Abstract: The history of the Soviet Union and the history of modern whaling are intertwined in surprising ways. Tracing the beginnings of Soviet whaling under Josef Stalin through to the vast, secret, and illegal slaughter of nearly extinct whales in the 1960s, this talk will explain how the Soviets made a distinctive impact on global ocean ecosystems, how whaling helps us understand the successes and failures of the Soviet project, and what made the twentieth century uniquely terrible for whales.
Speaker: Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor of Global Environmental History at the University of Oregon. He is author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea (2014) and Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (2022).
This event in the Department of History's Environment, Health, Technology, and Science lecture series is co-sponsored by the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. This event is supported in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to CSEEES.