Join us to hear Professor Ryan Tucker Jones discuss whaling, environmental history and Soviet science with Dr Katja Bruisch. Ryan’s latest book, Red Leviathan: the Secret History of Soviet Whaling, has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2023 and explores the history of Soviet whaling, which almost eradicated several species while at the same time paradoxically helping scientists to understand their complex biology.
The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. Soviet whalers brought many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans.
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.
Ironically, today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behaviour. The Soviet public helped to save them, eventually turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organisations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling – but not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.
You can meet Ryan and other authors at the Pushkin House Book Prize award ceremony on 15 June 2023.
About the speakers
Dr Katja Bruisch is Ussher Assistant Professor in Environmental History at Trinity College, the University of Dublin. She is an environmental historian of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Her current project on the history of peat fuel centres on actors, places and energy sources at the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy. This research underscores the relevance of regional perspectives for writing the history of the fossil fuel age and associated social and environmental changes. Katja is also interested in the history of wetland drainage and restoration in modern Europe. Her first book dealt with the relationship between politics, science and the public sphere, and the role played by experts in dealing with the "agrarian question" in late-imperial and early-Soviet Russia.
Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he holds a PhD in history from Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the Strange Beasts of the Sea (Oxford, 2014) as well as Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (University of Chicago Press, 2022).