There, tsarist officials watched in helpless rage as Americans slaughtered whales upon which many of the region’s Indigenous peoples relied. whalers sailed without restraint or hindrance into every corner of the world’s oceans, including waters around Russia’s Siberian empire. The era of whaling from sail boats, depicted in such memorable detail by Herman Melville in “ Moby-Dick,” had nearly wiped out slow, fat species like right and bowhead whales, and also wreaked substantial harm to sperm whales. In my new book, “ Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling,” I describe how the Soviet Union was central both to this deadly industry and to scientific research that helps us understand whales’ recovery.Īt the start of the 20th century, it seemed whales might gain a reprieve after years of hunting. The history of whaling shows how humans have wreaked careless havoc on the ocean, but also how they can change course. The creatures are still recovering from massive industrial-scale hunting that nearly wiped out several species in the 20th century. It’s a dramatic reversal from a century ago, when few people ever saw a living whale. Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #171693 / Vsevolod Tarasevich / CC-BY-SA 3.0.Įvery year, an estimated 13 million people go whale-watching around the world, marveling at the sight of the largest animals ever to inhabit Earth. Ships of the Sovetskaya Ukraina factory fleet tying up at the port of Odessa during the 1959–1960 whaling season.
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