Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

This article has a leftist bent, but when the total scope of Soviet whaling in the second half of the 20th century is realized it's a bit troubling. I've excerpted the first few paragraphs of a long article:

https://psmag.com/social-justice/th...of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

Charles Homans Updated on Jun 14, 2017

In the fall of 1946, a 508-foot ship steamed out of the port of Odessa, Ukraine. In a previous life she was called the Wikinger (“Viking”) and sailed under the German flag, but she had been appropriated by the Soviet Union after the war and renamed the Slava (“Glory”). The Slava was a factory ship, crewed and equipped to separate one whale every 30 minutes into its useful elements, destined for oil, canned meat and liver, and bone meal. Sailing with her was a retinue of smaller, nimbler catcher vessels, their purpose betrayed by the harpoon guns mounted atop each clipper bow. They were bound for the whaling grounds off the coast of Antarctica. It was the first time Soviet whalers had ventured so far south.

The work began inauspiciously. In her first season, the Slava caught just 386 whales. But by the fifth—before which the fleet’s crew wrote a letter to Stalin pledging to bring home more than 500 tons of whale oil—the Slava’s annual catch was approaching 2,000. The next year it was 3,000. Then, in 1957, the ship’s crew discovered dense conglomerations of humpback whales to the north, off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. There were so many of them, packed so close together, the Slava’s helicopter pilots joked that they could make an emergency landing on the animals’ backs.

In November 1959, the Slava was joined by a new fleet led by the Sovetskaya Ukraina, the largest whaling factory ship the world had ever seen. By now the harpooners—talented marksmen whose work demanded the dead-eyed calm of a sniper—were killing whales faster than the factory ships could process them. Sometimes the carcasses would drift alongside the ships until the meat spoiled, and the flensers would simply strip them of the blubber—a whaler on another fleet likened the process to peeling a banana—and heave the rest back into the sea.

The Soviet fleets killed almost 13,000 humpback whales in the 1959-60 season and nearly as many the next, when the Slava and Sovetskaya Ukraina were joined by a third factory ship, the Yuriy Dolgorukiy. It was grueling work: One former whaler, writing years later in a Moscow newspaper, claimed that five or six Soviet crewmen died on the Southern Hemisphere expeditions each year, and that a comparable number went mad. A scientist working aboard a factory ship in the Antarctic on a later voyage described seeing a deckhand lose his footing on a blubber-slicked deck and catch his legs in a coil of whale intestine as it slid overboard. By the time his mates were able to retrieve him from the water he had succumbed to hypothermia. He was buried at sea, lowered into the water with a pair of harpoons to weight down his body.

Still, whaling jobs were well-paying and glamorous by Soviet standards. Whalers got to see the world and stock up on foreign products that were prized on the black market back home, and were welcomed with parades when they returned. When a fourth factory ship, the Sovetskaya Rossiya, prepared for her maiden voyage from the remote eastern naval port of Vladivostok in 1961, the men and women who found positions onboard would have considered themselves lucky.

When the Sovetskaya Rossiya reached the western coast of Australia late that year, however, the whalers found themselves in a desert ocean. By the end of the season the ship had managed to round up only a few hundred animals, many of them calves—what the whalers called “small-sized gloves.” Harpooners on the other fleets’ catcher ships, too, accustomed to the miraculous abundance of years past, now looked upon a blank horizon. Alfred Berzin, a scientist aboard the Sovetskaya Rossiya, offered an alarmed and unequivocal summary in his seasonal report to the state fisheries ministry. “In five years of intensive whaling by first one, then two, three, and finally four fleets,” he wrote, the populations of humpback whales off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand “were so reduced in abundance that we can now say that they are completely destroyed!”

It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history—and it had happened almost entirely in secret. The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, the country’s fleets had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species. It had been an elaborate and audacious deception: Soviet captains had disguised ships, tampered with scientific data, and misled international authorities for decades. In the estimation of the marine biologists Yulia Ivashchenko, Phillip Clapham, and Robert Brownell, it was “arguably one of the greatest environmental crimes of the 20th century.”

Just one word! PPB!!!!!!

Since when did the Soviets (especially under Stalin) ever care about what the rest of the world thought of them ? Not much has changed. The upside is the Russians are not reproducing enough to keep them from dying out in the near future.

kwg

I got another......Holodomor.

Watched humpbacks feeding in the port from the deck of my cabin all Memorial Day weekend. Huge seabird feeding frenzies too. Rafts of 100-200 arctic loons along with equal numbers of marbled murrelets from below and up top 50 bald eagles dive bombing from above.

Luckily the Japs haven't done a number on them in the Pacific - but I'm sure they'd like to . . .

Some one doesn't know Russian history very well. The whaling started under Stalin, but by far, most of the damage was done while Nikita Khrushchev was in office. Stalin died in '53.

Whale Oil Beef Hooked

No need to kill whales now.

March 05, 1953 stalin died or was killed. Nikita took over, and some say it took 5-6 years to go Nikita USSR from Joe USSR momentum. I agree 53, but some say stalin policy, and stalin era continued until 1959. I don't know why that number is knocked around. I'll say Khrushchev oil myself post 1953, and the "Khrushchev thaw" post 1953, so Nikita owns it.
Nikita was another man of steel like joe. I think Nikita and Ike were balanced in some way. Nikita and JFK, not so much balance.
Nikita actually visited Gettysburg at Ike's home in 1959. Nikita was very interested in 1863, but almost went nuclear in 1962. Crazy stuff.
Ike's house is open for tour via national park service. Neat side tour if you go to Gettysburg.

Jap "research"? Good enough reason for them.

Right, those sneaky subhuman bastard Japs. But you forgot a little footnote: Americans, Canadians, Norwegians, Icelandic, Danish, Indonesian, Russians, Germans and Koreans also take whales...

Humpbacks are breeding like crazy. Taking a few out every year won't hurt them that much. Tired of watching them eat millions of fry 10 minutes after we release them.

All a bit emotive really.

Yes, whales were overhunted. Russia wasn't the only country involved, though they did continue to do it later than some others. Quite a number of countries were involved in whaling though, including mine and yours, and until very late in the piece, when it became obvious that numbers had been drastically reduced, no one gave much thought to sustainability.

In the case of WA's humpbacks, and those of eastern Australia too, the numbers have recovered hugely since whaling was largely stopped (save for the odd few taken by Japan), to levels which are at least close to pre-whaling levels and increasing at about 10% per annum. It seems to me that there may be room, if the emotion is left out of it, for sustainable harvest of them, whether now or soon. It may even become necessary to control the numbers, to keep them in balance with their environment. .

I watched Whale Wars to root for the Japanese.............

Agreed and well put, but emotion left out of it? As if. Bloody lucky break that chickens and pigs weren't chosen as the sweetheart headliners for Disney's Bambi franchise...

Is whale oil still used as cutting oil in machining operations?

Hate it when that happens . . . .

The correct answer to the thread title would be the successful anal birth of al gore back in 1948.

The downside to that is the muslim's aren't and will take over Russia and Europe.