Phil Clapham and Julia Ivashchenko, NOAA National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Seattle, WA
"A Whale of a Deception: Soviet Illegal Whaling and the MOSCOW Project"
Monday, July 20, 2009 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Beginning in 1948, the USSR conducted a massive campaign of illegal whaling, which devastated whale populations worldwide and corrupted the catch statistics used by the International Whaling
Commission to assess status of these populations. Only after the end of the Cold War was it finally revealed that Soviet whalers killed close to 100,000 “unreported” whales in the Southern
Hemisphere, and probably a similar number in the Northern Hemisphere. The catches were indiscriminate, and all whales encountered were taken, regardless of age, size or protected status.
At least one population (that of the right whale in the eastern North Pacific) was brought to the brink of extinction by the Soviets, and the impact on the recovery of other populations was often
substantial. In the Memoirs Of Soviet Catches Of Whales (MOSCOW) project, we are conducting interviews with former Soviet biologists and whalers who were witnesses to this whaling, in order to
document and reconstruct this unique example of government-sponsored fraud. In addition to correcting the catch record, the project also seeks to place the whaling into a broader social, economic and
political context. Lessons from Soviet illegal whaling serve to emphasize the importance of implementing a truly independent and transparent system for monitoring the whaling industry today.
