A Review of Ryan Tucker Jones, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling. Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2022, 269 pp.

Abstract

The book is dedicated to the history of Soviet whaling and traces it from prehistory, dating back to pre-Petrine times, to the ban on whaling at the end of the Soviet period. The author constructs an impressive narrative, aiming to demonstrate the connection between the formation, development, and decline of the Soviet social, political and economic system as a whole, and the development of whaling. He presents this story as the result of rather complex interactions between the various groups of actors involved, including the whales themselves, which to a certain extent were able to exercise their own agency in conditions where they were being hunted on a massive scale.