, fond 25, op. 1, no. 2, p. 32. Maksimov, Dnevnik Kitoboia, 42. “V kollektive prishel novichok,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, June 1967. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava, 1956–1957,” GAOO, fond R-7004, op. 3. Delo 11, p. 91. “Sudovoi Mekhanik,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, October 22, 1967, 1. “Tsenit’ i berech’ zvanie sovetskogo moryaka,” Dal’neveostochnyi Kitoboi, May 16, 1968. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 136. Sergeev, 156. “Protokoly partiinykh sobranii,” GAOO, fond 256, op. 1, no. 2, pp. 7– 8. Rozhkov, “First Soviet Whalers,” np. V. I. Lenin, How to Organize Competition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 408. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 131. “Partkom 1970,” GAOO, fond 294.1.19, p. 25. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 131, 158. Sergeev, 148, 149. GAPK, fond R-42, op. 1, no. 9, pp. 12, 13. “Shire dvizhenie novatorov!,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, April 6, 1968. “Berech’ dragotsennoe vremya! O nekotorykh nedostatkakh obrabotki transportov,” Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi, December 1, 1967. “Partkom 1970,” GAOO, fond 294.1.19, p. 52. Khanin, “The 1950s— the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” 1205; Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 7. B. D. Emerov, “Narodnozhoziaistvennoe Znachenie Kitoboinoi Promyshlennosti SSSR,” Trudy Moskovskogo Tekhnicheskogo Instituta Rybnoj Promyshlennosti i Zhoziaistva im. A. I. Mikoiana 8 (1957), 165. As Yuri Mikhalev did to me in one conversation in Arkhangel’sk, November 2018. Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 18. Khanin, “The 1950s— the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” 1197.

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40 41 42 43

Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2– 3. “Reisovyi Otchet Slava 1960–1961,” GAOO, fond R-7004, op. 3, no. 16, p. 24. “Reisovyi otchet, 1964–1965,” GAOO, fond R-7003, op. 3, delo 23, p. 52. Arkadii Sakhnin, “V reise do i posle,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 21, 1965. “Kitoboinia Solyanika,” Rodina, June 1, 2019, https://rg .ru /2019/07/17/rodina -rassledovanie -gromkogo -korrupcionnogo -skandala-1965 -goda .html; Igor Baranov, “Kak snimali Solyanika,” Porty Ukrainy 5, no. 107 (2011), http://portsukraine .com/node/2157.

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10 11 12 13

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Phillip J. Clapham, “The Humpback Whale: Seasonal Feeding and Breeding in a Baleen Whale,” in Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins, ed. Janet Mann et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 182. Randall R. Reeves, Joel Berger, and Phillip J. Clapham, “Killer Whales as Predators of Large Baleen Whales and Sperm Whales,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, ed. James Estes et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 174– 90. William K. de la Mare, “Changes in Antarctic Sea-Ice Extent from Direct Historical Observations and Whaling Records,” Climate Change 92 (2009): 469; Meghan G. Aulich et al., “Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) Migration in Australian Waters Using Passive Acoustic Monitoring,” Scientific Reports 9 (2019); V. Andrews- Goff et al., “Humpback Whale Migrations to Antarctic Summer Foraging Grounds through the Southwest Pacific Ocean,” Scientific Reports 8 (2018). Stephen Nicol, The Curious Life of Krill: A Conservation Story from the Bottom of the World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), 11, 87. Jesse Granger et al., “Gray Whales Strand More Often on Days with Increased Levels of Atmospheric Radio-Frequency Noise,” Current Biology 30, no. 4 (February 24, 2020): R155– 56. Kylie Owen et al., “Water Temperature Correlates with Baleen Whale Foraging Behaviour at Multiple Scales in the Antarctic,” Marine and Freshwater Research 70, no. 1 (2019): 19. Nicol et al., Curious Life of Krill, 291. Owen et al., “Water Temperature Correlates,” 28. Leigh G. Torres, “A Sense of Scale: Foraging Cetaceans Use of Scale-Dependent Multimodal Sensory Systems,” Marine Mammal Science 33, no. 4 (October 2017): 1176. Torres, “Sense of Scale,” 1179. Matt Walker, “Whale ‘Sense of Smell’ Revealed,” BBC News, July 22, 2010. Torres, “Sense of Scale,” 1177, 1180. David G. Ainley et al., “Modeling the Relationship of Antarctic Minke Whales to Major Ocean Boundaries,” Polar Biology 35 (2012): 281– 90, 282. Phillip J. Clapham, “The Social and Reproductive Biology of Humpback Whales: An Ecological Perspective,” Mammal Review 26, no. 1 (1996): 27– 49, 29– 30. Phillip J. Clapham, “Social Organization of Humpback Whales on a North Atlantic Feeding Ground,” Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 234 (1994): 265–74. Christian Ramp et al., “Age-Related Multi-year Associations in Female Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae),” Behavior Ecology and Sociobiology 64 (2010): 1572.

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20 21 22 23 24

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26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45

Janet Mann et al., eds., Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 218. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 37; Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 76. Eduard Vladimirovich Barsegov, “Moia bol’shaia kitovaia ‘Odisseia’” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakh-dal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2013), 438, 439. Sergeev, “Dolgii put k mechte,” 122, 123. “Reisovyi Otchet 1952–1953,” GAOO, R. 7004, op. 3, no. 7, p. 61. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 133. Quoted in Khisamutdinov, Kitoboinii Promysel na Dal’nem Vostoke, 56. Iu. Grigor’ev, “Ocherki zhurnalista,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakhdal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2013), 193, 194. See, among others, Ryan Tucker Jones, “A Whale of a Difference: Southern Right Whale Culture and the Tasman World’s Living Terrain of Encounter” Environment and History 25, no. 2 (May 2019). Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 130. Hal Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 199, 200; M. C. Caldwell, D. K. Caldwell, and D. W. Rice, “Behavior of the Sperm Whale Physter Catodon L. in Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, ed. K. S. Norris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966): 677–717; R. Gambell, “Aerial Observations of Sperm Whale Behaviour Based on Observations, Notes and Comments by K. J. Pinkerton,” Norsk Hvalfangsttid 57 (1968): 126–38; C. Lockyer, “Observations on Diving Behaviour of the Sperm Whale, Physeter Catadon,” in A Voyage of Discovery, ed. M. Angel (Oxford: Pergamon, 1977), 591– 609. Grigor’ev, Kit na line, 46. Princeton University, “Moby Dick Goes to Moscow,” Graphic Arts Collection, Special Collections, Firestone Library, n.d., https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2013/11/05 /moby-dick-goes-to-moscow/. See, for example, Kaliningradskii kitoboi, October 18, 1974. Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 159. Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 8. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 72. Zenkovich, 118. Zarva, “‘Aleut’— ‘Slava,’” 88. Richard C. Connor et al., “Male Reproductive Strategies and Social Bonds,” in Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins, ed. Janet Mann et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 252. Zarva, “‘Aleut’— ‘Slava,’” 88. See, for example, Dal’nevostochnyi Kitoboi December 1, 1967. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 38. Maksimov, Dnevniik Kitoboia, 37, 87. F. D. Ommanney, Lost Leviathan: Whales and Whaling (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 106. Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere, 95. Demuth, Floating Coast, 292. Ommanney, Lost Leviathan, 13. “Resovii Otchet 1952–1953,” GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, no. 7, p. 67.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2 8–1 3 2

46

47

48

49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59

60

61

62

63

64

“Materialy po kitoboinomu promyslu v Antarktike za 1963–1965 gg,” GAPK, fond 42, op. 1, no. 9, p. 70. Dmitri Pavlovich Tikhonov, No ne vechno budet nepogoda, 2018, p. 3 www.lit.lib.ru /t/tihonow_d _p/text _0090.shtml. Emma Richards, Tania Signal, and Nik Taylor, “A Different Cut? Comparing Attitudes towards Animals and Propensity for Aggression within Two Primary Industry Cohorts— Farmers and Meatworkers,” Society and Animals 21 (October 2013); T. Grandin, “Fast Food Chains Audit Animal Handling Practices,” Meat & Poultry 57 (December 1998). I want to express my gratitude to Poul Holm for pointing out this comparison. Ommanney, Lost Leviathan, 105. See Alla Bolotova, “Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union: State Ideology, Public Discourse, and the Experience of Geologists,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 29, no. 3 (2004): 104–123; 109. Lev Trotsky, Literatura i Revolutsiia (Moscow, 1924); quoted in Bolotova, “Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union,” 46. Josephson, Industrialized Nature. Bruno, Nature of Soviet Power, 31. “Fenomenlogiia Zhestokosti,” Priroda 1 (1975): 89–102. Natalia Maksimishina, “Animal Stories by Ernest Thompson Seton as a Part of Children Reading in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1930s” (MA thesis, National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, 2017). My thanks to Julia Lajus for pointing me in this direction. George Small, The Blue Whale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 70. Berzin, “Truth about Soviet Whaling,” 23. T. A. Branch et al., “Past and Present Distribution, Densities, and Movements of Blue Whales,” Balaenoptera Musculus in the Southern Hemisphere and Northern Indian Ocean,” Mammalian Review 37 (2007): 116–75. Alexandre N. Zerbini et al, “Assessing the Recovery of an Antarctic Predator from Historical Exploitation,” Royal Society Open Science 6, no. 10 (2019): 1. Sally A. Mizroch, Dale W. Rice, and Jeffrey M. Breiwick, “The Fin Whale, Balaenoptera physalus,” Marine Fisheries Review 46, no. 4 (1984). Sei Whale (Balaenoptera borealis): 5-Year Review: Summary and Evaluation, National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Protected Resources, June 2012. Victor Smetacek, “Are Declining Antarctic Krill Stocks a Result of Global Warming or the Decimation of the Whales?,” in Impacts of Global Warming on Polar Ecosystems, ed. C. Duarte (Spain: Fundacion BBVA, 2008): 45– 81. Timothy E. Essington, “Pelagic Response to a Century of Commercial Fishing and Whaling,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, ed. James A. Estes et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 42, 46, 47. A. M. Springer et al., “Sequential Megafaunal Collapse in the North Pacific Ocean: An Ongoing Legacy of Industrial Whaling,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 21 (2003): 12223–28; Trevor A. Branch and Terrie M. Williams, “Legacy of Industrial Whaling: Could Killer Whales Be Responsible for Declines of Sea Lions, Elephant Seals, and Minke Whales in the Southern Hemisphere?,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, ed. James A. Estes et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press). For doubts about this account of killer whale / large whale interactions, see Randall R. Reeves, Joel Berger, and Phillip J. Clapham, “Killer Whales as Predators,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, ed. Estes et al.

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Stephen J. Trumble et al., “Baleen Whale Cortisol Levels Reveal a Physiological Response to 20th Century Whaling,” Nature Communications 9 (November 2018): article no. 4587. Phillip J. Clapham and Alexandre N. Zerbini, “Are Social Aggregation and Temporary Immigration Driving High Rates of Increase in Some Southern Hemisphere Humpback Populations?,” Marine Biology 162 (2015): 632.

CH A P TER NINE 1

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7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14

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18 19

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21

See, for example, Kendall Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990). Arran Gare, “Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 4, no. 4 (1993): 69– 88. S. A. Atpaov, et al., eds., Rybokhoziaistvennoj Nauke Rossii 130 Let (Moscow: Izd-vo VNIRO, 2011), Gare, “Soviet Environmentalism,” 80. Zenkovich, “Nabliudeniia nad Kitami Dal’nevostochnykh Morei,” 38. A. G. Tomilin, “O golose kitoobraznykh i vozmozhnosti ego ispol’zovaniia dlia ratsionalizatsii promysla morskikh mlekopitaiushchikh,” Rybnoe Khoziaistvo 1, no. 6 (June 1954): 57, 58. Tomilin, “O golose,” 57. Tomilin, 57. Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, chap. 5. Joan McIntyre, ed., Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (Sausalito, CA: Project Jonah, 1974). Tomilin, “O golose,” 58. Tomilin, 58. This was an argument put forth by Roger Payne, Among Whales (New York: Scribner, 1995). This history is related by, among others, Stephen Martin, The Whale’s Journey: A Year in the Life of a Humpback Whale, and a Century in the History of Whaling (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001), 209, 210. N. L. Krushinskaia, “Povedeniia Morskikh Mlekopitaiushchikh,” in Zoologiia Pozvonochnykh, ed. A. V. Yablokov, L. P. Poznanina (Moscow, 1974), 49. N. L. Krushinskaia, “Povedeniia Morskikh Mlekopitaiushchikh,” Zoologiia Pozvonochnykh, ed. A. V. Yablokov, L. P. Poznanina (Moscow, 1974), 48, 49. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers), 51. B. A. Zenkovich, “Sea Mammals as Observed by the Round-the-World Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1957/58,” Norsk Hvalfangst-Tidende 5 (1962): 198–210. Brain, Song of the Forest. Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). M. M. Belopol’skaya, “Beseda 27 Ianvaria 2005 g,” Littoriny na litorali: Istoriia Biologicheskikh Stantsionarov Belogo i Barentsogo Moria, 2005, http://www.littorina .info/kandalaksha/kandalaksha/ochevidci/001.html. M. M. Sleptsov, Giganty Okeanov (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Rybnoi Promyshlennosti Vostochnykh Raionov SSSR, 1948), 77, 8.

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23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36 37 38 39

40

41 42

43

44 45

46

47

48 49 50

51 52

Ethan Pollack, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Sleptsov, Giganty Okeanov, 87. See Jones, Empire of Extinction, especially chap. 4, 6. “Aleksandr Nikolaevich Formozov (1899–1973),” Nauchnye Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Prirodnogo Zapovednika >Prisurskii, vol. 23 (2010), 38, http://prisursk.tmweb.ru/site /trudy/N_T_23.pdf. Sleptsov, Giganty Okeanov, 15. Sleptsov, 57. Evgenii Panov, Zoologiia i moia zhizn’ v nei (Litres, 2017), np; V. B. Sabunaev, Zanimatel’naia Ikhtiologiia (Ripol Klassik, 2013), 174. Klumov, “O lokalnosti kitovykh stad,” 12, 13. Klumov, 7. On stock structure, see Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, 171. Gambell, “International Management of Whales and Whaling,” 101. M. M. Sleptsov, “Rasprostranenie Kitoobraznykh v Severo-Zapadnoi Chasti Tikhogo Okeana,” Trudy Okeanograficheskoi Kommissii 3 (1958): 132. M. M. Sleptsov, “O Kolebanii Chislenosti Kitov v Chukotskom More v Raznye Gody,” in Kitobraznye Dal’nevostochnykh Morei, 57. Sleptsov, “Usloviia Sushchestvovaniia,” 133. Sleptsov, “Usloviia Sushchestvovaniia”; M. M. Sleptsov, “Raiony Nagula Kitov v Beringovom More,” in Kitobraznye Dal’nevostochnykh Morei (Vladivostok: Ministerstvo rybnoi promyshlennosti SSSR, 1955), 133, 76. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 35. A. G. Tomilin, V Mire Kitov i Del’finov (Moscow: Nauka, 1974). Yuri Mikhalev, pers. comm., November 11, 2019. Dina Fainberg, et al., eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (London: Lexington Books, 2016). Yuri Mikhalev, “Aleksei Vladimirovich Yablokov v Moei Zhizni i v Moei Pamiati,” in Yablokov Sad, ed. D. N. Klado (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo ‘VeraPrint,’ 2018), 300. Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere. Y. A. Mikhalev, “Prenatal’nyi Rost i Nekotorye Voprosy Biologii Razmnozheniia Finvala Antarktiki,” Kity Iuzhnogo Polushariia (Biologiia i Morfologiia), in Trudy AtlantNIRO (Kaliningrad, 1970), no. 29: 53 82, and . See D. D. Tormosov, “O reproduktivnom potentsiale samok kashalotov,” in Morskie Mlekopitaiu Golarktiki: Tezisy dokladov 2-I Mezhd. Konfer (Moscow, 2002), 255– 59. Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, 449. A. Ya. Yablokov and A. A. Berg, “Perspektivy razvitiia issledovaniii kitov,” Biologiia Moria 5 (1978): 12. M. V. Ivashin and R. G. Borodin, “Otsenka Zapasov Kitov i Ikh Ratsional’noe Ispol’zovanie,” Rybnoe Khoziastvo 10 (1983): 31. See I. V. Nikonorov, M. V. Ivashin, and R. G. Borodin, “Printsipy i Metody Regulirovaniia Promysla Kitov,” Rybnoe Khozaistvo 9 (1977): 16, 18. Bob Brownell, interview with the author, Monterey, CA, August 2019. Aleksei Yablokov, interview by Nicholas Dean and Cheryl Dean, Moscow, June 2016. A. I. Yablokov, “Ya Schstalivyi Chelovek,” in Yablokov Sad, ed. D. N. Klado Klado (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo ‘VeraPrint,’ 2018), 23, 27. Yablokov, “Ya Schastlivyi Chelovek,” 37. Alfred Berzin, The Sperm Whale (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1972).

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53

54 55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

A. A. Berzin and V. L. Vladimorov, “Recent Distribution of Cetaceans in the Sea of Okhotsk,” Soviet Journal of Marine Biology 15, no. 2 (March– April 1989); A. Berzin, “O Raspostranenii i Chislennosti Zapreshchennykh k Promyslu Kitov v Tikhom Okeana,” Biologiia Moria 4 (1978), 23. Yablokov, interview. A. V. Yablokov and A. A. Berzin, “Perspektivy Razvitiia Issledovanii Kitoobraznykh,” Biologiia Moriia 5 (1978): 3–13, 10. Yablokov and Berzin, “Perspektivy Razvitiia,” 10. Yablokov and Berzin, 10. Yablokov and Berzin, 11, 12. It should be noted that some American scientists had developed similar plans in the 1960s, proposing to farm whales by fertilizing lagoons with radioactive particles designed to stimulate biological productivity. See Arthur C. Clarke, Deep Range (London: Frederick Muller, 1957). Yablokov, interview. Yablokov, interview. Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere, 39. Yablokov, interview. Yablokov, interview. Yablokov, interview. Dale W. Rice, “Journal of Cruise Aboard the Vnushitel’nyi,” v. 2, Dale W. Rice Memorial Library, Seattle. Berzin, “Truth about Soviet Whaling,” 14.

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Khisamutdinov, Kitoboinyi Promysel na Dal’nem Vostoke, 47. Eleanor L. Pray, Letters from Vladivostok, 1894–1930, ed. and trans. Brigitta Ingermason (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 70, 71. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, 1. William Richardson, “Planning a Model Soviet City: Transforming Vladivostok under Stalin and Brezhnev,” Journal of Faculty of Architecture 8, no. 1 (2011): 131. Richardson, “Planning a Model Soviet City,” 136, 138. Khisamutdinov, Kitoboinyi Promysel na Dal’nem Vostoke, 69. “Vo Vladivostoke bol’she ne budet del’finariia,” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, October 10, 2008, https://www.dv.kp.ru/daily/24186/394818/. In 2008, the belugas were sold to China. Svetlana Osipova, “Zhir i Krov’: Putevoditel; po samomu beschelovechnomu biznesu v Rossii,” Proekt, July 22, 2020, https://www.proekt.media/guide/delfinarii-zlo/. Yu. I. Moskal’tsov, introduction to V. P. Shcherbatiuk, ed., Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakh-dal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni admirala G. I. Nevel’skogo, 2014), 6. Rukhliada, “Dalnevostochnye Kitoboi v Antarktike,” 55. EastRussia, “Vladivostok— rodina kitoboinogo flota,” February 19, 2018, https://www .eastrussia.ru/material/vladivostok-rodina-kitoboynogo-flota/. “Vo Vladivostoke kitoboinyi promysel v bronze,” Vlad News, January 16, 2018, https://vladnews.ru/2018- 01-16/123968/vladivostoke _kitoboynyy. Rukhliada, “Dalnevostochnye Kitoboi v Antarktike,” 52.

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34

35

EastRussia, “Vladivostok— rodina kitoboinogo flota.” Aleksandr Aderkhin, “Vizhu Fontan. Nachinaiiu okhotu. Kalinngradskaia ‘kitoboika’: Pravda i mify,” https://special.klops.ru/kitoboi. Stephan, Russian Far East, 275. Stephan, 263. Stephan, 262. “Plan postavki rybnoi muki, zhirov i kitovogo pishchevo miasa morozhennogo eksport na 1975 god,” GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, no. 1023. “Perepiska s Ministerstvom Rybnogo Khoziastva SSSR . . . o proizvodstve i postavke plavnikov akul, kitov . . . na eskport za 1969 god,” GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, no. 302, pp. 73, 82— 85. Akiko Ishihara and Junichi Yoshii, “A Survey of the Commercial Trade in Whale Meat Products in Japan,” Traffic East Asia, June 2000, 4, https://www.traffic.org /site/assets/files/3994/whale _meat _trade _in _japan.pdf. “Perepiska s Ministerstvom Rybnogo Khoziastva SSSR . . . o proizvodstve i postavke plavnikov akul, kitov . . . na eskport za 1969 god,” GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, no. 302, p. 151. Akito Kawamura, “Chronological Notes on the Commissioned Japanese Whaling Factory Ships,” Bull. Fac. Fish. Hokkaido Univ. 31, no 2 (1980): 185. Henrik Österblom and Carl Folke, “Globalization, Marine Regime Shifts, and the Soviet Union,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 370 (2015): 1. “‘Vladivostok Avia’ otmechaet 50-letie vykhoda reaktivnogo Tu-104 na avialiniyu Moskva-Vladivostok,” Primemedia, January 18, 2008, https://primamedia.ru/news /59895/. “Kvartal’nye planye raboty otdelov, 1948,” GAOO, fond R-704, op. 1., delo 5, p. 119. “Protokol No 1 Zapkrytogo partiynogo sobranii Partorganizatsii kf SLAVA,” GAOO, fond 256, op. 1, no. 2, pp. 2– 3. Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 267. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 69–70. “Gruppa Pisem’,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 1, no. 2023, pp. 18, 43. “‘Chernomorku’ Vse Liubiat do sikh Por,” Infoport, July 10, 2017, https://www .infoport.live/culture-capital/cinema/chernomorochku-vse-lyubyat- do-sih-por/. Although Charles King claims the song “Dark Is the Night” from the film Two Warriors can also be considered the city’s anthem; King, Odessa: Genius and Death, 262. The Ukrainian internet seems to favor “Song about Odessa. See Vgorode.ua, last accessed January 29, 2020, https://od.vgorode.ua/news/obzory/378322-spoem -o -luibymom-horode-top -10 -pesen-ob -odesse; and the official site of the city of Odessa, last accessed January 29, 2020, http://odessa360.net/en/the-song-about -odessa-en/. Georgy Natanson, Belaia Akatsia (Chişinău: Moldova Film, 1957), available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYI0p1KhK4E. Lloyd’s List & Shipping Gazette February 8, 1960; Leonid Tiulenev, “Antarkticheskaia Kitoboinaia Flotiliia ‘Yuri Dolgorukii,’K 45-letiiu,” June 2005, https://www.kmrp .ru/o-porte/history/istoriya-kitoboev.html. “Reisovyi otchet za 11-yi promyslovyi reis . . . Slava,” 1956–1957, GAOO, R-7004, op. 3, no. 11, pp. 33, 40.

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36 37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55

56 57 58

59

60 61

Sergeev, “Dolgii put’ k mechte,” 132. Grigor’ev, “Ocherki zhurnalista,” 177; Nefed’ev, “Moreplavanie promyslovykh flot,” 151. “Brief Review of the Research Work undertaken by the ‘Slava’ Whaling Fleet of the USSR,” Proceedings of the IWC Seventh Meeting, Moscow, July, 1955, p. 57, IWC Archives. Dal’intorg to Dal’moreprodukt, February 18, 1974, GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, no. 1019, p. 160. Emerov, “Narodnozhoziaistvennoe Znachenie Kitoboinoi Promyshlennosti SSSR,” 163, 164; Shister, V Antarktiku za Kitami, 43. “Protokol zasedaniia uchenogo soveta TINRO, June 7, 1964,” GAPK, fond R-42, op. 1, no. 9, p. 38; “Telegram,” GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, no. 1019, p. 66. Anna Berdichev’ska, “Ot ‘Slava’— k zabveniiu?,” Moriak Ukrainy, August 11, 2016, https://moryakukrainy.livejournal.com/3242275.html. “Vo Vladivostoke vandaly prevratili kitenka v ‘pamiatnik kitoboi,” VL.RU, May 2, 2016. https://www.newsvl.ru/vlad/2016/02/05/144054/. Emerov, “Narodnozhoziaistvennoe Znachenie Kitoboinoi Promyshlennosti SSSR,” 163; “Otchet nauhcnoi gruppy VNIRO, 1950–1951,” RGAE, fond 410, op. 1, no. 416, p. 18. I. V. Nikonorov, M. V. Ivashin, B. G. Makeev, and I. F. Golovlev, “Sovetskie kitoboi v Antarktike,” Rybnoe Khoziastvo 8 (1987): 10. Emerov, “Narodnozhoziaistvennoe Znachenie Kitoboinoi Promyshlennosti SSSR,” 167; Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere, 242. Sovetskaia Kulinarnaia Entsiklopedia, 1955, https:// kulinaria1955.ru/pischevye _zhiry/28-margarin.html. Emerov, “Narodnozhoziaistvennoe Znachenie Kitoboinoi Promyshlennosti SSSR,” 167. Grigor’ev, Kit na line, 37. Sleptsov, Giganty Okeanov, 87. Demuth, Floating Coast, 166. GAPK, fond R-42, op. 1, no. 9, p. 10. Alexei Yurchak, “Suspending the Political: Late Soviet Artistic Experiments on the Margins of the State,” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 718. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1980). S. Grigor’ev, Kit na Line (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Detskoi Literatury, 1963), 10. Grigor’ev, Kit na line, 47, 57. Grigor’ev, 46, 58. William Husband, “’Correcting Nature’s Mistakes’: Transforming the Environment and Soviet Children’s Literature, 1928–1941,” Environmental History 11 (April 2006): 303, 312. Robert Russell, “Red Pinkertonism: An Aspect of Soviet Literature of the 1920s,” Slavonic and East European Review 60:3 (July 1982): 390– 412; Rafail Nudelman, “Soviet Science Fiction and the Ideology of Soviet Society,” Science-Fiction Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1989): 38– 66. Dmitri Tormosov, pers. comm., June 21, 2016. Elena Khodzher, “’Tvoi knigi ostanutsia zhit’ . . .’: K 100-letiiu Anatoliia Vakhova,” Slevesnitsa Iskusstv 1, no. 41 (2018); “Avtor, Tragedii Kapitana Ligova’ rodilsia vo Vladivostoke 100 let nazad,” Vostok Media, February 18, 2018, https://vostokmedia

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62

63

64

65 66 67

68

69

70

71 72 73 74 75 76

77

78

79 80

81

82

83 84 85 86

87 88

.com /news /culture /12 - 02 -2018 /avtor - tragedii -kapitana -ligova -rodilsya -vo -vladivostoke-100 -let-nazad-312edd44-9e7c-4b7a-8e40 -a8b506fadb83. It is of course impossible to determine how many Russians read Vakhov, but it is indicative that both in 1962 and 1970 publishers released 75,000 copies of the reprinting of The Tragedy of Captain Ligov. A. A. Vakhov, Tragediia Kapitana Ligova (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sovetskii Pisatel,’ 1970). A. A. Vakhov, Fontany na Gorizonte (Magadan: Magadanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1958), 215. Nonna Kondrashechkina, “Zakonemernaia Neudacha,” Sovetskoe Primor’e 16 (1954): 217. Vakhov, Fontany na Gorizonte, 247– 49. Vakhov, Tragediia Kapitana Ligova, 56. Joh n C. Fiske, “Herman Melville in Soviet Criticism,” Comparative Literature 5, no. 1 (Winter 1953): 37. A. A. Vakhov, Shtorm Ne Utikhaet (Magadan: Magadanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1957), 10. See A. A. Vakhov, Garpuner: Ocherk o luchshem garpunere kitoboinoi flotilii “Aleut” F. D. Prokopenko (Primizdat, 1949). Mary W. Cavender, “Hunting in Imperial Russia: State Policy and Social Order in L. P. Sabaneev’s Writing,” Russian Review 76 (July 2017): 484– 501. Zarva, “‘Aleut’— ‘Slava,’” 88. Grigor’ev, Kit na line, 19. Cavender, “Hunting in Imperial Russia,” 490. Grigor’ev, Kit na line, 22. Zenkovich, Vokrug Sveta za Kitami, chap. 10. Helen Rozwadowsi, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (London: Reaktion, 2018), 151. For changing ideas around whales in the West, see Frank Zelko, Make It a Greenpeace!; and Burnett, Sounding of the Whale. Yuri Sergeevich Rytkheu, Kogda Kity Ukhodiat (Leningrad: Leningradskoe Otdelenie Izd-va “Sovetskii Pisatel’,” 1977). Josephson et al., Environmental History of Russia, 179. Stephen Brain, “The Appeal of Appearing Green: Soviet-American Ideological Competition and Cold War Environmental Diplomacy,” Cold War History 16, no. 4 (2016): 458. Yuri Rytkheu, “Predislovie,” and A. S. Sokolov, “Posleslovie,” in in Kit na Zaklanie, by Farley Mowat (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1977), 7, 161– 64. See V. M. Bel’kovich, S. E. Kleinenberg, and A. V. Yablokov, Nash Drug Del’fin (Moscow: Moladaia Gvardiia, 1967). A. Tomilin, V Mire Kitov i Del’finov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Znanie,” 1980), 3. Tomilin, V Mire Kitov i Del’finov, 210. Yablokov, interview, 23. T. M. Zhiravleva, A. I. Shalamov, Ya. G. Prut’ko, “Kontrol’ za Sobliudeniem Zapreta na Lov Del’finov v Chernom More,” in Izucheniie, Okhrana i Ratsional’noe Ispol’zovanie Morskikh Mlekopitaiushchikh (Tezisy dokladov 8 Vsesoiuznago soveshchaniia) Astrakhan, 5– 8 Oktiabria 1982 g (Astrakhan: Ministerstvo Rybnogo Khozaistva SSSR, 1982), 123. Greenpeace to Ottawa, Archives Canada, RG 23, box 168. Tomilin, V Mire Kitov, 215.

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89

90

91 92 93

94

95

Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2015): 149. See Alan Roe, Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom. Vladimir Troinn, Rasskazy o Kitax (Moscow: Bukinisticheskoe Izdanie, 1982). Vladimir Troinin, “Rasskazy o Kitax,” in A. Il’in, Tikhooekanskie Rumby (Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochnoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1977), 97–104. For biographical information, see Zapovednoe Primor’e, https://pgpb.ru/media/cd/zp/new/troy.html; and Zapovednik Komandorskii, http:// komandorsky.ru/%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%83%D1 %87%D0%BD%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8F %D1%80%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5-%D0%BA%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0 %B826.html. Anna Berdichev’ska, “Ot ‘Slavy’— k zabveniiu?,” Moriak Ukrainy, August 11, 2016, https://moryakukrainy.livejournal.com/3242275.html. “Vashy voprosy to 16.09.1985,” Argumenty i Fakty, September 17, 1985, https://aif.ru /archive/1658890.

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3

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11

Resolutions of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 36, 52, 53. Carmel Finley, All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 92. “Zhizn’ na porokhovoi bochke,” Kamchatkskoe Vremia, March 28, 2019, http:// kamtime .ru/node/4111; N. N. Sushkina, Na Puty Vulkany, Kity, L’dy (Moscow: Gosudarstvenno Izdatel’stvo Geograficheskoi Literatury, 1962), 60– 64. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 71. D. W. Rice, The Humpback Whale in the North Pacific: Distribution, Exploitation, and Numbers: Paper Presented at the Workshop on Humpback Whales in Hawaii, Honolulu, 6– 8 July, 1977, cited in Louis M. Herman, “Humpback Whales in Hawaiian Waters: A Study in Historical Ecology,” Pacific Science 33, no. 1 (1979). Edward James Gregr, “Analysis of Historic (1908–1967) Whaling Records from British Columbia, Canada” (master’s of science thesis, University of British Columbia, 2000). Lloyd, On the Northwest, chap. 8. Herman, “Humpback Whales in Hawaiian Waters,” 10. Erich Hoyt and E. C. M. Parsons, “The Whale-Watching Industry: Historical Development,” in J. Higham, L. Bejder, and R. Williams, eds., Whale-watching: Sustainable Tourism and Ecological Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p 58. “Field Notes, 1961–1962,” University of Alaska Fairbanks Archives, Rex Thomas Papers, box 3, folder 4, slide 94-167. On illegal gray whale catches, see N. V. Doroshenko, “Soviet Whaling for Blue, Gray, Bowhead and Right Whales in the North Pacific Ocean, 1961–1979,” in Soviet Whaling Data (1949–1979), ed. A. V. Yablokov and V. A. Zemsky (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy, 2000), 101. N. Doroshenko, “Soviet Catches of Humpback Whales (Megaoptera novoaengliae) in the North Pacific,” in Soviet Whaling Data (1949–1979), ed. A. V. Yablokov and V. A. Zemsky (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy, 2000), 59.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 80 –1 84

12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23

24

25 26

27

28

29

30

31

“U.S. May Seize Alien Fleet,” Kodiak Mirror, August 9, 1963. Christopher Pollon, “You Never Forget the Smell,” Hakai Magazine, January 28, 2020, https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/you-never-forget-the -smell/; “Soviet Fishing Pattern—1968,” Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, RG 01, series 124, box 3. Doroshenko, “Soviet Catches of Humpback Whales,” 63, 66. L. M. Herman and R. Antinoja, “Humpback Whales in the Hawaiian Breeding Waters: Population and Pod Characteristics,” Scientific Report Whales Research Institute Tokyo 29 (1977): 59– 85; A. A. Wolman and C. M. Jurasz, “Humpback Whales in Hawaii: Vessel Census 1976,” Marine Fisheries Review 39 (1977): 1– 5. Herman, “Humpback Whales in Hawaiian Waters,” 11. Berzin, “Truth about Soviet Whaling,” 43. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 92. Quoted in Ivashchenko, 68. “The Proposal of the Japanese Delegation, Special Meeting of Commissioners of the North Pacific Whaling Nations, Honolulu, 1967,” Australian National Archives— Canberra, A1838, 704/8/1/, part 13: Economic developments— International Whaling Commission, p. 11. “Statement of the Soviet Delegation, Special Meeting of Commissioners of the North Pacific Whaling Nations, Honolulu, 1967,” Australian National Archives— Canberra, A1838, 704/8/1/, part 13: Economic developments— International Whaling Commission, p. 15. Report prepared by Dr. J. L. McHugh on the Special Meeting of Commissioners of the North Pacific Whaling Nations which took place in Honolulu from 20th to 24th November, 1967, Australian National Archives— Canberra A1838, 704/8/1, part 13: Economic developments— International Whaling Commission, p. 3. Appendix D: Report of the Special Meeting of Commissioners from North Pacific Member Nations, Honolulu, Hawaii, February 14th to 17th, 1966, IWC Archives. Yulia V. Ivashchenko, Phillip J. Clapham, and Robert L. Brownell Jr., “New Data on Soviet Blue Whale Catches in the Eastern North Pacific in 1972,” International Whaling Commission Reports SC/66a/IA/1, 3. Rocha, Clapham, and Ivashchenko, “Emptying the Oceans,” 44. Yulia Ivashchenko and Robert Brownell, “Soviet Catches of Whales in the North Pacific: Revised Totals,” Journal of Cetacean Research and Management, January 2013; “Reisovyi Otchet Slava, 1952–1953,” GAOO, R.7004, op. 7, p. 4. Peter Thomas, Randall Reeves, and Robert Brownell, “Status of the World’s Baleen Whales,” Publications, Agencies and Staff to the U.S. Department of Commerce 544 (2015), 18. Clarence A. Weberg to Stuart Blow, May 26, 1970, Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, RG 01, S, series 124, box 3. Stuart Blow to Clarence A. Weberg, May 20, 1970, Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, RG 01, S, series 124, box 3. The Soviet Fishing Industry: Prospects and Problems, February 1975, CIA Archives, https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP86T00608R000500230006-7. Terence Armstrong, “Soviet Sea Fisheries since the Second World War,” Polar Record 13, no. 83 (May 1966): 156; Jan J. Solecki, “A Review of the U.S.S.R. Fishing Industry,” Ocean Management 5 (1979): 98.

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32 33

34 35

36

37 38

39 40 41 42

43

44

45

46

47

48 49

50

51

52

53 54

55 56

57

Armstrong, “Soviet Sea Fisheries,” 159. Vladil Lysenko, Crime against the World: Memoirs of a Russian Sea Captain, trans. Michael Glenny (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986). Solecki, “Review of the U.S.S.R. Fishing Industry,” 107. Solecki, 116, 117; “State Department Officials Plot Secretly with Soviets to Import Communist Processed Seafoods,” Kodiak Mirror, December 3, 1965. “Soviet Fishing Pattern—1968,” Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, RG 01, series 124, box 3. “Russ Trawling Destroys 24 Costly Pots,” Kodiak Daily Mirror, May 5, 1970. “Governor Egan Calls for More Naval Forces for Alaska” and “155 Red Ships off Kodiak,” Kodiak Mirror, May 24, 1963. “Russian Fishing Vessels Jamming ‘Mayday’ Channel,” Kodiak Mirror, June 7, 1963. “Crab War Appears Imminent,” Kodiak Mirror, September 27, 1963. “June Meet with Soviets,” Kodiak Mirror, May 22, 1964. “Fishermen Send Petition to Senators,” Seattle Times, September 8, 1970, University of Washington Special Collections, Warren Grant Magnuson Papers, SCSP 09425, box 56. “Extended Fishing Zone Petitions Gather Steam,” Bellingham Herald, October 4, 1970, University of Washington Special Collections, Warren Grant Magnuson Papers, SCSP 09425, box 56. “Message for Brezhnev?,” Daily Astorian, June 13, 1973, University of Washington Special Collections, Warren Grant Magnuson Papers, SCSP 09425, box 56. “For the Record from Sci/En William C. Trueheart,” April 25, 1974, US National Archives Record Administration, College Park, RG 59, Bureau of European Affairs— Office of Soviet Union Affairs— Multilateral Political Relations, box 5. Gene S. Martin and James W. Brennan, “Enforcing the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling: The Pelly and Packwood-Magnuson Amendments,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 293 (1988–1989): 288, 289. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 359. Stenogramma Zasedaniia Kollegii, June 13, 1975, RGAE, fond 8202, op. 20, no. 4522. “Otchet ob itogakh Zhenevskoi Konferentsii OON po Morskomu Pravu, 3 Iiuliia, 1975 goda,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 20, no. 4522. Eleanor C. McDowell, Digest of United States Practice in International Law, 1975 (Washington, DC: Department of State Publication, 1976), 407. “Department of State Briefing Paper Issues / Talking Points US/USSR Bilateral Fishing Problems,” November 1974, NARA, RG 59, US- Soviet Trade Relations and Economic Subject Files, box 12. Simona L. Perry, Douglas P. DeMaster, and Gregory K. Silber, “The Great Whales: History and Status of Six Species Listed as Endangered Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973,” Marine Fisheries Review 61, no. 1 (1999): 31, 41, 48, 55. Perry, DeMaster, and Silber, “The Great Whales,” 55. Phillip Hoare, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 351. Grigor’ev, “Ocherki zhurnalista,” 187. “Prikaz No. 340 Ob itogakh promyslovji raboty kitoboinykh flotilii v promyslovom sezone 1974/75 gg . . . ,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 20, no. 4533, p. 2. “Proizvodstvennyi otchet, 1974–1975 gg,” GAKO, op. 100, delo 4, no. 15, pp. 3– 4.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 8 8–1 9 3

58

59

60

61 62 63

64

Aleksandr Aderikhin, “Bol’shaia Okhota na bol’shuiu ruby: Rasskaz kitoboia,” Rugrad.eu, November 10, 2008, https://rugrad.eu/smi/244677/. Stuart Blow to Clarence A. Weberg, June 12, 1970, Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor— International Fisheries Subject Files, 1968–1974, RG 01, series 124, box 3. Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 159; Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food, UK, to Secretary, International Whaling Commission, ANZ—Wellington, record no. 104/6/9/2, International Affairs— Economic Affairs— Commodities—Whaling— International Whaling Convention— General, 1960–1961, np. Quoted in Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 192. Mikhalev, Whales of the Southern Hemisphere, 39. “Reisovyi Otchet Sovetskaia Ukraina, 1979–1980,” GAOO, fond R-7004, op. 3, no. 37, pp. 44, 54. “Proizvodstvennyi Otchet, 1972–1973,” GAKO, R-100.4.13., p. 94; “1977 Otchet,” TINRO, Scientific Archive, no. 2373, p. 18.

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7

8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17

18

Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, 641. Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement from 1971 to 1979 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2011), 141. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 142. Hunter, 142. Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 220, 223. Michael Heazle, Scientific Uncertainty and the Politics of Whaling (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 142. “International Whaling Commission: Possible Application of the Pelly Amendment,” April 25, 1974, NARA, RG 59, Bureau of European Affairs— Office of Soviet Union Affairs— Multilateral Political Relations, box 5. “Japanese and Soviet Whaling Protested by Boycott of Goods,” New York Times, June 20, 1974. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 146. “Greenpeace Whale Show: Jpn Tour,” May 27/74, confidential, Archives Canada, RG 25-A-3c, vol. 8729, Political Affairs— Non Party Groups— Greenpeace Foundation, box 376, file 20-18-5. “Greenpeace Whale Show: Jpn Tour,” May 27/74, Confidential, in Archives Canada, RG 25-A-3c, vol. 8729, Political Affairs— Non Party Groups— Greenpeace Foundation, box 376, file 20-18-5. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 171. Rex Weyler, Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World (Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2015), 276. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 198, 199; Weyler, 276. Weyler, 286. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 195. “O provedenii mintaevogo promysla v Okhotomorskoi Ekspeditsii,” January 22, 1975, GAPK, fond 1531, op. 3, delo 275, p. 66. “O dopolnenii Pravil rybolovstva v otkrytom more v severo-vostochnoi chasti Tikhogo okeana,” 24.01.75, GAPK, fond 1531, op. 3, delo 275, p. 83.

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21

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26 27

28 29 30 31

32

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34

35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48

“Usloviia Oplaty Truda,” GAPK, fond 1531, op. 3, delo 275, p. 16. “O rezul’tatakh kompleksnoi dokumentalnoi revizi k/f ‘Dal’nyi Vostok,’” 23.01.1976, GAPK, fond 1584, op. 3, delo 324, p. 79. “O faktakh ischeznoveniia chlenov sudoekipazhei v more i merakh predotvrashcheniia etikh tiazhelikh proisshestvii,” February 2, 1976, GAPK, fond 1584, op. 3, delo 324, p. 23. “Ob utverzhdenii pravil okhrany i promysla morskikh mlekopitaiushchikh,” June 11, 1975, GAPK, fond 1508, op. 2, delo 1023, p. 66. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 217, 218. Hunter, 219. Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd: My Fight for Whales & Seals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 36. 1975 Otchet, TINRO Scientific Archive, no. 23771, p. 28. “Khipi, panki, PUTshniki: veteran KGB vspomnil metody borby,” MKRU, December 11, 2018, https://www.mk .ru/social/2018/12/11/khippi-panki-ptushniki -veteran-kgb-vspomnil-metody-borby.html. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 221, 223, 224. “1975 Otchet,” TINRO Scientific Archive, p. 1. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 225, 226. Jerry Rothwell, dir. How to Change the World: The Revolution Will Not Be Organized (Picturehouse Entertainment, 2015). “Operation Ahab / Greenpeace Foundation,” classified report, July 4, 1975, San Francisco, Archives Canada, RG 25-A-3-c, vol. 8729 Political Affairs— Non Party Groups— Greenpeace Foundation, box 376, file no. 20-18-5. “Dokumenty Mezhdunarodnoi statistiku po kitoboinoi flotilii Vladivostok za period raboty v Severnoi chasti Tikhogo okeana s 24 maia po 10 noiabria 1975 goda,” GAPK, fond 1531, op. 3, delo 289. IWC Verbatim Report, Archive of the International Whaling Commission 1975, Red House, Impington, UK, 7, 8. IWC Verbatim Report, 1975, 58. “Kity pod Zashchitoi,” Izvestiia, July 10, 1975. IWC Verbatim Report, Archive of the International Whaling Commission 1977, Red House, Impington, UK, 65. “Soviet Ministrov SSSR Postanovlenie, Moskva, Kreml, 3– 4 Iuliia, 1975,” RGANI, fond 3, op. 72, no. 675, protokol 181. “O rezul’tatkah vtorogo truda Sovetskoi-Amerikanskoi mezhprav. peregovorov o rybolovstve . . . 29.07.1975,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 20, no. 4522. “Ban on Soviet Fishing Fleet Urged,” Vancouver Sun, August 14, 1975. Quoted in “Soviets Didn’t Come to Whale War,” San Francisco Examiner, July 7, 1976. “Russ Whale Hunt Spoiled,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1976. Quoted in Zelko, Make It a Greenpeace!, 282. Greenpeace Chronicles, February 14, 2012, 34, https:// issuu .com /green peace international/docs/greenpeacechronicles/34. “‘We Have Come to Ask You to Please Stop Killing the Whales,’” Bay Guardian, September 9, 1977. 1977 Otchet, TINRO Scientific Archive, no. 23773, p. 20. “Soviets Deny Plan to Halt Whale Hunting,” Vancouver Sun, August 26, 1976. “Russians to Give Up Whaling Says Envoy,” Province, August 30, 1976, Vancouver City Archive, Greenpeace Fond Add Mss 925, 594, file 3.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 1–2 0 4

49

50

51 52

53 54

55

56 57

58

59

60 61 62

63

64

65 66

67

68

69

70

“Soviets to Stop Whaling in 2 Years,” unidentified newspaper, Vancouver City Archive, Greenpeace Fond Add Mss 925, 594, file 3; Paul Spong, “Perspective,” unidentified newspaper, Greenpeace Fond Add Mss 925, 594, file 3. “Goodwill Mission of Soviets Marred by Demonstrators,” Vancouver Sun, August 30, 1976, Vancouver City Archive, Greenpeace Fond Add Mss 925, 594, file 3. “Soviets deny plan to halt whale hunting,” Vancouver Sun, August 26, 1976. “Soviets may return: Whale season in doubt,” unidentified newspaper, August 30, 1976, Vancouver City Archive, Greenpeace Fond Add Mss 925, 594, file 3. Spong, “Perspective.” “TsK KPSS Po Pis’mu Tov Iablokova A. V. o Kitoboinom Promysle Polucheno 15 Aprelia 1975 Goda,” RGAE, fond 8202, op. 20, no. 4551 TsK KPSS 1975. “Russia to Halt Commercial Whaling, Delegate Says,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1978 Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 224; NA, MAF 209/3057. V. P. Shcherbatiuk, “Kitoboinye flotilii,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitiboiakhdal’nevostochnikakh, ed. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni admirala G.I. Nevel’skogo, 2014), 47. Anna Berdichev’ska, “Ot ‘Slavi’— k zabveniiu?,” Moriak Ukrainy, August 11, 2016, https://moryakukrainy.livejournal.com/3242275.html. The Whaling Question: The Inquiry by Sir Sydney Frost of Australia (San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1979). Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 247, 244. “Eskimos Given Quota on Killing of Whales,” New York Times, December 8, 1977. “Prepared Statement of Craig van Note, Executive Vice President, the Monitor Consortium,” Review of the 32nd International Whaling Commission Meeting: Hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Sixth Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 34. Igor Krupnik and Michael Chlenov, Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900–1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2013); Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). M. V. Ivashin and V. N. Mineev, “The History of Gray Whale Harvesting off Chukotka,” Thirty-First Report of the International Whaling Commission (Cambridge, 1981), 504. Ivashin and Mineev, “History of Gray Whale Harvesting,” 504. Lyudmila S. Bogoslovskaya, “The Bowhead Whale off Chukotka: Integration of Scientific and Traditional Knowledge, in Indigenous Ways to the Present: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic, ed. Allen P. McCartney (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, 2003); Milton M. R. Freeman et al., eds., Inuit, Whaling, and Sustainability (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1988), 138. Lkudmila S. Bogoslovskaia, Kity Chukotki: Posobie dlia Morskikh Okhotnikov (Moscow-Provideniia-Anadyr: Rossiiskii Nauchno-Issledovatel’skii Instiut Kul’turnogo i Prirodnogo Naslediia Imeni D. S. Likhacheva, 2003), 8, 9. “Instruktsiia delegatam na Mezh. Konf. po regulirovaniiu kitoboinogo promysel,” RGAE, fond 9242, op. 1, no. 324, p. 67. “Minutes of the Seventh Session, Nov. 25, 1946,” in Proceedings of the 1946 Conference, 1:26, Archives of the International Whaling Commission. Harry Scheiber, “Historical Memory, Cultural Claims, and Environmental Ethics

255

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71 72 73

74

75 76

77 78 79 80 81

82

83

84

85 86

87

88

89

90

91

92

in the Jurisprudence of Whaling Regulation,” Ocean and Coastal Management 38 (1998): 17. Quoted in Gambell, “International Management of Whales and Whaling,” 104. “Prepared Statement of Craig van Note,” 43. See, for example, I. I. Krupnik, L. S. Bogoslovskaya, and L. M. Votrogov, “Gray Whaling Off the Chukotka Peninsula: Past and Present Status,” in Thirty-Third Report of the International Whaling Commission (Cambridge: International Whaling Commission, 1983), 561. “Sea Shepherd Makes Two Trips into Soviet Waters,” Nome Nugget, August 13, 1981; Paul Watson, interview with the author, San Diego, August 15, 2018. Quoted in David Day, The Whale War (San Francisco: Sierra Book Club, 1987), 74. Paul Watson, Ocean Warrior: My Battle to End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1995), 81, 82. “Sea Shepherd Makes Two Trips into Soviet Waters,” Nome Nugget, August 13, 1981. “Saving Whales: A Better Way,” Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1983. Chris Cook, phone interview with the author, August 3, 2018. “Greenpeacers Experience Soviet Eskimo Village,” Nome Nugget, July 28, 1983. “Greenpeace under Attack for Helping Inuit Whalers,” Nunatsiaq News, October 10, 1997. For more on the Lorino campaigns, see Ryan Tucker Jones, “Two Landings in Lorino: How Environmentalists Confronted the Soviets in the Bering Strait and Discovered Subsistence Whaling,” in Across Species and Cultures: New Histories of Pacific Whaling, ed. Ryan Tucker Jones and Angela Wanhalla (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022). “Letter to United Nations, Reagan, and Russian Embassy, Washington, DC, among Others, from Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, May 4, 1982,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, WHORM Subject File NR002, 076999. 1983 Verbatim Report, 1, 2, Archive of the International Whaling Commission, Red House, Impington, UK. Burnett, Sounding of the Whale, 634. “Response of Hon. Richard A. Frank to Subcommittee Chairman Bonker’s Letter of September 12, 1980, October 15, 1980,” in Review of the 32nd International Whaling Commission Meeting: Hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Sixth Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 87. Mark O. Hatfield Library Special Collections, Salem, Oregon, Robert Packwood Papers, box 518. Secretary of commerce to the president, April 1, 1985, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, John G. Roberts File, Correspondence, Miscellaneous (04/02/1985– 04/10/1985), box 14. Alaska State Archives, AS 8604, Subject Files, 1980–1992—Whales / IWC— Marine Mammal Regulation, box “Whales / IWC.” Ronald Reagan, “Message to the Congress Reporting on the Whaling Activities of the Soviet Union,” May 31, 1985, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/53185c. “‘Rybnaia Mafiia’: Kak v SSSR rassledovali pervoe delo o korruptsii,” Moskva24, April 24, 2014, https://www.m24.ru/articles/korrupciya/25042014/43321. “International Whaling Commission,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, WHORM Subject File NR002, IT054.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 9 –2 1 5

93

94

95 96

97 98

99

100 101 102

103

“To Russia, With Love,” ECO: International Whaling Commission XXX:6 (July 20, 1985), p. 4. “Memorandum from the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Powell) to Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Commerce Verity,” November 18, 1897, Department of State, Arctic, Antarctic, and Whaling, 1975–1987, lot 92D228, “IWC— U.S.S.R. 1986– 87, Secret,” https:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1981-88v41/d341; “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in the Soviet Union,” August 28, 1986. Department of State, Central Foreign Policy File, D860658– 0478, confidential, https:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1981-88v41/d325. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 434. “Memorandum from the Under Secretary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce (Calio) to the Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, Department of Commerce (Evans),” nd, Department of State, Arctic, Antarctic, and Whaling, 1975–1987, lot 92D228, IWC— U.S.S.R., 1987–19 87, https:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v41/d327. “Soviet Says It Is Giving Up Commercial Whaling,” New York Times, May 24, 1987. Thirty-Eighth Report of the International Whaling Commission (Cambridge: Office of the Commission, 1988). N. V. Doroshenko, “Proshchai, Antarktika!,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakhdal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2013), 498. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 80. Doroshenko, “Proshchai, Antarktika!,” 496. A. Riukhlada, “Dal’nevostochie kitoboi v Antarktike,” in Antarktika za Kormoi: O kitoboiakh-dal’nevostochnikakh, ed. V. P. Shcherbatiuk (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Morskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2013), 67. Tom Rose, Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World’s Greatest Non-event (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1989), 215–17.

C O N C L USI O N 1

2

3 4 5 6

Robbins Barstow, dir, The International Whaling Commission: Two Historic Meetings, doc. film, https://archive.org/details/barstow_international _whaling _comissions _1993 _1994. “Alexei Yablokov, Grandfather of Russian Environmentalism, Dies at 83,” Bellona, January 10, 2017, https:// bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2017-01-alexei-yablokov -grandfather-of-russian-environmentalism-dies-at-83. Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 59. Yablokov, interview, 19, 32. Brownell, interview. Part of the story had actually been revealed a year earlier, in Galveston, Texas, during the biannual meeting of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, when Yablokov addressed the meeting and went through some of the basics of Soviet cheating. But few had heard his talk. Then, in January 1994, Yablokov published a very short note in the American journal Nature, stating that the Soviets had underreported blue and humpback whale catch numbers and had secretly taken illegal right whales. Interview with Yulia Ivashchenko and Phil Clapham, Vashon, Washington, October 2020; Aleksey V. Yablokov, “Validity of Whaling Data,” Nature 367 (January 13, 1994).

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7

8 9

10

11 12

13

Report of the Scientific Committee to the International Whaling Commission 45th Meeting, 1995, Reports of the International Whaling Commission, no. 45, p. 62. Report of the Scientific Committee 1995, 61, 62. Report of the Scientific Committee to the International Whaling Commission 46th Meeting, 1996, Reports of the International Whaling Commission, no. 46, p. 65. A. V. Yablokov, Soviet Antarctic Whaling Data (1947–1972) (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy, 1995); A. V. Yablokov and V. A. Zemsky, eds., Soviet Whaling Data (1949–1979) (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy, 2000). Ivashchenko, “Soviet Whaling,” 175. Peter J. Stoett, The International Politics of Whaling (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 84, 85. Dmitri Tormosov, pers. comm., August 4, 2020.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. aboriginal whaling, 204–5, 212 Abu Khameda (Ibn Fadlan), 3 accidents, 194 activists, 190; aboard Dal’nii Vostok, 199– 200, 200; arrests of, 204–5; interaction with whalers, 195. See also environmentalists; Greenpeace African American whalers, 36, 37 agitators, 103–4 Ahab, Captain, 169 Alaska Natives, autonomy of, 207 alcohol: as danger to kollektiv, 104–5; and drunkenness, 55, 78–79 Aleut fleet, 31–33, 37, 47; behavior of crew, 33–34; in Bonin Islands, 39; captain of, 39; conditions onboard, 46; crew of, 32; and Far Eastern identity, 152–53; fictionalized, 168; in Hawaiʻi, 36–38; history of, 55; newspaper on board, 52, 84; retirement of, 188; in Vladivostok, 41–42; women aboard, 36 Aleutian Islands, 8, 12–13 Aleut people, 8, 11–13, 17; hunting techniques of, 9, 9 Allies, rivalry between, 61 Alona, Jenny, 206 Alutiit people, 11–12 American ships, repurposed by Soviet Union, 60

American whaling, end of, 60 Angelin, Vladimir, 162, 177 animal cruelty, 129, 130 Antarctic: areas of, 89; climate of, 65; explorers, 85; and politics, 62; ships in, 65–66 Antarctic fleets, 197 Antarctic whaling, 50, 58–59; conditions, 65; Soviet cessation of, 209 Area II, 92 Area IV, 93 Area V, 88–89, 89, 92; and Sovetskaia Ukraina, 93; whales return to, 113 Arguments and Facts ( journal), 177 Around the World for Whales (Zenkovich), 135 Arsen’ev, Margarita, 30 Arsen’ev, Vladimir Klavdeevich, 24–28, 26, 38–43, 48, 52–54; accusations against, 30; and scientific research, 134; ship named after, 212 Arsen’ev, V. S., 96 Avramenko, I., 112 azart (passion), 119, 167, 170–72, 177 baleen, market for, 19 baleen whales, 42–43, 164; management area, 89; social habits of, 118 Baltic Sea, 10

260

inde x

Baranov, Fedor, 145 Baranov, Igor A., 187 Barents Sea, 1, 2, 4, 7 Barsegov, Eduard Vladimirovich, 119–20 Bartlett, Bob, 180, 185 Baruch, Bernard, 61 Batrakov, 157 Beklemishev, C. W., 88, 89, 92 Belkovich, Vsevolod, 174 Bellingshausen, Faddey, 62, 64 Berdichev’ska, Anna, 162 Berg, Lavrentii, 62 Bering, Vitus, 10, 21 Bering Strait, 10–11 Berzin, Alfred, 91, 147–48, 181, 188, 196, 215 birthing grounds, 143 Black Sea, 1, 10; dolphin hunting in, 174–75 blue whales, 43, 45, 45; in Antarctic, 64; in North Pacific, 182 Bogdanov, A. S., 69–70 Bogoslovskaya, Lyudmila, 203 Bolshevik: ideology, 134–35; massacre, 24; Party, 40, 51; Revolution, 23–24, 134; transformation of Vladivostok, 153 Bonin Islands, 39 bonuses, individual, 106 Borisov, Yu. M., 194 Borodin, R. G., 145 Boronovskii, 53 Borshchov, Yu. F., 111, 120 bowhead whales, 19, 21, 117, 181, 202 boycotts, 192, 199 Brain, Stephen, 172 breeding grounds, 133 Breyfogle, Nick, 175 Brezhnev, Leonid, 109, 112, 186 Brownell, Bob, 149, 215 bubble-net technique, 9 Burnett, D. Graham, 69, 86 Bykovskii, Vladimir Stepanovich, 54 Calio, Antonio, 209, 210 calves, 118, 126–27, 163 Canada, 182, 194, 197–98, 200–201 Canberra meeting, 202 canning systems, 46–47 capitalism: blamed for excesses, 70–71, 73; disadvantage to Americans, 16; hardships of, 102; harm caused by, 23; and

privatization of whales, 72; and scarcity of whales, 164; and sexism, 77 capitalist theory, and value of ownership, 164 carcasses: desecrated, 129–30; whale, 14, 29, 83 Carson, Rachel, 172 Castro, Fidel, 75 catcher boats, 60, 85, 154; competition among, 105–6; increase of, 90–91 censorship, 177; of newspapers, 177; of reports, 198 cetaceans: behavior of, 140–41; communication between, 136–37, 144; intelligence of, 174. See also dolphins; whales cetologists, progressive, 145 cetology, 114–15; expansion of, 142; scientific contributions to, 19; Soviet advantages in, 138–39. See also science: scientific research Chamisso, Adelbert von, 8 Chapman, Douglas, 145 cheating, 66, 71; Soviet, 76, 80–83, 196, 216 Chegorskii, Dmitrii, 111 Chekhov, Anton, 30, 55, 152 Chekists, 40, 51 Chernenko, Konstantin, 207 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 214 Chillingarov, Arthur, 212 China, relationship with Russia, 155 Chittleborough, Graham, 95, 96 Chkalov, Valery, 34 Christensen, Christian, Jr., 28 chudovishche (monsters), 9 Chukchi people, 11, 27, 29, 173; creation myths of, 172; documentation of, 203– 4; exemptions for, 204; modernization of, 203. See also Indigenous peoples Chukotka, 203–4 Churchill, Winston, 61 Clapham, Phil, 215 Clark, Joanna Gordon, 197 Clarke, Arthur C., 148 Coal Harbour shore station, 182 Cold War, 61, 172–73, 207 communism: ideologies, 66–67, 73; rise of, 75 Communist Party: Communists aboard whaling boats, 53; lectures, 103

inde x

competition, among Soviets, 105–7, 195–96 compromise, between whalers and scientists, 70 comradeship: Soviet, 102; of whales, 122 conquest of nature, 129–30 Conrad, Joseph, 168 conservation, 60–61, 70–71; alternative form, 72; attitudes toward, 80, 172–73; and balance, 191; lack of, 95; need for, 59; organizations, 191–92; rules of, 127; Russian, 21, 27, 59; Soviet, 69, 142, 201; by Soviets vs. Westerners, 140; stockbased, 142; and the UN, 191–92 conservationists, 192 consumer goods, 109 controversy of 1977, 202 crew, responsibilities, 85 crew law, Norwegian, 59 Crimean War, 17 Cromie, W., 45 cyclonic activity, 88 Dal’nii Vostok, 92, 193–95; accidents aboard, 194; arrival to Vladivostok, 154; and Greenpeace, 190, 194–96, 199 Dal’rybokhoto (Far Eastern Fishing and Hunting Agency), 25–26, 27 Danilov-Danilyan, Viktor, 213 data: falsified, 96, 108, 148–49; real, 150, 214; request to delete, 217; revealing of, 214–16 Dawbin, Bill, 94–97 death on whaleships, 111–12, 123, 210 defection, by whalers, 37, 101–2 de Haes-Tyrtoff, Alexander, 18 Demuth, Bathsheba, 11 Deribas, Terentii, 40 Dersu Uzala (V. Arsen’ev), 25, 27 desertions, 37–38 de-Stalinization, 75 Diana, 28 Discovery Expeditions, 86 dismemberment process, 126, 127 DNA imprinting, 141 dolphinariums, 154 dolphins, 137–38, 174–75. See also cetaceans Doroshenko, Nikolai, 210 Dorsey, Kurk, 202

Dream in Polar Fog, A (Rytkheu), 171–72 drinking and drunkenness, 46, 52–53, 55, 78–79, 104–5 Dudnik, Aleksandr Ignatevich, 39–40, 45, 51–53, 67 Dudnik, Johanne Kleve, 40, 52 Dudnik, Svetlana, 52 Dunayevsky, Isaak, 158 Dydymov, Akim, 167 earplugs, in whales, 132–33 ecology, 95, 143, 185, 216 economy: decline of Soviet, 186; economic theory, Marxist vs. capitalist, 164–65; growth of, 75–76, 99, 109, 138, 175; planned, 99; Russian, 215; Soviet economic revolution, 90–91; Soviet economic systems, 108; splintering of, 107–8 ecosystem, 135, 156; Antarctic, 66; destruction of, 23; imbalance of, 131–32; North Pacific, 156 education level of Soviet whalers, 99 Egan, William, 185 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 23 Eisenstein, Sergei, 157 Emel’ianov, Boris, 165 emotions: of Soviets, 217; of whales, 132, 133 environment: and Chernobyl meltdown, 207; indifference to, 129–30 environmentalists, 175; antiwhaling, 192; Greenpeace, 190; and Indigenous people, 191, 204; influence of, 209, 210; Soviet reaction to, 198; targets of, 203; and US Congress, 202–3. See also activists; Greenpeace ethnicity, of whalers, 98–99 evolution: guidance of, 146; Lamarckian, 139, 142; Lysenkoist, 140–41 expansion of whaling, 6, 58, 59, 75 exploitation of oceans, 66, 71 extinction, 131, 140 factories, sale of, 90 fairy tales, 3 falsification of data, 96, 108, 148–49 Far East: control of, 51; immigrants to, 40; industrialization of, 40–41; whaling in, 25–27

261

262

inde x

Far Eastern Fishing and Hunting Agency (Dal’rybokhoto), 25–26, 27 Fearless Nine, The (Vakhov), 167 feeding grounds, 115, 117–18 filming, by Greenpeace, 190, 195, 201, 205 fin whales, 41–42, 43, 45; in Antarctic, 64; in Area V, 93; in North Pacific, 182–83 fish, exportation of, 184 fisheries, expansion into North Pacific, 184 Fisheries Institute: Moscow (see VNIRO); in Vladivostok (see TINRO) Fisheries Ministry, 90–91; importance of whaling to, 188; lobbying of, 108, 188, 208; plans of, 90, 108, 178–79. See also Ishkov, Aleksandr Akimovich fishermen, Astrakhan, 41 fishing: allocations, 208; commercial, 178; fleets, 184–85; increase of, 187; Soviet, 184–87; in US waters, 210; vs. whaling, 178–79, 184 fish mafia, 208 Five-Year Plan: of 1928 (first), 31; of 1932 (second), 40–41; of 1956 (sixth), 90, 178 fleet, expansion of Antarctic, 92 floating factories, 60, 65–66; construction of, 178; at Golden Horn, 156; off Haida Gwaii, 180 food shortages, 58–59 food sources, for whales, 116–17 Ford, Gerald, 186 forests, Russian, 20–21 Frank, Rusty, 200 Friends of the Earth, 191, 197 Frinovskii, Mikhail, 51 Gagarin, Yuri, 74, 83 Gamarnik, Jan, 24 gender relations of whales, 123–24 Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 48 genocide of whales, 118 Giants of the Oceans (Sleptsov), 139, 140 giant squid, 45, 132, 139, 193 Golden Horn, and floating factories, 156 Golovnin, Vasily, 35 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 207–8 Gorelov, Anton, 14 “Grand Embassy,” 5

Graves, Phillip, 36 gray whales: Atlantic, 21; habits of, 43, 176; in North Pacific, 181; overhunting of, 47–49, 53–54; Pacific, 21; protection of, 69 Great Acceleration, 95 “Great Purge,” 51, 52–53 Greenpeace, 144, 175, 178; in Barrow, Alaska, 211–12; challenges to, 193; in Chukotka, 205–6; harassing of fleets, 190; and Indigenous whaling, 206; influence of, 200–201; interaction with Dal’nii Vostok, 194–96, 199; and IWC meetings, 197; mission of, 191, 192–93; in 1976–77, 199–200; and public relations, 196–97, 200–201; at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 213; Soviet reaction to, 198; Soviet Union office, 214. See also activists; environmentalists Gregor (Tungus man), 19 grenades, use of, 43–44 Grigor’ev, S., 164, 165–66, 170 Grumant. See Spitsbergen habitat of whales, 115; destruction of, 15–16 harpooners, 83–85, 120; attitude of, 127; harpoon gun, 28; harpooning, 42–44, 84; role of, 170 Hawaiʻi, 15, 35–37, 179–81; Hawaiʻian stowaways, 38; oppression of Hawaiʻians, 35, 37 hearing of whales, 116, 136–37 Higgins, Nancy, 206 Hillary, Edmund, 79 Holt, Sydney, 96 Honolulu, 37 humpback whales, 41–42, 45, 45; in Alaskan waters, 179; in Area V, 93, 113; author’s encounter with, 113–14; killing banned, 94, 96; migration routes, 89, 96; near extinction of, 95–96; in North Pacific, 182; North Pacific migration habits, 179; physiology of, 116; scarcity of, 180–81; slaughter of, 93–94; social habits of, 118 Hunter, Bob, 190–96, 199 Hunters of the Southern Seas (film), 79 hunting, of whales, 84, 118–20

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icebergs, 64, 65 I Ching, 193 illegal whale catching, 188; records of, 214–16 Indigenous peoples, 11; in Chukotka, 203; conception of whales, 171; and environmentalists, 191, 206; execution of, 40; and IWC regulations, 207; modernization of, 203. See also individual Indigenous peoples industrialization, 55; of Indigenous peoples, 203; industrial production, 109 industrial whaling, 171; cessation of, 204–5; and environmentalists, 198 In Fountains on the Horizon (Vakhov), 169 insanity, 11–12 inspectors, 82–83, 95; and Chukotka, 204– 5; international, 177; warnings of, 95–96 international observer scheme, 188 International Whaling Commission (IWC), 66, 68–69, 68, 74, 145; change at, 89, 92, 189; and compromises, 202; creation of, 59; data, invalidated, 215; debates with Chukotka, 204; five year plans vs., 83; international observers, 188, 204–5; Netherlands and Norway departure from, 89; New Management Procedure, 189; 1960 report, 94; prohibitions, 96, 111; prohibitions during 1970s, 187–88; and science, 207. See also IWC meetings; IWC regulations International Whaling Convention of 1946, 68, 68 International Whaling Statistics, 192 In the World of Whales and Dolphins (Tomilin), 144, 174, 175, 191 Iñupiaq people, 11, 202; and bowhead hunting, 202; death of, 16; and Greenpeace, 206. See also Indigenous peoples Ishkov, Aleksandr Akimovich, 67–68, 175, 186–87, 187; reprimanding subordinates, 198–99; and scandal, 208; warnings of, 194–95 Ivanovich, Vladimir, 87 Ivashchenko, Yulia, 152, 215, 216 Ivashin, M. V., 145, 149, 177 IWC. See International Whaling Commission (IWC)

IWC meetings: of 1958, 89; of 1975, 197; of 1977, 197, 202; of 1980, 204–5; of 1985, 208; of 1994, 213; of 1995, 215 IWC regulations: adherence to, 188; in Antarctic, 93; ignored, 80–82; Indigenous, 206–7 Izvestiia (newspaper), 29, 197 Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 185 James Bay, 199 Japan: army of, 30; conservationists and, 192; naval base in, 39; observers and, 188; relations with Russia, 155; and trade, 155; and whale products, 155–56 Japanese Whaling Association, 193 Josephson, Paul, 129 Kaliningrad, 152, 155, 160, 214 Kamchatka, 10, 41 Kamchatka Trading Company (AKO), 31 Kanno, Reichi, 188 Kanshin, 66 Kant, Immanuel, 160 Kellogg, Remington, 69 Kent, Rockwell, 122 Khan, Genghis, 10 Khetagurova, Valentina, 40 Khisamutdinov, Amir, 54, 56 Khrushchev, Nikita, 74–75; overthrowing of, 109; plans of, 91; reforms of, 108; Secret Speech of, 178; visit to Vladivostok, 155 killer whales, 43, 121, 132, 190–91 killing, Soviet attitude toward, 138 Kirishi protests, 209 Kirov, Sergei, 51 Kleinenberg, Sergei, 146, 146, 174–75 Klumov, Sergei Konstantinovich, 141–42 Kola Peninsula, 3–5, 7 kollektiv, 102–12, 111; and Communists, 103–4; culture, 103; downfall of, 110–12; effectiveness of, 110; effects of, 108–9; and hunting, 105–6; maintenance of, 104; Soviet, 102–3; splintering of, 107–8 Korotva, George, 196 Kostenko, N., 177 Kotkin, Stephen, 49 Kotzebue, Otto von, 35

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Kozubenko, Nikolai Filipovich, 123 Kraikovski, Alexei, 5 Krasnoe Znamia (newspaper), 51 Kraul, Otto, 32–35, 37; fictionalized, 168 krill, 116–18, 131–32; accumulations of, 42, 88, 92 Krivokhizhina (third assistant captain), 53 Kronotsky zapovednik, 41 Kropotkin, Petr, 135 Krupnik, Igor, 203 Kunstkamera, St. Petersburg, 6, 9 Kurilov, V. I., 194 Kuril shore stations, 143–44, 179 lactation, Soviet whalers’ fascination with, 128, 130 Lake Baikal development, 175–76 Lamarckian evolution, 139 Lenin, Vladimir, 23, 27, 30, 106 leviathan, dual meaning of, 7 life, Soviet, 102–3 Lilly, John, 137, 174 Lindholm, Otto, 17–20, 25, 54, 83; attitude toward whales, 21; estate of, 162; fictionalized, 167–68; legacy of, 22; photo of, 18; and scientific research, 134; studies of, 19 Lipsky, Albert, 40 Lisiansky, Yuri, 35 literary works about whales, 172–73 locality, of whales, 142 London, Jack, 130 “long ruble,” 100 Lorino campaigns, 206 Ludwig, Johan, 67 Lysenko, Trofim, 139, 144 Lysenkoism, 139, 141 Magnuson, Warren, 185 Makarov, Nikolai, 200–201 Maksimov, A. Ya., 22 Maksimov, Oleg, 125–26 Mamonov, Yuri, 127, 128 manatees, 21, 140 margarine, production of, 50, 163, 165 maritime conditions, 16 Martinsen (Norwegian advisor), 105–6 Mekhlis, Lev, 51 Melville, Herman, 21, 79, 123

memory, of whales, 132–33, 141 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 20 Menshikov, Alexander, 6 merchandise, bought by whalers, 155 migration habits, of whales, 20, 43, 49, 86–87, 115–16, 141 migration routes, humpback, 89 Mikhalev, Yuri, 66, 95–96, 213, 215–17, 216; background, 144; and KGB, 149–50; meeting with Solyanik, 96–97 Mikoyan, Anastas, 31, 58, 60, 73, 77, 100 minke whales, 91, 176, 187–88, 208 mink farms, 204–5 Mit’ki, 165 Moby-Dick (Melville), 169 moratorium, 192, 196; controversy around, 207; enforcement of, 210; Japanese obstacle to, 201; Soviet objection to, 209; US stance on, 202 Morgun, B. M., 110–11 Morzhovoi Bay, 29 Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (film), 165 mother/calf bond, 125 mother whales, killing of, 125–26 Mowat, Farley, 172–74, 190 Murphy, R. Cushman, 70 Museum of Pacific Naval History, 153 Nantucket Inquirer, 16 Natanson, Georgy, 158 nature preserves. See zapovedniki (nature preserves) Nazi Germany, and war, 53 Neakok, Billy, 206–7 Nebel, Benedictus, 5–6 Nefed’ev, A. A., 55–56 NEP (New Economic Policy), 24 Neptune ceremony, 158, 159 New Economic Policy (NEP), 24 newspapers: archived, 151–52; banning word “whale,” 177; censored, 177; reports of, 15–16, 35, 41, 65, 75; response to Greenpeace actions, 197; shipboard, 46, 55, 102–6, 122–23, 130; special edition, 66. See also individual newspapers New Zealand whaling, 96 Nicholas II, 152 night hunting, 84

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Nikishin, E. I., 68–69 Nikonorov, I. V., 197, 207–9 1920s, 21–22, 23–24, 27–31 1930s, 35–38, 39–49, 50–52 1940s, 53–54, 57–72, 86 1950s, 74–91; scientific research, 139, 174 1960s, 82–83, 92–97, 109, 155–56, 179; and Soviet fishing, 184–85; and Vladivostok, 156 1970s, 105–11, 171, 188–90, 193–97, 201–2 1977 controversy, 202 1980s, 154, 177–83, 208 1990s, 132, 142–47, 213–17 Nixon, Richard, 186 NKVD, 30, 40, 51–52 noosphere, 146 North Pacific: collapse of whale population, 181–82; transformation of, 181; whaling in, 41–42, 179 Norwegian whaling, 28–29, 50, 58; Norwegian concession, 28–30; Norwegian concession, fictionalized, 168; Norwegian crew law, 59; quotas, 89; specialists, 32, 42, 63, 72, 84, 106 Nosilov, K. N., 9 observations: scientific, 87–88; by whalers, 114, 120 observers, international, 188 Odessa: decline of, 160; as film site, 158–59; and Jewish immigrants, 157; prosperity of, 152, 156–57; war losses, 62; as whaling base, 67 Ohana Kai, 200 OIAK (Society for the Study of the Amur Region), 25, 54–55 Ommanney, F. D., 129 orcas, 43, 121, 132, 190–91 Orlikova, Valentina, 78 Our Friend the Dolphin (Yablokov, Kleinenberg, and Belkovich), 174 overhunting, of whales, 27, 71–72, 90–91, 142 Pacific Ocean Bearings ( journal), 176 Pacific Rim, 156 Packwood, Robert, 208 Packwood-Magnuson Amendment, 208 pain, of whales, 132, 135–36

Panov, G. E., 85 Paskalov, Alexander, 149 Paust, Otto, 29–30 Pavlov, Ivan, 20 pay: collective method of, 106; for whalers, 99–100 Payne, Roger, 137 Pelly Amendment, 186, 192, 208 Peter the Great, 2, 4–6, 7, 9–10, 19, 28 Phyllis Cormack, 192–93, 194 plane spotters, 42 planetary consciousness, 191 “Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” 139–40 poaching, 80–83 polar bonus, 100 poles, summer habitat of whales, 115 political prisoners, 40 politics: Communist Party, 103–4; Russian, 40 Pomors, 5, 7 population dynamics, 144–45 population-morphology method, 145 Pravda (newspaper), 197 Pray, Eleanor Lord, 25 predators, natural, 115 pregnant whales, 115–16, 126–28 prison ships, 40 production, increase of, 66 profitability, of Soviet whaling, 108 Prokopenko, F. D., 169 protection of whales, 121–22, 190 purges, Soviet, 52, 54 Purgin, Afanasii, 55–56, 65, 66, 84–86, 85 Putin, Vladimir, 74 quotas, 41, 49–50, 70–72; for aboriginal hunting, 202; Antarctic, 208; bonuses for, 100; for bowhead whales, 202; determined by scientists, 69–70; for minke whales, 208; multinational meetings concerning, 182; in 1946, 69; objections to, 53, 186; observance of, 189; reduction of, 82–83, 189; and Soviet demands, 90; unmeetable, 91; US stance on, 202; votes to increase, 194 RAC (Russian American Company), 12, 17 racial equality, 36

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ratchet effect, 108 Reagan, Ronald, 206–7 “red spout,” 43–44 reports: censored, 198; falsified, 199 research institutes, 135 restrictions: vs. five year plans, 82; Soviet ignoring of, 80–83 RFWC (Russian-Finnish Whaling Company), 16–17 Rice, Dale, 149 right whales, 4, 16–17, 21, 45, 114; North Pacific, 21, 42, 181; southern, 80, 83, 131 rivalry, among Soviets, 105–7 rorquals, 42 Rukhliada, Andrei, 210 Russia, 1, 2, 5, 16; Russian behavior, 32–35; Russian civil war, 24; Russian Empire, 20–21; Russian Far East, 39–40, 54–55; Russian imperialism, 12, 16 Russian American Company (RAC), 12, 21 Russian Far Eastern Republic, 24 Russian-Finnish Whaling Company (RFWC), 16–18, 18, 207 Rytkheu, Yuri, 171, 173, 173, 190, 204 sail whaling, 15, 18, 21; vs. industrial whaling, 118, 126, 165–66 Sakhnin, Arkadii, 112 Salvesen, Christian, 58, 82 Save the Whales, 211 science, 43, 53, 69; and economic activity, 70; and excessive hunting, 90; impeded by false data, 149; scientific authority, and whaling, 72; scientific management, 71, 189; scientific recommendations, disregard of, 91–92; scientific research, 25, 42, 138–39, 174 (see also cetology); scientific socialism, 91; scientific theories, 134 Scientific Committee, concerns of, 94 scientists: aboard floating factories, 86; aboard whaleships, 86; advocating for whales, 134; competition among, 86–87; disputes with, 86; influence on whalers, 124; prediction of whale movement, 87; protests by, 128; recommendations by, 91–92; role of, 85–87; teachings of, 123

Sea Calls, The, 166 sea cows, 21, 140 sealers, 21 Sea of Okhotsk, 13–15, 16–19 sea otters, 17; conservation of, 21; extermination of, 35 Sea Shepherd, 204–5 seas of Russia. See individual seas seasons, whaling, 70–71, 80–82, 126–27, 142 secret police, 40, 51 sei whales, 45, 118 Sergeev, Yuri, 100, 105, 107 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 130 Severnyi, 195 Sherbatiuk, Viktor, 154 Shirshov Institute of Oceanography, 88 shore stations: Australian and New Zealand, 96–97; Coal Harbour, 182; Kuril, 143–44, 179; in North Pacific, 179–80 shortages, of food and supplies, 58–59, 101 Silent Spring (Carson), 172 Sitka, 18 Slava, 60–64, 63; as ambassador, 76–77; in Area II, 92; in Area IV, 93; and competition, 110; conditions on board, 67; filming of, 158–59; ignoring restrictions, 80–81; and military operations, 73; scientists on, 86 Sleptsov, Makar Mitrofanovich, 70, 90, 139–44, 175 slipway, stern, 28, 31, 36, 37 Small, George, 131 Smirnoff, wife of, 34 Smirnov (professor of biology), 124 Soccoro Island, 34 socialism: scientific, 91; socialist duty, 102; socialist rivalry, 105–7; socialist science, and whaling, 71 Socialist Realism, 167–68 Society for the Study of the Amur Region (OIAK), 25, 54–55 Sokolov, A. S., 173–74 Solyanik, Aleksei, 52, 60, 65, 72, 76, 85; assumptions of, 91; book by, 81–82; complaints of, 93, 158; criticism by, 105; deception by, 95–96; disregard for rules, 83; downfall of, 111–12; exploitation of the kollektiv, 110; impact on

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whaling, 98; meeting with scientists, 96–97; rise to notability, 74–80; storytelling, 123; wages, 100 Solyanik, Gennaddi, 158 Solyanik, Svetlana Zhivankova, 77–78, 112, 158 Sovetskaia Rossiia, 92, 92; Neptune ceremony, 159; newspaper on board, 103; in North Pacific, 180; in Singapore, 155; at Vladivostok, 154 Sovetskaia Ukraina, 92, 93; last hunt of, 211; and Solyanik’s downfall, 111–12 Sovetskii Komsomolets (newspaper), 112 Soviet-American fisheries treaty, 183–84 Soviet Committee of Cooperation with the Peoples of the Northern Borders, 29 Soviet Union: collective, 32; destabilization and demise of, 207–9, 214; economy, 75– 76, 109; ideology, 170; industrialization of, 31; living conditions, 109; postwar, 58–59; and US discussions, 208; at war, 53; whaling history, 217–18 Soviet whaling: end of, 178, 201, 209–10; fleet, retirement of, 202; profitability of, 108; and US response to, 183 sperm whales, 21, 42, 44–45; killing of, 92; mating habits, 124; photos of, 45, 47, 64, 120, 127; protection of, 201; quotas for, 202; slaughter of, 179; social habits of, 118; teeth of, 156 Spitsbergen, 4–7 Spong, Paul, 190–91, 193, 199–202 sportsmanship, 170 Spouts on the Horizon (Vakhov), 167–68 Stalin, Joseph, 23, 30–31, 40, 51, 58, 61, 68; concerning women on ships, 77; and Soviet science, 139 “Stalin Constitution,” 103–4 Stanchinskii, V. V., 135, 139, 143 statistics: of Antarctic, 210; of Areas IV–VI, 93–94; falsely reported, 72, 94; of fin whales, 183; of gray whale killings, 181; of humpback whale killings, 93–94; of North Pacific, 181; of Soviet Antarctic whaling, 83; of Soviet fisheries, 184; of Soviet whaling, 210; whaling, 45, 95 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 10 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 168

stock management, 189 “Stories about Whales” (Troinin), 176 Storm Does Not Still, The (Vakhov), 167–70 stowaways, from Hawaiʻi, 38 strontium, 95 subsistence whaling, 203–4 superstitions, 63, 77 supplies, shortages of, 101 sustainable whaling, 147 teeth, sperm whale, 156 territorial limits, 185–87, 197 Thomas, Rex, 180, 181 Tikhanov, Mikhail, 9 Tikhonov, Dmitrii Pavlovich, 128 TINRO, 32, 91, 135, 153 Tlingits, 18 To Distant Seas, 166 Tolchan, Yan, 32 Tomilin, Avenir, 136–38, 137, 144, 174–75, 191 Tormosov, Dmitri, 144, 167, 216, 217; and whaling data, 213–15 trade, with Japan, 155–56 trading whales for fish, 183–84 traditional whaling, 203 Tragedy of Captain Ligov, The (Vakhov), 167, 171 travel, of whalers, 99 “tricky” whales, 121 Troinin, Vladimir, 176 tropics, 115 Trotsky, Leon, 129 Trudfront, 44 tsunami, in North Pacific, 179 Turku, 16–18 Tver’ianovich, V. A., 51, 53, 68–69, 68 Unangan, 8, 11–13 United Kingdom, and Soviet sailors, 60–61 Vakhov, Anatolii, 167–71 Varganov, Vladimir, 200, 201 Vega fleet, 29 Veniaminov, Ivan, 12 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 145 “Virgin Lands” campaign, 75, 109 Vladimir Arsenyev, 212

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Vladivostok, 92, 193 Vladivostok, 24–25, 41; and air service, 156–57; archives, 151–53; connection with Pacific Rim, 156; fleets’ arrival to, 154; history of, 152–55; and link to Odessa, 156–57; living conditions, 55; prosperity of, 152, 155; transformation of, 153; whalers’ monument, 154 Vladivostok Fisheries Institute. See TINRO VNIRO, 70, 83, 135, 139, 145, 149 Vtorogov, L. M., 203 wage gap, Soviet, 100 wages, whalers’, 48, 99–100 war losses, 62 warships, in Alaskan seas, 185 Watson, Paul, 195–96, 201, 209; and Chukotka, 204–5 weather, and whaling, 87 Weberg, Clarence, 183 Webermann, Ernst, 2, 4 Weyler, Rex, 200 “Whale Alley,” 11 whale fats, 26, 46 Whale for the Killing, A (Mowat), 172, 173 whale meat, 46, 161–62 whale oil, 5; distribution of, 17; market for, 50, 58 Whale on the Line (Grigor’ev), 164, 165–66, 170, 176 whale products: demand for, 50; distribution of, 160–61; preservation of, 107; processing of, 46, 64–65; uses, 163; waste of, 46, 65, 107, 160 Whaler and His Friends, The (Emel’ianov), 165 whalers: British firms, 82; desensitization of, 128–29; ethnic makeup of, 98–99; German, 32; Norwegian, 28–29, 58; popularity of, 158; Soviet vs. Japanese, 182; troubled by killing, 125; wealthy, 101 whales: ability to learn, 121; attacking whale boats, 44, 123; behavior of, 43, 49, 55, 120–21; care for each other, 166; cries of, 136–37; destruction of, 15–16, 18–20, 40, 50, 183; emotions of, 132, 133; extermination of, 15–16, 21, 50; familial bonds, 48–49; farming of, 148;

feeding habits, 3, 116–17; fetuses of, 126, 128, 128; food sources of, 116–17; gender relations of, 123–24; hearing of, 116, 136–37; impact on Soviet life, 162; mates for, 133; mating habits, 117; memory of, 132–33, 141; migration patterns, 20, 43, 49, 86–87, 115–16, 141; nursing mothers, 48–49; pain of, 132, 135–36; population decline of, 41, 80; population recovery of, 213–14, 217; populations of, 131; pregnant, 115–16, 126–28; preservation of, 21, 48; reproduction of, 144–45; rescue of, 211–12; response to predators, 121–22; Russian attitude toward, 22; satiated, 88; senses of, 116–17; slaughter of, 50; sociability of, 145, 176; social bonds and habits, 118, 122; sounds made by, 119; in Soviet fiction, 165–71; stress among, 132–33; suffering of, 162; tagging of, 147; terms for, 3, 8, 9; tracking of, 43; types of, 45; uses for, 11–12; war’s effect on, 57. See also cetaceans; individual species whale shepherding, 147–48 whaleships, 28, 59–60; conditions onboard, 46, 49, 54–55, 65, 78; Japanese, 57; used for war, 57 whale song, 119, 137 whale watching, 180, 182–83 whaling: aboriginal, 204–5, 212; appeal of, 55, 99–101; archives, 151–53; bonuses of, 99–101; books about, 122–23; British, 82; cessation of, 110, 142, 209–10; commercial, 6; competition, 59, 73; Crimean War effects on, 17; criticism of, 177; decline of, 187–88; defense of, 177; the Dutch and, 4–6; expansion of, 6, 58, 59, 75; in the Far East, 25–27, 40– 41; fascination with, 79–80; and food shortages, 58–59; forbidden, 80; history of, 3–6; illegal, 73, 95; and insanity, 11–12; methods, 8–11, 27–28; from 1941 to 1945, 57; by non-Russians, 3, 7, 11, 28– 30; in North Pacific, 41–42; obstacles to, 87; pause of, 177; perspective on, 176; postwar, 57–58; profitability of, 108; role in Soviet life, 165; Russian, 16; Russian vs. American, 13, 15–16; Soviet, 32–34; Soviet investment in, 109; and Soviet

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revolution, 23–24; and Soviet Union history, 217–18; unpredictability of, 50 whaling conference, international, 67 whaling fleets: catching fish, 188; increase of, 90; reduction of, 86, 188 whaling industry, regulation of, 70–72, 80–83 whaling prohibitions, 13, 27, 69, 96, 127, 187–88, 201; need for, 48 whaling restrictions, 41, 48–50, 59, 70 whaling season, 127 When the Whales Leave (Rytkheu), 171–72 White Acacia (film), 158–59 White (counterrevolutionary) cause, 25 White Sea, 2–3, 5, 7 Wikinger, 60–61 women: marriageable, 40; role on ships, 78–79; on Soviet ships, 36, 40, 63, 77 work, as Soviet goal, 102 worker’s state, 98, 102 working conditions, whalers’, 104 World War II: effects on Soviet Union, 61–62; effects on whaling, 51–54 Yablokov, Aleksei, 145–49, 146, 174–75, 209, 214–17; and Chukchi whaling, 205; and

Greenpeace, 214; proposal to Fisheries Ministry, 201 Yeltsin, Boris, 213 young whales: killing of, 70; protection of, 70, 121–22 Yup’ik people, 11, 16, 203, 206 Yuri Dolgorukii, 92, 160 zapovedniki (nature preserves), 21, 27, 30, 41, 175; closure of, 76; popularity of, 175–76 Zarva, Petr, 32, 55–56, 60, 65, 66, 84–86 Zemsky, Viacheslav, 201–2, 213, 215, 216 Zenkovich, Boris, 24, 42–46, 47, 53–56, 72–73, 89, 170–71; attributes of, 32–35; call for conservation by, 48–49; and Hawaiʻi, 35–37; misconceptions of, 123–24; reading habits, 130; retirement of, 144; round-the-world account, 139; teachings of, 123–24; travels of, 39; troubled thoughts of, 125; warnings by, 91, 142; writings of, 122, 135–36, 153 Zilanov, Vyacheslav, 209–10 zone of fertility, 143 Zvezdnyi, 203 Zweig, Stefan, 168

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