Whaling in Russia
Whaling in the lands of Russia and the former Soviet Union has been conducted in the Chukotka region of Siberia for at least 4,000 years and has traditionally been undertaken by the native Yupik and Chukchi people. However, commercial whaling did not begin until the mid-19th century, when companies based in Finland sent vessels to the Pacific Ocean. It was not until 1932 that modern pelagic whaling began to take off with the purchase of an American cargo ship, which was renamed the Aleut. This remained the only Soviet factory ship until World War II. After the second world war, with the need for a stronger Soviet economy and rapid industrialization of the country during the 1940s and 50s, Soviet whaling took off and became a global industry. The first Soviet whalers reached the Antarctic during the 1946–47 season with the factory ship Slava and then underwent a rapid expansion during the late 1950s, during which five new fleets were added within a four-year span: Sovetskaya Ukraina in 1959, Yuriy Dolgorukiy in 1960, and Sovetskaya Rossiya in 1961 for the Antarctic, and finally two large fleets in 1963 for the North Pacific. By the early 1960s, Soviet whaling was operating globally in every ocean except the North Atlantic and undertaking voyages that could last as long as seven months each. From 1964 to 73, the Soviet Union was considered by some as the biggest whaling nation in the world.
Due to implementation of the International Whaling Commission's International Observer Scheme in 1973, and the subsequent quotas on catch limits of most species of whales the same year, Soviet whaling began a slow decline during this period. From 1978 to 1980, three of the four remaining whaling fleets were retired, largely due to the outlawing of all pelagic whaling except for minke whales in the Antarctic, as well as the intervention of anti-whaling groups. After 1980, only the Sovetskaya Ukraina fleet remained, taking only minke whales in Antarctic waters. Despite strong efforts by the Soviet government to provide adequate funding for this fleet to continue whaling, the international moratorium on whaling issued by the IWC in 1982, combined with the high cost of maintaining this fleet, caused all Soviet whaling to end after the 1986–1987 whaling season; the USSR abolished whaling on 22 May of that year. Currently whaling in Russia is practiced solely by the Chukotka people of the Russian Far East, who take 136 gray whales yearly on an annual quota provided by the IWC, in addition to the average catch rate of one bowhead whale per year.
In 1993, Alexey Yablokov, a former scientist on board the Soviet whaling fleets and at the time an advisor to Russian president Boris Yeltsin on ecology and health, revealed that the USSR had committed mass falsifications of its whaling data during the period 1948–1973 and had killed nearly 180,000 whales which they did not report, mostly because such catches comprised protected species or ignored quotas or regulations with regards to legal size, females with calves, or catching outside legal hunting areas. The falsified data was somewhat corrected in the late 1990s, but not until 2008, shortly after the publication of former whale biologist Alfred Berzin's memoir , was the full, corrected data for both the Antarctic and North Pacific regions revealed. According to Charles Homans, a writer for Pacific Standard magazine, the Soviet whaling program represented "the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century."
History
Aboriginal whaling
The first records of aboriginal whaling in the Russian Far East region of Chukotka date back at least 4,000 years, when Eskimo hunters from Alaska crossed the Bering Strait region to the Chukotka region of far northeastern Asia. The prime target of the early whalers was primarily the bowhead whale, because it provided spoil-resistant meat in huge quantities, enough to keep an entire village fed over the course of a long, harsh winter. Gray whales were also taken in some quantity, though not nearly as much as they are currently taken. The hunters used small kayak-like boats and harpooned the whales with bone or wooden harpoons attached to sealskin floats, to ensure the position of the whale could be tracked. Once the whale tired, it was struck with a lance and killed. After being towed to shore, it was cut up by the villagers and shared according to how much everyone contributed to the hunt, but everyone in the village would receive a portion. Whale bones were used to frame shelters and boat rafters due to their strength and durability. The gray whale was initially not much sought after due to its smaller size and meat – which rotted faster in the Arctic climate than the bowhead whale – but this would change in the Soviet era.During the Soviet era, especially after World War II, Chukotka natives were provided with modern equipment to process the whales, including a modern catcher ship, Zevezdny, which boosted the catch from no more than 30 to around 130 to 200 whales per year, which remained the norm for the rest of the Soviet era. Not every whale taken was destined for subsistence, however. Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society launched an expedition into Loren in Chukotka in 1981 and found that many of the whales killed in the "subsistence hunt" were actually used for mink food and were being processed by non-aboriginal Russians. The number killed for this purpose is unknown, but it may have amounted to most or perhaps all of the catch during peak years.
Today, indigenous whalers of the Chukotka Peninsula take an average of 120 gray whales per year, slightly less than in the Soviet era, with modern weapons and wooden boats. A few bowheads are also taken incidentally. The catch level is estimated to pose minimal threat to the survival of both the gray and bowhead whale populations. Since 2022, there has been a complete ban on industrial and coastal whale fishing throughout the Russian Federation.
Open-boat whaling
In 1850 the Russo-Finnish Whaling Company was established. It fitted out five whaleships. They were sent to the North Pacific, where they mainly operated in the Sea of Okhotsk, but they also caught whales in the Sea of Japan and Gulf of Alaska. The company did well its first two years, but one of its ships was destroyed during the Crimean War. It ceased operations in 1863. A second company, based in Helsingfors, sent out the brig Storfursten Constantin, which also cruised in the Sea of Okhotsk as well as off Baja California.In the 1860s two whaling stations were built in Tugur Bay in the western Sea of Okhotsk. The first was built by the Russian-American Company in 1862 in Mamga Bay. With two schooners, it caught whales from 1863 to 1865. It sold its station to Otto Wilhelm Lindholm, who had built another station at Tugur in the southern part of Tugur Bay in 1863. He soon abandoned the latter station, using the one at Mamga until the mid-1870s.
Modern whaling
Akim Grigorevitch Dydymov was the first to utilize modern methods in Russia. He had a catcher ship built in Norway and a whaling station built near Vladivostok. The first whale was caught in November 1889, and by the end of 1890 they had taken seventy-three. The catcher ship was then lost with all hands. Heinrich Hugovitch Kejzerling bought Dydymov's station and, using two Norwegian-built catcher ships, an average of 110 whales a year were caught between 1895 and 1903. In 1903 he converted a secondhand steamer into a floating factory ship, which processed ninety-eight whales that year. At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War the following year the factory ship, catchers, and crew were captured by the Japanese.Soviet whaling: 1932–1946
The decision by the Soviet government to initiate commercial whaling was made in the early 1930s, during Joseph Stalin's mass industrialization as part of the new series of Five-Year Plans. To start it off, an American cargo ship named Glen Ridge was purchased by a Kamchatka-based stock company and converted into a factory ship named Aleut throughout 1931 and the first half of 1932. In July 1932, with the conversion complete, the ship and its catcher ships started their maiden voyage to their home port of Vladivostok. Realizing they would not make it home in time for the whaling season they instead decided to undertake "test whaling" off the Revillagigedo Islands, and during the journey from the Revillagigedos to Hawaii they killed 21 whales. The first full whaling season began in 1933, and the first whale killed, a sperm whale, was taken on May 28, 1933. Most of the whaling in the pre-war days took place around Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea. Before WWII, the annual catch of whales from the Aleut fleet rarely exceeded 1,000; however, such kills did indeed need to meet annual production targets, and a failure to meet the goals for the Second Five-Year Plan led to Captain A. Dudnik being sacked from his position in 1937 and arrested on charges of being a Japanese agent trying to sell the fleet to Japan, despite there being no evidence of this.After the war, an expansion of the North Pacific whaling fleet was undertaken with the purchase of several American-built minesweepers from the war, which were converted into catchers and worked out of several of the Kuril Island, utilizing old whaling stations built by the Japanese during the period of Japanese rule over the islands. Like the Aleut fleet, the catchers out of the Kuril stations were relatively modest in comparison with whaling that would take place later on; however, the catcher boats were extremely effective at catching whales, so much so that the whale stocks were quickly depleted. Soviet scientist B. Zenkovitch commented as early as 1951 on the decline of whale stocks around the Kurils. In 1955, prominent Soviet whale biologist S.K. Klumov wrote to the central fisheries ministry complaining of how the Five-Year Plan quotas were not reflecting of the actual state of the whale stocks around the Kurils, and suggested a more rational approach to whaling and saying Plan quotas should reflect the condition of the whale stocks and not raw domestic production, but unfortunately his concerns were ignored. Indeed, towards the end of the 1950s the Kuril land stations began increasingly taking under-sized whales, especially sperm whales, because of a great desire to meet production targets, despite rapidly depleting the area of whales. By the end of their operating periods, the majority of the catches in the Kurils region consisted of undersized whales. The first shore station to close was the Shikotan Island station in 1955, and shortly after the stations on Iturup Island were closed as well. The northernmost station, on Paramushir Island, was the last station to close; it closed in 1964. The Aleut fleet continued operating until 1967, when it was finally retired after 35 years of service.