Red Leviathan Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century many of them illegally and secretly That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through todays oceans In this new account based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with exwhalers environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales destruction

As other countriesespecially the United States Great Britain Japan and Norwayexpanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction but as Jones shows there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony todays cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior

Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their countrys whaling industry working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whalingnot long before the worlds whales might have disappeared altogether