RED LEVIATHAN

Based on the opening of newly accessible Soviet archives and interviews with former Soviet whalers, a historian of Russia offers a shocking new look at life behind the Iron Curtain, in the open ocean, and the fight that saved large whales from extinction.

RED LEVIATHAN uses whaling as a window into what it was like to be a citizen of the Soviet Union; what it was like to be at the forefront of modern industrialized states' attack on the open ocean; and what it was like to encounter huge numbers of large, strange, but strangely familiar marine mammals on a scale few have experienced. Soviet whaling nearly destroyed the world's whales, and its history reveals a surprising amount about humanity's relationship with the oceans. Russia has the longest coastline in the world and Russians have one of the world's longest whaling histories. But whaling was never an industry in Russia until after the Bolshevik Revolution and, long before there were Cosmonauts, it was the Soviet whalers - through bestselling novels and memoirs, and fawning press coverage - who were among the most celebrated and popular of their citizens working a job many were desperate to have. Decades into their pursuit of whales around the world they had nearly hunted several large whale species into extinction. Misgivings by Soviet whalers and scientists about whaling's utility and its impact as well as the memorable confrontation between whaling ships and Greenpeace activists off the coast of California in 1979 saw it come to a surprising end. As much the story of the men and women, this is also the story of those whales, their families, and their cultures, who were broken by the brutal attack of industrial whalers, but who survived and whose populations are rebounding today. Ryan Tucker Jones is an historian of the Pacific, Russia, and the global environment at the University of Oregon, specializing in human interactions with the ocean. He is fluent in Russian.