
Whaling in the Soviet Union - telotortium
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774
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fludlight
The Truth About Soviet Whaling: A Memoir / Alfred Berzin

[https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usdeptcommercepub/12/](https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usdeptcommercepub/12/)

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georgecmu
The following page links to the actual memoir (57 page PDF):
[https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/spo/SPO/mfr702/mfr702.html](https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/spo/SPO/mfr702/mfr702.html)

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adolph
Excerpts and light commentary by Marginal Revolution:

[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/on...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/one-
of-the-greatest-environmental-crimes-of-the-20th-century.html)

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tomohawk
Not hardly the worst. Here's just a sampling:

[https://www.robedwards.com/2010/12/the-soviet-
environmental-...](https://www.robedwards.com/2010/12/the-soviet-
environmental-disasters-that-could-come-to-haunt-us.html)

~~~
jngreenlee
Ownership of land by those without Skin in the Game can easily lead to this
sort of thing. Times 1000 when by a politically hellbent bureaucracy.

~~~
tomjakubowski
Indeed. See also: nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, the Salton Sea disaster,
United States Navy training in Puerto Rico, and the Hanford nuclear site.

But even when landowners have "skin in the game", man-made environmental
disaster can still strike, like when bad farming practice led to the Dust
Bowl.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_in_Vieques,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_in_Vieques,_Puerto_Rico)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl)

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anti-submarines
I wonder if some of this had to do with anti-submarine warfare?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine)

That the soviets were falsifying documents, killing whales indiscriminately,
not even using the carcasses very efficiently, and operating in ways that
seemed to clear the sea of cetaceans, seems to point to some other deeper
motivation to continue apace.

So much so, that Russian marine biologists and whaling scientists themselves
took note of the attitude, and secretly retained records of the activity.

The article chalks this up to a simple antiquated quota established as a
simple matter of the Soviet version of pre-environmentalist dust bowl
ambition, and that the stubborn, bureaucratic single-mindedness of Soviet
communists saw a number printed on a piece of paper and capriciously, if not
robotically declared it must be so, and the machinations of a fear of failure
to deliver unto Stalinist masters perpetuated an artificial demand to perform,
in the face of GULAG style negative reinforcement, even though there was no
such authentic demand that the supply was feeding into.

So, boss sees number, insists number must go up, stooges deliver number for
fear of punishment. All of this willfully flouts international oversight of
conservation efforts in secret, at the behest of the Soviet ministry of
fisheries to save face before the high court of the communist party.

But is that really it? Or was it a paranoia of mobilized nuclear tipped
missiles slipping past defenses onboard underwater launch platforms?

Did they think that maybe all the environmentalism was really a cover to
hamstring anti-submarine warfare, at a time when this represented a key means
of delivering nuclear deterence? That saving the whales was an effort to
provide cover for submarines that might threaten Soviet cities with submarine
launched ballistic missiles?

Maybe all the noisy whales were getting in the way of other cold war related
human activity?

I guess if that were true, the whaling ships might have followed a different
pattern, but maybe submarine warfare followed a pattern of using the animals
as cover, and where a pod of animals could be found, so too a sneaking
submarine?

~~~
adolph
From the article:

 _Soviet ships’ officers would have been familiar with the story of Aleksandr
Dudnik, the captain of the Aleut, the only factory ship the Soviets owned
before World War II. Dudnik was a celebrated pioneer in the Soviet whaling
industry, and had received the Order of Lenin—the Communist Party’s highest
honor—in 1936. The following year, however, his fleet failed to meet its
production targets. When the Aleut fleet docked in Vladivostok in 1938, Dudnik
was arrested by the secret police and thrown in jail, where he was
interrogated on charges of being a Japanese agent. If his downfall was of a
piece with the unique paranoia of the Stalin years, it was also an indelible
reminder to captains in the decades that followed._

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hosteur
Erhm... nuclear bombs?

~~~
0xffff2
What about them? Serious question. Has the sum total of nuclear testing had
any measurable environmental impact at all?

~~~
zokier
Locally? Definitely. The testing grounds are heavily contaminated with all
sorts of radioactive (and possibly otherwise hazardous) material

Globally? More difficult to estimate. But one example where the environmental
impact of nuclear testing can be seen is the contamination of worlds steel
supply: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-
background_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)

