This is an extraordinary story that deserves to be better known. The original article by Charles Homans in Pacific Standard is from June 2017, though I came across it through this piece by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution today - One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century. It concerns the massive hidden slaughter of some 180,000 whales by the Soviet Union in the middle of the last century, driving several species to the brink of extinction:
It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history—and it had happened almost entirely in secret. The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, the country’s fleets had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species. It had been an elaborate and audacious deception: Soviet captains had disguised ships, tampered with scientific data, and misled international authorities for decades. In the estimation of the marine biologists Yulia Ivashchenko, Phillip Clapham, and Robert Brownell, it was “arguably one of the greatest environmental crimes of the 20th century.”
It was also a perplexing one. Environmental crimes are, generally speaking, the most rational of crimes. The upsides are obvious: Fortunes have been made selling contraband rhino horns and mahogany or helping toxic waste disappear, and the risks are minimal—poaching, illegal logging, and dumping are penalized only weakly in most countries, when they’re penalized at all.
The Soviet whale slaughter followed no such logic. Unlike Norway and Japan, the other major whaling nations of the era, the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Once the blubber was cut away for conversion into oil, the rest of the animal, as often as not, was left in the sea to rot or was thrown into a furnace and reduced to bone meal—a low-value material used for agricultural fertilizer, made from the few animal byproducts that slaughterhouses and fish canneries can’t put to more profitable use.
So why did this massive whale slaughter take place? The answer was, simply and horrifyingly, that the whalers had been tasked to kill so many whales according to the strictures of the Soviet command economy, and so - irrespective of any need or any rationale - kill them they did. To fail would lead to prison and worse.
The truth came out with the translation and publication in 2008 of the memoirs of Alfred Berzin, a scientist who'd spent his career at a government laboratory in Vladivostok, and who'd sailed with several Soviet whaling fleets. [The memoir remains unpublished in Russia.]
The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote....
This absurdity stemmed from an oversight deep in the bowels of the Soviet bureaucracy. Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.
Whaling fleets that met or exceeded targets were rewarded handsomely, their triumphs celebrated in the Soviet press and the crews given large bonuses. But failure to meet targets came with harsh consequences. Captains would be demoted and crew members fired; reports to the fisheries ministry would sometimes identify responsible parties by name.
Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" was coined to describe Adolf Eichmann, who she believed - incorrectly - to have been a dim-bulb cog in the Nazi machine, just following orders. The phrase surely has a much better and clearer application in a case like this.
And perhaps we can drop the automatic "capitalist greed" response to every question about the despoliation of the natural world.
Plus Whaling crews in good standing would have the rare, prestigious & lucrative privilege of being able to travel & trade abroad.
Posted by: Martin Adamson | May 23, 2019 at 07:47 AM