Speaker: Dr. Ryan Tucker Jones, Associate Professor of History, University of Oregon

Topic: "Red Leviathan:  The Secret History of Soviet Whaling” 

This talk will present portions of Ryan Tucker Jones’s new book, Red Leviathan:  The Secret History of Soviet Whaling.  Using formerly secret Russian archives along with interviews with ex-whalers and cetacean scientists, the book examines the motivations behind the Soviet Union’s secret, and shocking campaign of secret, illegal whaling in the 1950s and 1960s.  It also reckons with the environmental consequences of this mass slaughter for the Antarctic and North Pacific Oceans.  Finally, Red Leviathan uncovers the hidden story of Soviet scientists’ exceptional advances in whale science from the 1930s on and the unheralded role Soviet citizens played in finally bringing their disastrous whaling industry to an end.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo137529766.html