The truth about Soviet whaling: a memoir.

Ivashchenko, Yulia V. ; Clapham, Phillip J. ; Brownell, Robert L., Jr. 等

ALFRED A. BERZIN

Translated from Russian by Yulia V. Ivashchenko

A Special Issue of the Marine Fisheries Review

Foreword

In November 1993, Professor Alexei Yablokov, who at the time was the Science Advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, stood on a podium in Galveston, Tex., and delivered a speech to the Society for Marine Mammalogy's biennial conference, the premier international event in the field of marine mammal science. Addressing the 1,500 scientists present, he made what amounted to a national confession: that, beginning in 1948, the U.S.S.R. had begun a huge campaign of illegal whaling. Despite being a signatory to the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (signed in Washington, D.C., just 2 years before in 1946), the Soviets set out to pillage the world's oceans.

For the next 25 years, ignoring every quota restriction or prohibition agreed on by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the U.S.S.R. factory ship fleets killed every whale they could find. Nothing was spared: highly endangered protected species, undersized whales, even lactating females and their newborn calves--anything that crossed the bow of a catcher boat was considered fair game. Soviet fleets traveled everywhere in their relentless pursuit of whales: from the Bering Sea to the Antarctic, from the Indian Ocean to the coasts of South America, from chilly high-latitude waters to the tropics. They plied their grisly trade from one area to another, from one whale stock to the next, leaving behind them a trail of destruction and devastated populations. They left, as the author of this memoir notes, "a desert in their wake."

This wanton carnage continued unabated until the IWC finally passed an International Observer Scheme in 1972, a move that had until then been successfully blocked by the U.S.S.R. Even then, as we learn here, the observer scheme was often ineffective, with Soviet and Japanese whalers "monitoring" each other's catches in a way that allowed some illegal hunting to continue. During the long period of illegal whaling, some scientists at the IWC harbored suspicions that unreported killing was occurring. However, none of them could have imagined the scale on which this was actually being prosecuted.

The truth about Soviet whaling could be revealed only with the end of the Cold War and the flowering of perestroika. Following Yablokov's revelations (Yablokov, 1994; Yablokov et al., 1998), a number of former Soviet biologists stepped forward to work with their western counterparts to correct the original catch records and provide details of the Soviet hunts. It turned out that more than one of these men had taken considerable personal risks to preserve the real data, and even then much of this priceless information was destroyed by individuals who, having been leading proponents of the illegal whaling scheme, had no wish to see the truth brought into the light of day under Yeltsin's new and more enlightened regime.

Prominent among those seeking to tell the true story was Alfred Antonovich Berzin, the author of this memoir. Berzin was born on the 2nd of August 1930 at Rostov-on-Don, in western Russia. After a standard Soviet undergraduate education in the biological sciences, in 1955 he began work at the U.S.S.R.'s Pacific Research and Fisheries Center (TINRO) in Vladivostok, and in the same year made his first voyage aboard the first Soviet whaling factory ship, the Aleut. Berzin rose to the position of Chief of the Marine Mammal Division at TINRO and was thus responsible for coordinating the laboratory's scientific studies of whales and whaling.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How the U.S.S.R. managed to keep its wholesale slaughter of the world's whales secret, why the Soviet state embarked on this enterprise in the first place, the details of how it was conducted, and the economic and political context into which the illegal whaling campaign must be placed, are the primary subjects of this remarkable memoir. Berzin was first and foremost a scientist, and as such he was an observant witness to the quarter century of depredation that he documents.

But he was also a storyteller. So here, among the grim details of whaling methods and catches, we find fascinating anecdotes of life aboard ship, as well as sympathy for the whales themselves, and no small amount of dark sardonic humor. He relates the absurdity of the Soviet industrial system, in which meeting the ever-increasing annual targets of the "Plan" represented a goal to be achieved at any price, even if it meant (as Berzin notes in one example) converting new equipment into scrap or metal shavings because the plan expected that a specified quantity of these would be produced as byproducts of industrial production.

For whales, this system represented an unmitigated disaster. As we have noted elsewhere (Ivashchenko et al., 2007), the government set annual targets for quantities of whale products to be obtained from the hunt, and paid factory fleet crews a bonus only if these targets were exceeded. But when this occurred (as it did in many of the earlier years), the following year's whaling plan would contain targets that had been increased to match or even exceed the production level of the previous season. Consequently, whaling crews were forced to kill more and more whales to obtain their bonuses, and the populations concerned inevitably crashed under the pressure of overexploitation.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the humpback whale (1) populations which feed in the Antarctic south of Australia and New Zealand were so rapidly depleted by the Soviets (some 25,000 humpbacks were killed in just 2 years) that the shore whaling fishery in those two countries was forced to close for lack of whales. Berzin documents this and other extreme examples, including the destruction of sperm whales and right whales in the North Pacific (the latter remain critically endangered today as a result), and the various depredations of the most ruthless whaler of them all, Alexei Solyanik, the "General Captain-Director" who was so notorious that he merits a section of his own.

Berzin notes the continual warnings by Soviet scientists of the consequences of the U.S.S.R.'s whaling policy. These warnings of declining whale stocks became increasingly pointed with each scientific report on that year's whaling; yet they were all ignored by the bureaucracy and party leaders in the clamor for greater production, bigger bonuses, and the coveted awards and privileges dispensed to individual workers by the Soviet state. Indeed, as he notes here, scientists were often held in low esteem, and they were even excluded from key meetings aimed at planning the next season's whaling campaign. Production was everything; science was irrelevant.

Alfred ("Fred") Berzin died suddenly on the 2nd of April 1996, at age 652, never to see his memoir published. Yet in this bleak but curiously engaging work, he leaves behind an honest and detailed legacy regarding what is arguably one of the greatest environmental crimes of the 20th century. We suspect he would agree with our sentiment that, at a time when there remain calls for a resumption of commercial whaling, any future exploitation of natural resources should be governed by strict and transparent controls lest the disaster that was Soviet whaling be repeated.

A Note on the Text and Translation Fred Berzin's text, beginning with his Preface and ending with the Epilogue, have been translated here from the original Russian. As far as possible, Berzin's very personal style of writing has been preserved in this translation. For the sake of clarity and easier reading, some of the language in the memoir is not transliterated, but rather has been amended to convey in clearer English the intent of the original text which, to a non-Russian reader, would be confusing. If there is any question with regard to meaning, this is indicated by a footnote.

Photographs provided by Berzin have been integrated into the text at relevant points wherever possible. Those specifically referred to by Berzin are numbered as Figures and referred to as such; the remainder are numbered as Plates. Through footnotes, we have attempted to clarify or explain details of the narrative which might otherwise be unclear to a reader unfamiliar with whales, whaling, or the Soviet system. We have also provided three appendices documenting the early history of Russian whaling as well as the scale of Soviet illegal catches in the Southern Hemisphere (which in many ways bore the brunt of this whaling) and in the North Pacific. The first gives a brief account of the origins of modern whaling in the Russian Far East. The second (reproduced from Clapham and Baker, 2002) gives a summary of reported vs. actual catches for all species in the Southern Hemisphere (see also Clapham et al., In review, for a detailed breakdown of humpback whale catches, by factory fleet). The final appendix provides a partial accounting of catches of large whales in the North Pacific from 1961 to 1979; the true catch records from this ocean are less complete than for the Southern Hemisphere. We hope that this additional information serves to provide a clearer picture of Soviet whaling as related here by Fred Berzin.

Acknowledgments

Funding for the translation and editing of this memoir was provided by a contract to Seastar Scientific from the National Marine Fisheries Service (Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle). Additional funding came from a grant from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. We are very grateful to these institutions, and to both Doug Demaster and Patrick Ramage, for their support of this work. We also thank Jeff Breiwick, Gary Duker, Jim Lee, Randy Reeves, and Kim Shelden for their helpful comments on the manuscript, and Ian Hart for supplying details of construction and technical specifications of Soviet whaling factory ships.

Note: Mention of commercial firms, trademarks, or products in this memoir does not imply endorsement by an individual or entity.

Literature cited

Clapham, P., and C. S. Baker. 2002. Modern whaling. In W. F. Perrin, B. Wursig, and J. G. M. Thewissen (Editors), Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, p. 1,328-1,332. Acad. Press, San Diego, Calif.

--, Yu. Mikhalev, W. Franklin, D. Paton, C. S. Baker, Y. V. Ivashchenko, and R. L. Brownell, Jr. In review. Catches of humpback whales in the Southern Ocean, 1947-1973. Mar. Fish. Rev.

Doroshenko, N. V. 1997. Alfred A. Berzin, 1930-1996. Mar. Mammal Sci. 13:535-536.

Ivashchenko, Y. V., P. J. Clapham, and R. L. Brownell, R.L. Jr. (Editors). 2007. Scientific reports of Soviet whaling expeditions in the North Pacific, 1955-1978. U.S. Dep. Commer., NOAA Tech. Memo. NMFS-AFSC-175, 36 p. [Transl. by Y. V. Ivashchenko].

Yablokov, A. V. 1994. Validity of whaling data. Nature 367:108.

--, V. A. Zemsky, Y. A. Mikhalev, V. V. Tormosov, and A. A. Berzin. 1998. Data on Soviet whaling in the Antarctic in 1947-1972 (population aspects). Russ. J. Ecol. 29:38-42.

(1) Genus and species of whales are fisted in Appendices II and III.

(2) An obituary for Fred Berzin, giving additional details of his fife, appeared in the journal Marine Mammal Science in 1997 (Doroshenko, 1997).

Yulia V. Ivashchenko is with Seastar Scientific, Dzerzhinskogo St 5-30, 150033 Yaroslavl, Russia (seastarsci@yahoo.com) and the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 (yulia.ivashchenko@noaa.gov). Phillip J. Clapham is with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 (phillip.clapham@noaa.gov). Robert L. Brownell, Jr. Is with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, 1352 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA 93950 (robert.brownell@noaa.gov).

Yulia Ivashchenko, Phil Clapham, and Bob Brownell Seattle, Washington September 2008