Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling

By Ryan Tucker Jones

A revealing and authoritative history that shows how Soviet whalers secretly helped nearly destroy endangered whale populations, while also contributing to the scientific understanding necessary for these creatures’ salvation.
 
The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226628998

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Cover Page for Red Leviathan

Red Leviathan

Red Leviathan

The Secret History of Soviet Whaling

Ryan Tucker Jones

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by Ryan Tucker Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62885-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62899-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226628998.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Ryan Tucker, author.

Title: Red leviathan : the secret history of Soviet whaling / Ryan Tucker Jones.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021029508 | ISBN 9780226628851 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226628998 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Whaling—Soviet Union—History. | Environmentalism—Soviet Union—History.

Classification: LCC SH383.5.S625 J66 2022 | DDC 639.2/80947—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029508

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

1  Russia’s Whale Problem

2  The Whales of Distant Seas

3  A Revolution in Whaling

4  North Pacific Numbers

5  War and Glory in the Antarctic

6  Aleksei Solyanik and the End of Area V

7  The Kollektiv and the Long Ruble

8  The Cetacean Genocide

9  Scientists Locate Their Prey

10  Whales in the Home

11  A Whale Is Not a Fish: Back to the North Pacific

12  Greenpeace and the View from the Dal’nii Vostok

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Important locations in this book, including whaling fleet headquarters (in bold), the route of the Aleut’s inaugural voyage, and confrontations with Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd. Map by the author and Anna Sukhova.

Preface

It was one of the signature moments of the environmental movement, and one of the turning points of global history. A few long-haired men and women afloat in small rubber inflatables on an open ocean faced a gigantic Soviet whaleship, the Dal’nii Vostok. They positioned themselves next to the panicked groups of sperm whales fleeing the ship, daring the Soviets to fire their harpoons and risk killing the Greenpeace volunteers who had organized and now were filming this dangerous protest. The image was nearly perfectly crafted, as Greenpeace leader Bob Hunter had meant it to be: tiny, helpless individuals pitched against an unfathomably evil, inhuman force; sentient humans, united with sentient whales, versus the unthinking machine of modern bureaucracy and militarism. Hunter summed up the contrast with the horrified observation that the whale oil rendered from the whale carcasses being winched up the stern slipway would go to lubricate intercontinental missiles. It seemed we were staring into the face of a giant robot, he wrote, whose particular obscenity came from the fact that here was a beast that fed itself through its anus, and it was into this inglorious hole that the last of the world’s whales were vanishing—before our eyes.¹

Indeed they were. At that moment, in June 1975, only a fraction of the former population of great whales remained in the world’s oceans, and the Soviet catcher boat was hunting down some of the last of them. Even worse, Hunter and others had only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Unbeknownst to the world, the Soviets had been killing tens of thousands more whales than they were reporting to the International Whaling Commission—an illegal and dishonest catch that one writer termed the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century.² It was probably also the most sudden revolution the globe’s oceans have ever experienced.

Decades later, when I first read Hunter’s account and saw the powerful pictures of the encounter, I was shaken. Many in the 1970s had the same reaction. Though Greenpeace was not the only organization protesting commercial whaling at the time, its campaign against the Soviets had the single greatest impact on the growing movement to save the whales. The mind bomb Greenpeace released that day eventually helped create enough public pressure to force a global moratorium on commercial whaling beginning in 1986. Millions of global citizens had concluded, rather suddenly, that whales were not monsters, but emotional, intelligent creatures whose destruction was morally abhorrent and signaled deep problems with modern society. They also decided, based on little more than twenty seconds of television footage, that these Soviet whalers were the real monsters.

Like many people in the world, I find the mass slaughter of whales to be heartbreaking, and their saving heroic. Whatever dangers the world’s whales face today from ship noise, ship strikes, and marine pollution, what they encountered in the twentieth century was far worse.³ From 1900 to 1999, humans killed nearly three million whales, in every corner of every ocean. Already by the 1970s they had reduced the population of every large species to near extinction. It was, in the estimation of Phillip Clapham, the former head of NOAA’s lab for cetacean research, the largest removal of biomass in world history.⁴ It was also the closest thing to genocide we can observe in the history of human relations with their large mammalian relatives. In less than a century, humans transformed the world’s oceans from places that pulsed with living whales, to nearly empty water. The fact that the large whale species survived at all is a miracle, their twentieth-century history a testament both to humans’ collective power to destroy, and to reverse course.

I wrote this book because I think it essential that we understand this remarkable history. And, looking at Greenpeace’s pictures, I realized there was much more to it than the actions of a handful of environmentalists. I wondered, especially, who were these Russians on the other side of the ship’s bow, looking down at the Greenpeace hippies, firing away at the sperm whale mothers and calves in spite of the protesters? Their role in this episode seemed to me nearly as significant as those of the activists. It demanded a better explanation than militarism, mechanism, and evil. But, despite the fact that they killed more whales than did any other country after World War II, the Soviet Union’s part in the story has remained entirely hidden. After the Greenpeace encounter, the Dal’nii Vostok made its way back to its home port of Vladivostok, ventured out a few more times, then called it quits. Silence ensued. Why?

Greenpeace protestors aboard a zodiac holding up a sign saying no to the Soviet whaleship Dal’nii Vostok during their second engagement with the fleet. The Russian crew looks on with curiosity. July 1976. Greenpeace/Rex Weyler.

This book answers that and several related questions. Why did the Soviet Union pursue industrial whaling at such a gigantic scale, even as other countries dropped out of an increasingly unprofitable industry? Why did they kill so many whales above the international quotas they had accepted? Did anyone in the USSR care or try to stop this from happening? Were the Soviets at all moved by the Greenpeace protesters that day in 1975? What was it like for the world’s whales to experience such an unremitting slaughter? Thanks to the opening of former Soviet archives and the dedication of whale scientists in piecing together the scale of the Soviet deception, we can now answer some of these questions. The answers help us understand the fate of the world’s whales, of the Soviet Union, and of the central dramas of the twentieth century.

During the years of researching this book, I met former Soviet whalers on several occasions. Two encounters stick out in particular. First, on a midsummer’s day in 2016, I joined a group of whalers from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea who gather every year at a small city park notable for a large statue of two fighting bulls. The bulls’ testicles are particularly prominent, and they turned the whalers’ conversation to the culinary qualities of whale testes, which were apparently considerable. Even as cloudbursts erupted, the old men basked in the warmth of jokes and their memories of disasters narrowly averted, larger-than-life harpooners, and the comradery of shared hardship.

These men had done well in the Soviet Union. They had survived perestroika and the chaos of the 1990s, if only just. As one whaler explained to me, he had earned good money at whaling, but post-Soviet inflation had destroyed every cent of it. If many now lived in crumbling apartments, they could at least enjoy their grandchildren making modestly successful futures, wealthier than even these ex-whalers had dreamed of becoming. They were gratified, too, by my interest and by the attention of a film crew making a documentary about Soviet whaling.⁵ This was the respect they felt they deserved. Why had they become whalers, I asked? The spirit of the sea had lured them, they responded. Some said they had just been born hunters. Read this book of whaling poetry, one advised me. There are more answers to your questions in one verse than in all our responses.

As the evening inevitably turned to cognac at a nearby Ukrainian restaurant, toasts were offered to international friendship, and the surreal nature of the scene stole in through the beginnings of a headache in my mind. Here I was, chatting amicably with men who had played a central role in one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, whose only reckoning had been the fact that the world had forgotten about them. Others who cared deeply about whales had made darker accusations. As Bob Hunter had asked after his encounter with the Dal’nii Vostok, What indeed could a nation of armless Buddhas [whales] do against the equivalent of carnivorous Nazis equipped with seagoing tanks and Krupp cannons?⁶ Few today would be willing to go as far as Hunter. The whalers at the table with me had massacred nonhumans, and they had done it at a time when few thought it wrong. At least the outside world had recognized the Nazis’ actions as immoral as they were occurring. Soviet whalers were hardly Nazis.

But that should not keep us from recognizing the scale of the horror that whales experienced during the age of industrial whaling, which spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. For whales, what industrial whalers—and the Soviets prominent among them—did was a uniquely terrible chapter in their very long history. Few creatures have enjoyed such long-term security as modern whales, streamlined for quick movement and insulated with blubber to outlast long fasts and migrations. They have nearly no predators except for humans. While Indigenous whalers, Japanese shore whalers, and Western sail whalers in the nineteenth century had eliminated or seriously reduced local populations—driving Atlantic gray whales into extinction and nearly doing the same to Pacific gray whales and southern right whales—they had left the world’s largest whales almost entirely untouched. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the world’s oceans were nearly as full of blue whales, fin whales, humpback whales, and others as they had ever been. The industrial slaughter of the world’s whales takes its place alongside the other unprecedented catastrophes of the twentieth century, all of which sit uneasily with the exceptional advances in human knowledge and well-being made during the same time. The Soviet Union was central to many of these stories.

A second meeting with Soviet whalers—this time in Odessa, Ukraine—further complicated my impressions of them. Led by two women who had worked in the whaling industry, a crew of veterans dressed in whaling outfits met my plane at the airport and conducted me on a tour of the former Black Sea whaling capital. Their generosity and amiability were easing me into a sense of familiarity when we sat down at a table at the local military veterans’ administration. The group’s leader started into a speech on the merits of Aleksei Solyanik, the legendary whaling captain who had done so much for the city of Odessa. But before she could really get started, someone interrupted her. I hadn’t realized it, but Yuri Mikhalev, one of the scientists responsible for revealing the shocking scale of Soviet whaling, had joined our group. It was instantly clear that this was going to be a different conversation. Mikhalev began by stating that as a scientist, he had to take a more rational point of view about these things. He was not going to agree with our leaders’ warm words, nor with the golden-hued memories of most of the whalers I had met. Mikhalev began a point-by-point, year-by-year recounting of Solyanik’s lies and misdeeds and their catastrophic effect on Antarctic ecosystems. As he put it elsewhere, Soviet whaling brought whale populations to near-extinction, was unprofitable, amoral and politically damaging for the country.⁷ Like a scientific Dostoevsky or some such archetypal Russian truth-teller, Mikhalev closed his eyes, concentrating, feeling the pain of each detail, measuring his story with a quiet, deliberate intensity and at the same time an exhausted recognition that nothing could be changed and that similar monstrous actions would likely occur again.

Though I was familiar with the figures Mikhalev was citing, I was still awed by the power of his impromptu speech. It was immediately clear why he had been one of the very few brave enough to say these same things to his superiors and the KGB during the height of the illegal catches. But just as interesting at that moment was the reaction of the men and women at the table. They did not dispute Mikhalev’s tale, nor did they seem angered by this discrediting of their professional lives. Instead, they seized the chance to talk to one of the world’s most knowledgeable cetacean scientists and peppered him with questions about the whales themselves. Why were they found in some places and not others? What explained the quick rebound of some species? Why do whales strand?

I sensed here the troubled heart of this book. I liked these people who had perpetrated one of the greatest ecological catastrophes the world’s oceans have ever seen. I felt a respect for the fact that whaling had given their lives solid, positive meaning. I shared their fascination with whales. But what I perceived as genocide, they thought of simply as work, and I was amazed at how little their recollections included danger or drama. How had such a momentous piece of the globe’s history taken place so routinely, so quietly? Mikhalev, too, presented challenging contradictions. During later conversations with me in his apartment, he described how his protests over illegal whaling had ruined his career. Soviet bureaucrats closed down his biological laboratory, and his health and marriage suffered. But, even with the end of the Soviet Union, Mikhalev had found justice elusive. He, along with fellow scientists Aleksei Yablokov, Viacheslav Zemsky, Alfred Berzin, and Dmitri Tormosov, had revealed to the world the extent of Soviet illegal whaling during the 1990s. He had expected that other former whalers would follow suit. But now, decades later, where were the confessions from the Japanese, who almost certainly were also cheating, or other European countries which Mikhalev suspected as well?⁸ What about some reckoning with the hundreds of thousands of whales Americans had killed during the nineteenth century? Instead of increased openness and mutual understanding, the episode had become another of many in which the West cynically and opportunistically embarrassed Russia. Mikhalev told me he was sure my book would do more of the same.

And perhaps it does. I won’t deny that I still find shocking and disturbing the triumphant Soviet documentaries depicting the killing of whale families, the pictures of Soviet whalers taking illegal whales and cavorting over their corpses, or the thousands of pages of archival records drily documenting a genocide. And, as someone who grew up in Oregon and California in the 1980s, I experienced the ocean at the whales’ lowest point, an ocean that had been created by the Soviet Union as much as anyone. The history of Soviet whaling belongs to anyone who looks out to sea and sees nothing.

But, as Soviet whalers sometimes asked me and others: what is the difference between killing whales and killing, for example, pigs, which so many people accept without a second thought? Or, thinking more historically, why single out the Soviet Union when other countries had in fact killed more whales? It’s true—while the Soviets killed more than 500,000 whales during the twentieth century and Great Britain killed more than 300,000, Japan had killed nearly 600,000 and Norway nearly 800,000. Others, mostly American whalers, had killed around 300,000 in the nineteenth century, at a time when Russians had killed almost none.⁹ Australia, Brazil, Canada, Holland, Korea, New Zealand, Peru, South Africa, and others played smaller but still significant roles. Scholars have examined these stories and other critical aspects of humanity’s disastrous relationship with whales in the twentieth century. They have shown how the International Whaling Commission failed to head off catastrophic overcatching, and how the preeminent whalers Norway and the United Kingdom gave up on the industry by the early 1960s; have debated why Japan kept whaling through those decades and even past the global moratorium of 1986; and have explained why the science of counting whales became central to changing global ideas about the environment.¹⁰ But, with the exception of biologist Yulia Ivashchenko’s superb research into the industry, and some valuable insights from Bathsheba Demuth, the Soviets, who were crucial to all these developments, have barely been a part of these histories.¹¹ The result is huge holes in our understanding of why humans nearly destroyed whales and why they stopped just in time.

So, if the Soviet contribution to modern whale genocide was not preeminent, it had special characteristics. The Soviets killed nearly half their whales secretly, in knowing contravention of the conventions they had signed. They did so in the full knowledge of the impact on whale populations. In fact, no one knew the catastrophic state of whale numbers better than Soviet whale scientists, who sailed with the fleets and tallied the destruction. As others exited the whaling industry, the Soviets, alongside the Japanese, helped reduce the world’s whales from imperiled to nearly extinct, doing the hard work of an annihilation that flew in the face of economic rationality. The Soviets were able to do this in part because of a planned economy that resisted market forces. But they also did it for historical reasons that stretched back into earlier eras of global whaling when it was Russians who had been the victims.

Furthermore, behind the ex-whalers’ untroubled twenty-first-century nostalgia, I discovered a more complex history of relationship with whales. Some Soviet whalers at the time cried when they heard the sounds of the dying animals. Even in this officially atheist state, some felt the weight of sin as they butchered whale families. All knew that what they were doing was illegal, and most knew that extinction was the likely outcome.

These stories also open windows into some neglected but fascinating aspects of Russian history—how Russia has quietly shaped the world’s oceans for a long time; how some of the more obscure parts of the vast Russian Empire, such as Vladivostok and Odessa, were sometimes as important for global history as Moscow and St. Petersburg; how Soviet socialism entertained high hopes of protecting the environment; how Russian scientists made some of the most important contributions to humanity’s understanding of its place in the natural world.¹² These histories get to the heart of what it was like to live and work in the Soviet Union, what it was like to be at the forefront of modern industrialized states’ attack on the ocean, and what it was like to touch and smell huge numbers of large, strange, but strangely familiar marine mammals on a scale few have experienced.

Finally, this book is about those whales’ lives, too, their cultures, and their families, which were nearly broken by the industrial whalers’ attacks. Their stories cannot be told, either, without the rich data compiled by their killers. The reckless gamble of destroying the world’s whales is entwined with the life of the Soviet Union, the twentieth century’s most daring social experiment. The stern slipway—the key technological piece of industrial whaling—was invented in 1922, five years after the Soviet Union’s creation in 1917. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, four years after the last whale was killed for commercial purposes. Leviathan was slaughtered in the transiting shadow of the Soviet leviathan’s rise and fall.¹³

So, I hope this book does more than simply condemn, that it provides some understanding of the history of both whales and the Soviet Union. I hope, too, that it offers some light in an otherwise dark tale. Whales did survive, after all, and they are now coming back in every ocean in the world. The Soviets’ role in that outcome, too, should not be ignored. This book finally tells their story, the story of those whalers looking down on the Greenpeace zodiacs in 1975, who appeared to the activists as faceless monsters, and who—in all their gore, glory, and human contradiction—for a moment held the fate of the world’s whales in their hands.

1

Russia’s Whale Problem

Russia is the largest country on Earth. It covers eleven time zones and more than 6.6 million square miles of tundra, taiga, forest, steppe, mountain, and desert. Yet, these impressive facts understate Russia’s importance for the world. Depending on how one measures, Russia also possesses the third- or fifth-longest coastline in the world. Russian lands front a great diversity of ocean environments, from the warm but relatively sterile Black Sea in its southwest to the cold and marvelously fertile Sea of Okhotsk in its northeast, to thousands of miles of gray, icy Arctic Ocean following Russia all the way from Murmansk to Chukotka. As deeply as anyone on the globe, Russia has impacted the world’s oceans. And in all these oceans swim whales.

If you visit a Russian coastline today, you may find it difficult to appreciate the country’s maritime heritage. A few years ago, I traveled to the far northern city of Murmansk, located on the Barents Sea near the old trading town of Kola, to see for myself the birthplace of Russian whaling. When the sun finally rose around 9:30 a.m., a soft rain was melting the previous week’s snow. I slipped along icy roads and made for the deep, beautiful fjord I had spied from my hotel window. Though this arm of the ocean wasn’t more than two hundred feet away, it proved difficult to reach. First, railroad tracks blocked my way. Then, as I made my way through crumbling apartment blocks pasted over with new orange exteriors to signal the new Russia, a heavily barricaded cargo port intervened. A whole modern apparatus of military and commercial concrete and steel had arisen on the shoreline since the city had been bombed by the Nazis in World War II. The ocean, meanwhile, had all but disappeared from view. After an hour of crunching through the black snow on the side of a busy highway, I saw an opening. There, just before another port began, was a breach, a small window onto the Barents Sea. As I descended onto a sandy beach, I looked around me and saw the most ruined stretch of ocean shore I’d ever encountered. Plastic rubbish and decomposing tires were plotted like mines along the strand, while in the shallow water a ship’s hulk slowly disintegrated. I was shocked to see fishermen gathering at the shore, smoking and readying their lines. Here was a vision of steely exploitation—and also amazing persistence. It was a combination that had appeared on these shores centuries earlier.

In some ways, my tortured attempt to experience Russia’s seas mirrored the country’s longer history. Russians often found the ocean frustrating. They were tantalized by its promises of wealth, but stymied by the storms, ice, and especially a lack of the capital necessary to profitably exploit it. Meanwhiles, these obstacles seemed barely to bother foreigners, especially the Europeans and later Americans who often visited Russian oceans—another reason Russians found their oceans troublesome. The oceans may have been, as Peter the Great said, windows to the West, but oceans were also windows into Russia. They, and the whales that lived in them, symbolized many of the things Russians felt they themselves lacked. Russia’s pre-revolutionary whaling history offers numerous examples of these frustrations, as well as many wild schemes designed to right Russia’s relationship with the ocean. And it is this history of failure and resentment that is essential for understanding the motivations that much later drove Soviet whalers to attack the world’s oceans when their chance finally arrived.

Along with the glorious deeds of princes and warriors, the first written accounts of Russia also mention its whales. The nineteenth-century historian Ernst Webermann reported that as early as the 800s—the century of Russia’s conversion to Christianity—Moscow’s grand prince received tribute from northern peoples in the form of bear furs, beavers, and whale skin, the latter used apparently to make ropes for ships.¹ The skin likely came from relatively small beluga whales, the only cetacean that abounded in the ice-choked White Sea. Even more distant from the Russian heartland but also destined to fall under its sway, the inhabitants of the Yamal and Kola Peninsulas also hunted marine mammals, in the much more diverse and productive waters of the Barents Sea, nourished by the last warm fingers of the Gulf Stream.² Petroglyphs carved in rocks as early as the fourth century show whales at the end of harpoon lines.

Russians knew of this whaling only through sporadic trade for walrus and sometimes narwhal tusks.³ Early in the 900s, the Arabian traveler Abu Khameda (Ibn Fadlan), who visited southern Russia, wrote that northern peoples were catching polar (possibly bowhead) whales, and that it was well known that orcas sometimes drove these whales into shallow waters.⁴ At the same time, Vikings had begun making voyages to the Russian North, not only to trade and raid but also, possibly, to hunt whales.⁵ An early precedent had been established: the northern seas at the edges of Russian control were full of whales, Russians knew the animals were there, and it was non-Russians who were catching them.

Perhaps due to this very general familiarity with whales, early Russian biblical dictionaries provided one translation of the Bible’s leviathan as great whale.⁶ A large snake with a broad tail that inhabits some ancient Russian fairy tales, and often blocks heroes’ paths through the ocean, may also be a whale.⁷ Reflecting influence from the south, too, the Russian word for whale—kit—is taken from the Greek, cetus, and not from the Norsk hwal as it is in most Western European languages (although both cetacean and cetology—the study of whales—do come from the Greek). Ancient Greeks knew far less about whales than did the whaling Scandinavians, and as these word origins suggest, whales remained mysterious for Russians. For one thing, baleen whales’ methods of feeding perplexed them. Lacking teeth, the giants seemed to have no way of capturing prey. One tenth-century Russian poem wondered whether whales, the mother of all fish, fed themselves on heavenly fragrances. Direct experience was not necessarily more helpful: a medieval Western whaler who cut into a stranded whale’s stomach and found a gray mass of food concluded that it had fed on internal fog.⁸

While inhabitants of the northern Russian town of Novgorod may have conducted some limited nearshore whaling, the first reports of direct Russian use of whales come after the ascendancy of Moscow in the fifteenth century. In the 1500s or 1600s, the Pechensky Monastery on the Kola Peninsula engaged in maritime hunting, which included the use of stranded whales and walruses.⁹ The Russian monks there had the good fortune of living on one of northern Europe’s most productive shores, that of the White Sea, whose long summer days combined with nutrients from several long rivers to produce a rich broth of plankton that supports abundant marine life, including fish and whales. That monks should have been involved with whales is not unusual in the Russian context. Monasteries were often granted special commercial privileges by the tsar, and they served as bridgeheads of Russian commercial and territorial expansion in the North.

Around the same time, merchants from the British Isles, Holland, and Denmark—those nations at the vanguard of emerging European capitalism—made contact with the Russian North and soon thereafter began whaling in nearby waters.¹⁰ Inscriptions left in rocks there include one from a Danish captain who wrote that he had visited the Russian coast twenty times since 1510.¹¹ Russian operations at the time mostly targeted belugas, while foreigners went after larger bowheads. Russian trade was based out of the town of Kola, near the modern city of Murmansk, situated deep within a protected fjord giving access to the Barents Sea to the north. Residents there sometimes constructed their roofs out of whale bones. Russian officials farmed out the whale trade to those, often foreigners, who could pay for the privilege, a system that seems to have discouraged overall catches.¹²

As they did at the same time in the Baltic and North Seas, Dutch mariners increasingly came to dominate maritime trade in the Barents Sea, including whaling around Novaya Zemlya and the Kola Peninsula. By the seventeenth century, the Dutch had become the globe’s most prolific whalers. At the same time, Russians were for the first time trying their own hand at overseas whaling, around the Arctic island of Spitsbergen (then called by Russians Grumant), part of the Svalbard archipelago not far from Norway. The origins of whaling in Spitsbergen are still subject to some dispute, although some think Russians themselves pioneered the hunt there, perhaps as early as the fourteenth century.¹³ While Russian participation remained modest, British, Dutch, and—to a lesser extent—German whalers led the expansion of the Spitsbergen whaling through the seventeenth century. Catches peaked in 1697, known as the Great Year, when nearly two thousand Atlantic right whales met their end in Spitsbergen’s waters.¹⁴ The islands played such an important role in the development of whaling that, according to Webermann, Russians long referred to all whaling simply as the Grumant trade.¹⁵

A profound transition in Russians’ relationship with cetaceans began in the early eighteenth century. That’s when the increasingly powerful Russian state became directly involved in promoting, financing, and controlling whaling. One stimulus came from Tsar Peter the Great, who came to power in 1688 determined to yank Russia into his vision of modernity and to reorient its outlook toward the seas. It was also thanks to Peter that whaling became an important part of this transformation. Peter’s Grand Embassy—a combination intelligence-gathering tour and diplomatic mission that took the young tsar through Europe from 1697 to 1698—had dramatic effects on his plans. No place made a greater impression than Amsterdam. From stock markets to canals, the Dutch way of life seemed to promise an unusually effective way of organizing society to produce wealth and power. Whaling, too, seemed associated with strength and modernity. It was in Amsterdam, as the historian Alexei Kraikovski relates, that Peter happened to observe the whaling fleet itself returning to port from Spitsbergen.¹⁶ Whaling seemed to be a crucial part of this rich, modern state. Peter was impressed.

But this was not Peter’s first contact with whales. Five years earlier, during one of his several visits to the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk, Peter had put to sea with an Orthodox archbishop. From their boat, he spotted a beluga whale, which local Pomors sometimes caught with nets. Peter had no patience for such slow, local methods. He grabbed a harpoon, ordered the boat to give chase, and hurled the weapon after the fleeing whale. Peter’s attack