Speaker 1: Hey you Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you an
Speaker 2: episode from the Vault. This one originally aired on June
Speaker 2: twenty third, twenty twenty two, and it is Rob's interview
Speaker 2: with Ryan Tucker Jones, author of a book called Red Leviathan,
Speaker 2: which has to do with whales. And I think we've
Speaker 2: been doing a lot of whales lately, so it seemed appropriate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've referred back to this book a couple
Speaker 1: of times as well, read Leviathan, The Secret History of
Speaker 1: Soviet Whaling. So I thought it'd be a great time
Speaker 1: to just go ahead and feature this interview once more.
Speaker 1: Things a really informative one, And here we go.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb. My co host Joe is on leave this week,
Speaker 1: so I have an interview for you. I recently talked
Speaker 1: with Ryan Jones of the University of Oregon. His new
Speaker 1: book is Red Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling.
Speaker 1: So this is a fascinating book, and I think we
Speaker 1: had a fascinating chat about the history, specifically the twentieth
Speaker 1: century history of whaling and how that factors into Russian history,
Speaker 1: the history of the Soviet Union, but also global history
Speaker 1: as well. A word of caution that this interview will
Speaker 1: of course discuss whaling, which is going to have some
Speaker 1: graphic details in it, so be advised on that count.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, I want to stress that
Speaker 1: this will not just be a parade of horrors. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting historical and cultural information in here
Speaker 1: as well. So without further ado, let's go straight to
Speaker 1: the interview. Hi, Ryan, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Hey Rob, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So your book concerns whaling, which humans have been engaging
Speaker 1: in for thousands of years, and yet twentieth century whaling
Speaker 1: stands out in rather appalling ways. Can you set the
Speaker 1: scene for us regarding twentieth century whaling and what truly
Speaker 1: sets it apart from the sort of nineteenth century whaling
Speaker 1: that many of us are probably familiar with from the
Speaker 1: likes of Moby Dick.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right, Rob, I mean nineteenth century whalen, which
Speaker 5: was dominated by the Americans, was a really low tech
Speaker 5: enterprise that still managed to manage to sweep nearly the
Speaker 5: entire Earth Pacific, Indian, Atlantic Ocean, and I had a
Speaker 5: pretty massive impact on certain whale species like sperm whales.
Speaker 5: Others it left entirely untouched, especially the fast whales, the
Speaker 5: big whales that many people will be familiar with, humpback whales,
Speaker 5: blue whales, fin whales.
Speaker 4: Et cetera.
Speaker 5: And major parts of the ocean that were just off
Speaker 5: limits to people working with sale technology, like the Antarctic,
Speaker 5: which is the place where the most whales used to
Speaker 5: live at least.
Speaker 4: And so twentie central whalen was.
Speaker 5: Far I think, far less talked about, far less romanticized about.
Speaker 5: There is no Herman Melville for the twentieth century industrial era,
Speaker 5: and yet it was by an order of magnitude more
Speaker 5: devastating for most whale species. Do you want me to
Speaker 5: talk a little bit about the technology. I'm mindful of
Speaker 5: not just going on and on with my answers and
Speaker 5: new readers.
Speaker 1: No, No, I think we'd all love to have a
Speaker 1: little technological background. My next question, in fact, was going
Speaker 1: to be about the Stern Slipway and what it was
Speaker 1: and why it was so essential to modern whaling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the technology.
Speaker 5: There was really a major change in the technological implementations
Speaker 5: of oiling at the end of the nineteenth century, mostly
Speaker 5: brought about by Norwegians who had been whaling in their
Speaker 5: near shore waters, but perfected a few things like the
Speaker 5: exploding harpoon gun, which actually sent a grenade into a
Speaker 5: whale exploded inside its body, which was far more lethal
Speaker 5: and far less lethal for humans because they could kill
Speaker 5: the whale, often with one or two shots, rather than
Speaker 5: having to tire it out over a long period of
Speaker 5: time being attached to this gigantic, dangerous creatures they had
Speaker 5: in sail whaling. So that was one of the major
Speaker 5: changes that took place. The other was the stern slipway
Speaker 5: raw which you just mentioned, and this was a classical
Speaker 5: industrial piece of technology which allowed whales to be winched
Speaker 5: on board the whale ship, which really fundamentally changed the
Speaker 5: whole industry. It meant that you didn't have to process
Speaker 5: whales either in the ocean on the side of the
Speaker 5: ship as you know, as people did in moby Dick
Speaker 5: for example, or that you even had to go ashore
Speaker 5: and process whales at shore factories. What this meant was
Speaker 5: that you could stay out to see with your mother ship,
Speaker 5: your factory, your factory ship, and just process whales day
Speaker 5: after day after day. They'd be brought to you by
Speaker 5: a fleet of catcher boats taken to the mothership, winched
Speaker 5: up at the stern slipway, and then a whole team,
Speaker 5: whole army of industrial workers would process that whale carcass
Speaker 5: into the products that people in the twentieth century wanted,
Speaker 5: which increasingly was margarine, you know, butter substitute. That was
Speaker 5: another technological innovation, the process of hydrogenation, which allowed people
Speaker 5: as scientists to inject hydrogen.
Speaker 4: I better not.
Speaker 5: Maybe I won't go so firmly into the details of hydrogenation,
Speaker 5: but it allowed them to to process whale meat in
Speaker 5: such a way that it was basically stripped of any
Speaker 5: fishy flavor. People didn't even know they were eating margarine.
Speaker 5: They had come from whales oftentimes, and this was the
Speaker 5: major driver behind twentieth century global industrial whaling.
Speaker 1: You also mentioned that this allowed for the processing of
Speaker 1: the carcass to take place out of sight, right, This
Speaker 1: made it a little more hidden.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. I mean, certainly not for those involved
Speaker 5: in it. For those involved in it, you know, you
Speaker 5: could you would see just one hundreds on some days,
Speaker 5: literally hundreds of whales being processed. But it was it
Speaker 5: allowed the industry really to take place. Well, first of all,
Speaker 5: in the Antarctic. The Antarctics started being hunted in the
Speaker 5: nineteen tens based on this new technology, and then really
Speaker 5: peaked in the twenties and thirties, so far away from
Speaker 5: where any humans lived that you would, you know, you'd
Speaker 5: get this product margarine with really no sense of what
Speaker 5: kind of labor, what kind of danger, what kind of
Speaker 5: slaughter had produced it.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Previously, I mean, whaling had always taken place pretty far
Speaker 5: from shore, but it had always been you know, pretty
Speaker 5: closely connected with shore industry as well, since you know,
Speaker 5: often process the whales on shore, et cetera. Often hunted
Speaker 5: whales in many cases that were not that far away
Speaker 5: from human population. So yeah, it allowed it really changed
Speaker 5: the industry in a lot of ways, making it in
Speaker 5: some ways far more mysterious for most people.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned too that the twentieth century whaling also
Speaker 1: it impacted more species of whales as compared to the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, whales, a lot of whales are really
Speaker 5: hard to catch without industrial technology. They're fast, they can
Speaker 5: standard water for a long period of time, and as
Speaker 5: with fishing, the twentieth century just saw, you know, a
Speaker 5: series of innovations that allowed people to overcome the whales
Speaker 5: ability to escape. First of all, diesel engines, of course,
Speaker 5: which are so much faster, allowed them to really run
Speaker 5: down any species they wanted to. Then sonar, after the
Speaker 5: Second World War came into greater use airplanes which allowed
Speaker 5: them to spot you. Often on this mothership would have
Speaker 5: a helicopter or an airplane, but usually a helicopter pad
Speaker 5: where helicopters would take off and search the area for whales,
Speaker 5: tell people where the large agglomerations were that they could
Speaker 5: chase them down with these really fast ships and then
Speaker 5: process them on board. I mean, you know, for whales,
Speaker 5: you can only imagine this was a obviously devastating suite
Speaker 5: of technologies. They never faced predators like this on the
Speaker 5: scale or with this lethality. They were really totally prepared,
Speaker 5: especially the big ones like blue whales and fin whales,
Speaker 5: you know, the two largest species on Earth, which really
Speaker 5: sustained the whaling industry from the nineteen tens through the
Speaker 5: nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in terms of what it was like for the whales.
Speaker 1: You described this as the breaking of their quote, cultures
Speaker 1: and families. Can you describe that a little bit for us?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Thanks Rob.
Speaker 5: This is one of the things I wanted to do
Speaker 5: with the book was to I mean, the statistics can
Speaker 5: be numbing and it feels like an industrial slaughterhouse, which
Speaker 5: of course it was in a lot of ways. But
Speaker 5: you know, the whalers were catching wild animals, wild animals
Speaker 5: that had as you know, scientists are telling us these days,
Speaker 5: they've done incredible research into whale cultures, the whale emotions,
Speaker 5: whale behaviors that you know, whales are complex creatures. They
Speaker 5: passed down a lot of the information necessary for their
Speaker 5: lives through cultural transmission. That is, they learn it from
Speaker 5: the other whales around them. It's not embedded genetically. Certain behaviors,
Speaker 5: migration routes, feeding areas, feeding strategies, et cetera. And so
Speaker 5: it allows us to understand what was happening with this
Speaker 5: unprecedented onslaught, which was not just the kind of devastation
Speaker 5: of a population, but also the loss of knowledge amox
Speaker 5: whale communities. That we have pretty clear evidence that whales,
Speaker 5: even as they've rebounded since the end of industrial whaling
Speaker 5: in the eighties, have failed to recolonize certain areas, places
Speaker 5: that they used to go to to give birth, the maid,
Speaker 5: to feed, et cetera, in part because there was just
Speaker 5: such a loss of cultural knowledge that was part of
Speaker 5: this slaughter. You know, you killed so many nursing mothers,
Speaker 5: for example, right, who have then failed to pass on
Speaker 5: to their offspring certain important facets of what it meant
Speaker 5: to be a humpback whale.
Speaker 4: And so that's kind of.
Speaker 5: Knowledge reverberate that loss reverberates.
Speaker 4: Today.
Speaker 5: Sperm whale mothers, for example, seem to be far less
Speaker 5: adapt at keeping their calves alive than they were before whaling.
Speaker 5: It's surmised that this is one of those knowledge losses
Speaker 5: that happened as a result of industrial whaling. So we
Speaker 5: still see the impacts even as whale numbers are rebounding
Speaker 5: here in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Now, red Leviathan is the secret history of Soviet whaling,
Speaker 1: So I'm getting a little bit into the history of
Speaker 1: Soviet whaling and also just Russian history with whaling. I'm
Speaker 1: always fascinated by a particular culture relationship with the sea,
Speaker 1: and you discussed this in the book concerning Russia. So
Speaker 1: how did Russia historically view the ocean and its resources
Speaker 1: and how did this impact involvement in whaling.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, Russia such an interesting place to think
Speaker 5: about humans relationship to the ocean. You think about Russia,
Speaker 5: it's this huge land empire, which.
Speaker 4: It is, of course, but it also has.
Speaker 5: One of the longest coastlines in the world. And Russians
Speaker 5: have been interacting with wales, you know, for a couple
Speaker 5: of thousand years, of all sorts of different species in
Speaker 5: the Pacific and the Arctic and the Baltic, in the Ocean,
Speaker 5: you name it. The Russians had relationships with whales there.
Speaker 5: And I mean, I think the important thing for Russians
Speaker 5: was that they basically missed this period of sale whaling.
Speaker 5: Well they didn't miss it exactly. They saw themselves as
Speaker 5: victims in this period. Americans British dominated that they had
Speaker 5: the capital to sustain these long distance whaling expeditions. The
Speaker 5: Russians didn't. They were quite poor compared to Western European
Speaker 5: and America nations. And so what they saw year after
Speaker 5: year Americans come into Siberian shores, for example, and doing
Speaker 5: whatever they wanted, even though this was part of what
Speaker 5: Russia thought of as their own territory. Americans would come
Speaker 5: and kill as many whales as they wanted, basically laugh
Speaker 5: at any kind of Russian attempts to stop them. They
Speaker 5: trade with indigenous people, Siberians, who in many cases depended
Speaker 5: on whales for their own sustenance, Alaskans as well. You know,
Speaker 5: Russia controlled part of Alaska in the nineteenth century, and
Speaker 5: you know, from the Russian perspective, it's just outrageous. These
Speaker 5: capitalists whalers, Yankee whalers as they called them, were destroying
Speaker 5: indigenous livelihoods. Russians really actually cared about this. They were
Speaker 5: destroying whales that Russians would have liked to have made
Speaker 5: some money off of. And so that really helped shape
Speaker 5: Russia's major entry into the end industry. They came with it,
Speaker 5: you say, a lot of historical baggage into it. And
Speaker 5: when Russia finally established its own whaling industry in the
Speaker 5: nineteen thirties under Stalin, Joseph Stalin, they thought of it
Speaker 5: not just as a way to industrialize the country that
Speaker 5: was part of it, but as a way to kind
Speaker 5: of rectify this historical wrong, that their whaling industry was Russia.
Speaker 5: Finally Russia getting its share and finally able to sort
Speaker 5: of defend its own oceans against Americans, British and increasing
Speaker 5: the Norwegians as well.
Speaker 1: Now you get into the mystery of wales as well.
Speaker 1: I was taken by what you shared about the mystery
Speaker 1: of baleen whales, including a tenth century Russian poem that
Speaker 1: concluded that these whales fed on quote heavenly fragrances. What
Speaker 1: are we to make of that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, whales are a pretty mysterious creature. They were for humans,
Speaker 5: well they still are in a lot of ways. You know,
Speaker 5: they spend ninety nine percent of their life underwater. Humans
Speaker 5: really only got to know them when they were washed
Speaker 5: up on shore or once they'd been harpooned, and so,
Speaker 5: you know, wales lent themselves to a lot of mystery.
Speaker 5: And you know, one of the interesting things that I
Speaker 5: found research in this book is, you know, the really
Speaker 5: important work that the Soviet Union did, especially as scientists
Speaker 5: and kind of unraveling some of these mysteries. You know,
Speaker 5: you read this poem. This was a great indication of
Speaker 5: the really almost total ignorance of whales that humans had
Speaker 5: in the tenth century, but really up until the twentieth
Speaker 5: century in a lot of ways. And you know, the
Speaker 5: Soviets they killed more whales than any country did after
Speaker 5: the Second World War. They also studied wales in greater
Speaker 5: depth than any other country. They're scientists, were on the
Speaker 5: whale ships, you know, digging through whale carcasses, watching whales
Speaker 5: as they were being hunted, using captive dolphins for study.
Speaker 5: You know, the Soviet Union, as much as any country,
Speaker 5: really advanced our knowledge of what wales. Where no one
Speaker 5: was talking about them feeding on heavenly mists, by the
Speaker 5: late twentieth century, the Soviets were talking about them nearly
Speaker 5: going extinct, and they were some of the first understand
Speaker 5: how deep the crisis was as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so in this you're getting into what you refer
Speaker 1: to in the book, is that the challenging contradictions that
Speaker 1: you encountered and sometimes you're encountering in interviews with Russian
Speaker 1: whalers and scientists. Can you can you speak to this
Speaker 1: a little bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I kim In.
Speaker 5: I wrote this book because I was horrified and shocked
Speaker 5: by a lot of things I've just been talking about
Speaker 5: the numbers of whales killed, the truth, you know, the
Speaker 5: pain that whales felt, but you know, to to try
Speaker 5: to understand this and the role specifically that the Russian
Speaker 5: Soviet Union played. Of course, I went out and I
Speaker 5: talked to people who had been on board these whale ships.
Speaker 5: I went to Ukraine and went to I went to
Speaker 5: Moscow and Coliningrad and other places and talk to people
Speaker 5: who had been part of this, and it was it
Speaker 5: was hard not to like them, frankly. You know, they're
Speaker 5: people who not only didn't think at the time that
Speaker 5: what they were doing was wrong, many of.
Speaker 4: Them, some of them did.
Speaker 5: I should make that clear that you know, some people
Speaker 5: were really disturbed by the whaling that they were doing.
Speaker 4: Many were not.
Speaker 5: And you know, frankly, most people around the world didn't
Speaker 5: really care that whales were being killed.
Speaker 4: For most of the time period.
Speaker 5: But you know, not only that, but also that they
Speaker 5: were you know, they were also really deeply interested in wales,
Speaker 5: you know, like myself, really fascinated by these creatures. And
Speaker 5: you know, when I talked to them, I talked to
Speaker 5: whales scientists. You know, they wanted to talk. They were
Speaker 5: so you know, they wanted to relive their experiences with whales.
Speaker 5: They expressed sympathy for these creatures, fascination for them. You know,
Speaker 5: I met some of really the greatest whale scientists, probably
Speaker 5: the twentieth century, people who are still who still really
Speaker 5: care about whales, who tried to blow the whistle in
Speaker 5: the Soviet Union about some of the illegal whaling that
Speaker 5: was taking place, and some of them turned out to be,
Speaker 5: you know, as you said, challenge contradictions. You know, one
Speaker 5: of the whale scientists that I really relied on for
Speaker 5: a lot of the information for this books living in
Speaker 5: Odessa and Ukraine now and you know, has been emailing
Speaker 5: me telling me he can't wait for Russia to come
Speaker 5: free Ukraine from the Nazis. You know, he's a deep
Speaker 5: Russian patriot who really regrets the demise of the Soviet
Speaker 5: Union as well. You know, people who's not not easy
Speaker 5: to pigeon hold them into easy dichotomies that we often
Speaker 5: fall into.
Speaker 1: And looking at Russia, so we touched a little bit
Speaker 1: already on the history of Russian whaling and their relationship
Speaker 1: with the resources of the sea prior to the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: But then what other reasons they're pushing the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: then to pursue industrial whaling so strongly during a time
Speaker 1: when other countries are dropping out of the practice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was the crazy thing about this, and the
Speaker 5: King really came through heartbreaking details. I was reading scientists reports.
Speaker 5: You know, the Soviet Union really expanded their whaling presence
Speaker 5: in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, just
Speaker 5: at a time, as you say, Rob, when the Norwegians
Speaker 5: were starting to drop out, the British were starting to
Speaker 5: drop out, the Dutch were starting to drop out, The
Speaker 5: US wasn't whaling anymore. Everyone saw the writing on the wall.
Speaker 5: The large profitable whales wiped out. You know, they're gone.
Speaker 5: It's not going to pay. And you know, the Soviet Union,
Speaker 5: they had a real belief in the power of science.
Speaker 5: You know, this was a society that was had thrown
Speaker 5: off God, thrown off religion. It was going to rely
Speaker 5: on the expertise of people who weren't subject to those
Speaker 5: kinds of those kinds of superstitions. You know, they were
Speaker 5: going to integrate all kind of economic planning with experts.
Speaker 5: So they had a real belief that they were actually
Speaker 5: going to be really more responsible environmentally than other countries,
Speaker 5: So it was it was just bizarre to read, you
Speaker 5: know that they when the Soviet Union under Nikita Krushev
Speaker 5: was thinking about building they thought about building nine new
Speaker 5: factories floating factories in the nineteen fifties, which was, you know,
Speaker 5: was going to make them the biggest whaling country on earth.
Speaker 5: And they asked their scientists, is this a good idea?
Speaker 5: Every scientist said, now, they said, look, the oceans are
Speaker 5: in crisis, and they really were in the in the
Speaker 5: nineteen fifties. It's easy to forget just how we had
Speaker 5: exploited whale and fish stocks at that time really recklessly.
Speaker 5: And Soviet scientists understood this perfectly. They were seeing it
Speaker 5: happen on board to a man, and they were all
Speaker 5: men at that time. They advised the Soviet economic planners like,
Speaker 5: don't do this, this is crazy. And what did they do?
Speaker 5: They said, Okay, instead of nine, were build seven. They
Speaker 5: built seven new factory fleets, which you know, dwarfed everyone
Speaker 5: except the Japanese at a time.
Speaker 4: As I said, when people.
Speaker 5: Were getting out of this industry justified logic, and it
Speaker 5: led to the predictable disaster. You know, the Soviets having
Speaker 5: built these these huge fleets found that there weren't whales
Speaker 5: to catch, so they started catching the last of the
Speaker 5: whales that were prohibited, you know, and they really, you know,
Speaker 5: the special contribution that the Soviets made was catching those
Speaker 5: last few whales of the species that really didn't make
Speaker 5: any economic sense to catch the Soviets for the Soviets,
Speaker 5: though they had the capacity.
Speaker 4: They did it.
Speaker 5: They wiped out almost the last of the humpback whales
Speaker 5: in the southern hemisphere, the last of the southern right whales.
Speaker 5: So you know, it's it's hard to read that stuff,
Speaker 5: and it really feels like a kind of a tragic
Speaker 5: failure of the Soviet belief that science would really make
Speaker 5: them able to operate more effectively in the world. You know,
Speaker 5: they it could have worked, you know, the scientists told
Speaker 5: them the right thing, and they ended up ignoring the advice, really,
Speaker 5: you know, to the great tragedy of the whales around
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 1: But they did end up sending scientists out on these
Speaker 1: ships as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Oh, the Soviet Union had the largest net of whales
Speaker 5: scientists really in the world, and so they understood probably
Speaker 5: better than any country in the world what you know,
Speaker 5: exactly how deep the crisis was with the world's whales's
Speaker 5: that's the that's the difficult contradiction here.
Speaker 1: So there were there were international quotas at the time, though, right,
Speaker 1: how did this play into Soviet whaling activity at the time?
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, So you know, Soviet Union was one of
Speaker 5: the original signatories to the International Whaling Convention that established
Speaker 5: in the National Whaling Commission in nineteen forty six, and
Speaker 5: they'd agreed to abide by quotas. Quotas which at first
Speaker 5: were kind of laughably generous. They wanted to make sure
Speaker 5: that whalers were still profitable, but became increasingly restrictive over
Speaker 5: the years, and especially in the nineteen sixties. They had
Speaker 5: some real teeth in them. And the same the Union
Speaker 5: pretended to abide by those quotas, they would come back
Speaker 5: and every year whale nations would have to report how
Speaker 5: many whales they'd killed at the at the meeting of THEWC,
Speaker 5: and so an you would do this, they'd make their
Speaker 5: reports and they started falsifying them in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 5: at first overstating the number of whales that they'd killed,
Speaker 5: in part because they wanted to look like they were
Speaker 5: bigger whalers than they were, in part because you know,
Speaker 5: they wanted to establish a precedent for having killed this many.
Speaker 5: But then after they built these big fleets, they realized,
Speaker 5: you know, we can't abide by any of this stuff.
Speaker 5: We're to make any money from this at all, We're
Speaker 5: going to have to cheat wildly, and they did. And
Speaker 5: so throughout the late fifties and sixties, they'd come back
Speaker 5: from the Antarctic and say we killed three hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty humpback whales and they'd killed twelve thou you know,
Speaker 5: that kind of just devastating numbers, which flummoxed people around
Speaker 5: the world. You know, whales scientists in Australia and New
Speaker 5: Zealand who were monitoring local populations that migrated down to
Speaker 5: the Antarctic starting in fifty nine, they saw that suddenly
Speaker 5: there were no whales coming back and they couldn't understand why.
Speaker 5: They said, well, maybe there's some cheating going on, but
Speaker 5: we'd have to, you know, there'd have to be tens
Speaker 5: of thousands of missing whales to explain what's happening. No
Speaker 5: one's cheating like that. But actually, the Soviets were was
Speaker 5: an unbelievable crime, really was a tragedy, of course, not
Speaker 5: only for whales, but you know, for those who were
Speaker 5: studying and cared about them, one that wasn't unraveled until
Speaker 5: the nineteen nineties, you know, about thirty forty years later.
Speaker 5: It was thanks to those same Soviet scientists who who
Speaker 5: were really upset by this, kept their own figures. They
Speaker 5: kept the real numbers, in part because they hated to
Speaker 5: see their science messed up by the fake numbers, and
Speaker 5: in part because they really cared about the future of
Speaker 5: whale stocks. And thanks to them, we actually know the
Speaker 5: extent of what was going on.
Speaker 1: Now, could you take us to a pivotal point in
Speaker 1: the international reaction to Soviet whaling, the one that you
Speaker 1: touch on several different times in the book, and that's
Speaker 1: the green Peace protest in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, green Peace people are putty familiar with
Speaker 5: the organization. It's still around, of course, an important environmentalist organization,
Speaker 5: but they really got their start as an anti whaling group.
Speaker 5: They tried some anti nuclear actions that were only mildly
Speaker 5: successful in the early seventies, but seventy five they hit
Speaker 5: on this strategy of going out to the open ocean
Speaker 5: and locating whaling fleets and coming between them and their prey,
Speaker 5: trying to stop them from killing whales, and of course
Speaker 5: most importantly photographing this all video recording it and letting
Speaker 5: the world know, letting the world see just how brutal
Speaker 5: industrial whaling was, just how awful it was to see
Speaker 5: these whales being killed. And so some of the green
Speaker 5: piece called mind bomb crafting an image that would be
Speaker 5: so powerful that it would immediately sway global opinion, and
Speaker 5: they were pretty successful with this. This was a groove,
Speaker 5: groundbreaking moment in the history of global environmentalism, and it
Speaker 5: was the Soviets that they decided added to target. It
Speaker 5: was one Soviet ship out of the Russian Siberian port
Speaker 5: of Vladivostok that they located in June nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 5: and was a ship that had just been warned by
Speaker 5: Soviet authorities and especially Soviet scientists not to take undersized
Speaker 5: sperm whales. Soviets were really nervous about that publicity that
Speaker 5: was caught red handed by Greenpeace in this moment, taking
Speaker 5: sperm whales just off the coast of California that were
Speaker 5: really small infants, really young sperm whales, maybe not infants,
Speaker 5: and this was, you know, for the Soviets as well,
Speaker 5: one of the turning points. You know, they the negative
Speaker 5: press that they got was really pretty pretty devastating for them.
Speaker 5: They didn't end whaling right away, but one could point
Speaker 5: to the green Peace confrontations. It's really the beginning of
Speaker 5: the end for Soviet and industrial whaling as a whole.
Speaker 1: Now, how much of that came through to the Russian
Speaker 1: people at that time or were they more or less
Speaker 1: cut off from any.
Speaker 4: Of this in the media.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, the Soviet Union did its best to
Speaker 5: hide the confrontation from the Soviet people, but they had
Speaker 5: access to Western media, western radio reports, to television.
Speaker 4: They could get some of that.
Speaker 5: And you know, one of the things that was I
Speaker 5: found really interesting in the book was to trace Russian
Speaker 5: popular opinion around whaling, and it was really changing as
Speaker 5: well by the nineteen seventies. You know, I give green
Speaker 5: Piece a ton of credit for saving the loss of
Speaker 5: the whales, but there it's not the whole story. And
Speaker 5: the whole story really does connect to some of these things.
Speaker 5: Soviet scientists, who by the nineteen seventies were publishing a
Speaker 5: lot of their research in for domestic consumption. Soviet people
Speaker 5: love to read about the ocean. They were totally intrigued
Speaker 5: by it and this they they loved to read these
Speaker 5: popular scientific accounts, and what they were reading was was
Speaker 5: really changing. By the seventies, Soviet scientists were in some
Speaker 5: ways kind of similarly to the West, kind of rethinking
Speaker 5: what whales were. And a lot of the popular publications
Speaker 5: at the time we're talking about wales as humans best friend.
Speaker 5: You know, their their their gentle creatures, They're useful, their
Speaker 5: you know, dolphins are really loyal to humans like dogs
Speaker 5: like this is one of the things that Soviet scientists
Speaker 5: were saying, and people were reading about. Some of the
Speaker 5: Soviet Union's indigenous authors, people from Jakotka, God by the
Speaker 5: name of Urrit Hugh in particular, was writing novels that
Speaker 5: really talked about wales from an indigenous perspective as sentient,
Speaker 5: intelligent creatures, and so Soviet people really gaining this really
Speaker 5: different view of wales and it led them to question
Speaker 5: their own industry, even aside from what Greenpeace was doing,
Speaker 5: and it comes to quite clearly. They wrote letters to
Speaker 5: members of the Bolshevik Party, the Communist Party, demanding, for example,
Speaker 5: that the dolphin hunt be ended, which the Soviet Union
Speaker 5: did ended in nineteen sixty six, well before the United
Speaker 5: States ended marine mammal hunting in nineteen seventy two, and
Speaker 5: then increasingly letters to newspapers, you know, saying, hey, look
Speaker 5: are we really adhering to the IWC conventions? Are we
Speaker 5: going to end whaling? What's going on here? And a
Speaker 5: lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to endus well,
Speaker 5: And that's a big part of the That has to
Speaker 5: be part of the explanation for why the Soviet Union
Speaker 5: ultimately agreed in nineteen eighty seven to stop industrial whaling.
Speaker 5: A it's a combination of Western environmentalists and some pressure
Speaker 5: from Russian people at home too.
Speaker 1: And did the did the economic aspects of it play
Speaker 1: into it at all? Or was that or was the
Speaker 1: whaling industry kind of in the Soviet Union kind of
Speaker 1: insulated from like market forces.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they it did play a role, you know, Soviet Wales.
Speaker 5: It's unclear if they ever made any money off of it.
Speaker 5: Another the like, I don't know, tragedy in some way.
Speaker 5: If they'd really cared about profits, they never would have
Speaker 5: built those huge fleets in the sixties. But the Soviet
Speaker 5: Union was entering into an economic crisis by the seventies,
Speaker 5: and so these industries like the whaling industry, which were
Speaker 5: lavishly financed people make great salaries in whaling, they begin
Speaker 5: to seem like more of a problem as the Soviet
Speaker 5: economy as a whole was slowing and then by the
Speaker 5: early eighties really lurching into a crisis, and so the
Speaker 5: economics did play a role. Yeah, so it was, you know,
Speaker 5: the Soviets, like the Japanese by the early eighties were
Speaker 5: catching really small whales in comparison to the earlier catches,
Speaker 5: minky whales mostly and some sperm whales. Minkys are you know,
Speaker 5: twenty thirty foot whale, and that's a lot less whale
Speaker 5: product than you got from an eighty to two hundred
Speaker 5: foot blue whale back in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4: So there, that was a part of and they were.
Speaker 5: Trying to economize on fuel and definitely played a role
Speaker 5: in getting rid of the Soviet whaling industry, but it
Speaker 5: had a long history of operating without much attention to
Speaker 5: profits or losses. So yeah, it is, it is part
Speaker 5: of the explanation, but it's definitely not the whole explanation.
Speaker 1: So why are Soviets barely a part of the history
Speaker 1: of whaling, as you discussed in the book, despite playing
Speaker 1: such a you know, obviously significant role in it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I.
Speaker 5: Mean part of it is because sobjects were pretty secretive
Speaker 5: about what they were doing. Part of it is this
Speaker 5: period of industrial whaling. Yeah, but I don't think people
Speaker 5: really like to think back on it that much. It
Speaker 5: was a it was a grizzly history. It was a
Speaker 5: depressing history, there's no question about it. But I think,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe most of all this, you know, the
Speaker 5: Soviet Union, despite producing this really top notch research, despite
Speaker 5: killing so many whales, and there're scientists, weren't allowed to
Speaker 5: travel around the world share their research, at least not
Speaker 5: until the nineteen late seventies and early eighties, and so
Speaker 5: a lot of what they were doing just the world didn't.
Speaker 4: Know about, for better or for worse.
Speaker 5: And you know, that's that's part of what I wanted
Speaker 5: to do with this book, was to bring that back
Speaker 5: into global attention and you know, account you know for
Speaker 5: the destruction that the Soviet Union reeked on our oceans,
Speaker 5: and you know, I should mention that. Look, it's not
Speaker 5: like just like they were doing this, you know, in
Speaker 5: some far away corner of the Earth. One of the
Speaker 5: things that struck me was, you know that when I
Speaker 5: went to the ocean as a kid in the North
Speaker 5: Pacific on the coast of California and Oregon, you know,
Speaker 5: the lack of whales there. Well, this was part of
Speaker 5: the Soviet Union's legacy. They were killing whales just offshore,
Speaker 5: as were the Japanese, you know, as had American wheeling
Speaker 5: stations as well. Sovie Union was impacting my own history here,
Speaker 5: so I thought it was really important to understand how
Speaker 5: and why it had done this on you know, for
Speaker 5: the for the globe, not just for those interests in Russia,
Speaker 5: but also to give you know, to give the Soviets
Speaker 5: there due especially in the way that they advanced our
Speaker 5: knowledge of wales. They made really important contributions. We wouldn't
Speaker 5: understand whales the way we do without the work of
Speaker 5: their scientists, who did, you know, really incredible stuff, not
Speaker 5: just an understanding whale behavior, which was their main focus,
Speaker 5: but also in keeping the records that we have today
Speaker 5: of exactly how many whales were killed in the twentieth
Speaker 5: century as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to stress to our readers that even
Speaker 1: though the subject matter is grim in many in many cases,
Speaker 1: like the book is not just one endless horror show.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's so much fascinating content about the
Speaker 1: people involved, the cultures involved in the uh, in the
Speaker 1: in the science of whales. So I want to I
Speaker 1: want to stress that to everyone. And and also you
Speaker 1: you do specifically mention you know that there is there
Speaker 1: is light in an otherwise dark taiale.
Speaker 5: Right, I appreciate that, Rob. Yeah, so you know the book,
Speaker 5: the book does chronicle a lot of whales being killed. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this is fundamentally kind of a I mean, I turned
Speaker 5: one chapter of the Whale Genocide. This is the story
Speaker 5: of a number of species of creatures which it really
Speaker 5: flourished on this planet for a long time, carved out
Speaker 5: a really successful nis for themselves, really suddenly facing extermination.
Speaker 5: And part of the book is, you know, it's chronicle
Speaker 5: in that and trying to understand how whales did survive
Speaker 5: through this.
Speaker 4: If barely. But the other part of it, Rob is accactive.
Speaker 5: As you say, you know, it's a people lived rich
Speaker 5: lives even as they were you know, destroying these creatures.
Speaker 5: And actually, you know, the Soviet whaling industry allows us
Speaker 5: to kind of look at, you know, some of the
Speaker 5: really really messed up, cynical aspects of Soviet life, but
Speaker 5: also some of the great dreams that people had and
Speaker 5: some of the ways that they really found meaning in
Speaker 5: the communist project through their own work, through adventure and
Speaker 5: the ocean, you know, through through real scientific accomplishment. You know,
Speaker 5: there's I use this story as a way to think
Speaker 5: about what life was like in the Soviet Union, all
Speaker 5: all of it's really horrible and wonderful aspects and like
Speaker 5: like any human society, and I had both, and it
Speaker 5: comes out pretty clearly in the way that people made,
Speaker 5: you know, some really really meaningful lives for themselves aboard whaleships,
Speaker 5: getting to see the world, getting to know these creatures
Speaker 5: that they were killing in really unsurpassed detail.
Speaker 4: And also you.
Speaker 5: Know, the real pain that a lot of whalers themselves
Speaker 5: experience trying to reconcile all the great experiences they were
Speaker 5: having with the with the fact that they were destroying
Speaker 5: these families of wales.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: And they couldn't they couldn't get you know, they couldn't
Speaker 5: overlook that fact.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: The book is red Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling.
Speaker 1: It's out now in physical and digital formats. We've we've
Speaker 1: been chatting with Ryan Tucker Jones. Ryan, thank you for
Speaker 1: coming on the show.
Speaker 4: Rob, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: All right. Thanks once more to Ryan Tucker Jones for
Speaker 1: chatting with me about the new book, Red Leviathan, The
Speaker 1: Secret History of Soviet Whaling. You can get it right
Speaker 1: now in physical or digital formats. Uh. Definitely, if you're
Speaker 1: if you're interested in anything that we discussed in this episode,
Speaker 1: definitely pick up a copy of this book. It's a
Speaker 1: wonderful read. In the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our
Speaker 1: core episodes published every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Mondays, you'll find
Speaker 1: our listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays, we tend to put
Speaker 1: out a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
Speaker 1: on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just
Speaker 1: talk about a weird film. Thanks as always to Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson for producing this episode and if you want
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