Ryan Tucker Jones, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling by Jan Drent

In the twentieth century, whaling was conducted on an industrial scale by factory ships from several nations, in pursuit of animal fats used in producing margarine and other products.Most of the activity was in remote waters.Fleets of catcher boats would locate and kill whales and bring them to their parent factory ship for processing.This system owed its effectiveness to innovations by Norwegian whalers earlier in the century: deck-mounted harpoon guns armed with an explosive grenade, and a factory ship with a stern slipway that enabled the whale carcass to be winched inboard for processing instead of the former method of flensing it alongside.The Soviet Union was a latecomer to the industry, creating its first whaling flotilla in the 1930s.After the 1950s, it was a major player, and "the world's most prolific whaler" (210).Between 1932 and 1987, Russian whalers killed 550,000 whales, roughly one in six of all those taken in the twentieth century.This stark story of the Russian decimation of whale populations was largely unknown in the west.It was publicized in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR by Russian scientists and Yulia Ivaschenko, a Russian-American scientist.In Red Leviathan, Ryan Tucker Jones, an environmental historian at the University of Oregon, has now published a highly readable and thorough examination of all aspects of Soviet whaling.He covers why the industry was developed, how it was organized, and how it reflected the ideology of the USSR.He describes how it was supported by massive research, entered popular culture, created a group of privileged workers and finally, ended in the 1980s.The book is based on years of study, interviews with former whalers and scientists in Russia and Ukraine, and Jones' reflection.An earlier work, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (2014) was about the dire environmental consequences of Russia's imperial expansion into the North Pacific.It also covered how Russia subsequently introduced progressive conservationist policies.Jones' even-handed perspective is a particular strength in Red Leviathan.While

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