The KGB's sea of slaughter."If you see a school of whales where there is a feeding mother, first kill the calves because then the mother won't leave. Next, kill the mother, then the male won't leave. And finally, kill the male." The comments of former whaling fleet captain Vladimir Dobralskiy echo the kill-at-all-costs credo that operated for years in the Soviet Union's whaling industry. The shroud of secrecy that once enveloped en·vel·op tr.v. en·vel·oped, en·vel·op·ing, en·vel·ops 1. To enclose or encase completely with or as if with a covering: "Accompanying the darkness, a stillness envelops the city" this most furtive of all Soviet industries finally lifted last year when Russian officials from the Environmmental Ministry exposed the practices to a disbelieving panel of the International Whaling Commission International Whaling Commission (IWC) An intergovernmental organization created in 1946 to control the rapid escalation of whaling. The original purpose of the IWC was to preserve whale stocks for commercial whalers. (IWC IWC International Whaling Commission IWC Industrial Welfare Commission IWC Iowa Wesleyan College IWC International Watch Company (Swiss watch manufacturer) IWC Ice Water Content IWC In Which Case IWC Indianapolis Water Company ). Indeed, after becoming a signatory to the IWC in 1948, the Soviet Union systematically violated every IWC whaling quota. It is believed that from 1948 to 1987 -- when Soviet whaling ceased -- the four Soviet whaling flotillas killed at least 100,000 whales over and above their quotas. "Whaling was considered one of the most secretive commercial industries. It was done without any limitations. No one wanted to restrict it," says Ernst Cherny, a former whaler WHALER, mar. law. A vessel employed in the whale fishery. 2. It is usual for the owner of the vessel, the captain and crew, to divide the profits in just proportions, under an agreement similar to the contract Di Colonna. (q.v.) who witnessed the slaughter firsthand. "They killed females, calves, illegal species, at illegal times, in illegal whaling zones, and all of it was done because the government sanctioned and encouraged these global violations." In 1961 and 1962, for example, the Antarctic whaling vessel Sovietskaya Rossiya hunted and killed 1,568 humpbacked hump·back n. 1. See hunchback. 2. A humped upper back. 3. A humpback whale. hump whales but only reported 270. In 1964, the same Sovietskaya Rossiya alone killed 530 blue whales, though the IWC report acknowledges only 74 caught by all four Soviet whaling fleets. The Kuril Islands, seized by the Soviets from the Japanese during World War II, was the scene of the worst slaughter. "Our whalers Whalers may mean:
 n`), weapon used for spearing whales and large fish. The early type was a flat triangular piece of metal with barbed edges and a socket for attaching a wooden handle, to the guns," admitted Sergei Klumov, the head of the "scientific" delegation on the Sovietskaya Rossiya in 1966. "On some ships the KGB KGB: see secret police. KGB Russian Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security”) Soviet agency responsible for intelligence, counterintelligence, and internal security. agents worked undercover as sailors or captains' assistants," explains Cherny. "But on the whalers they were openly presented as agents of the Committee for State Security. They would monitor who said what to whom." Cherny would like to see all Soviet records systematized and offered for further study, something the Fishing Ministry is not eager to do. "The people in the Fishing Ministry are the ones who falsified the data for decades and now they control this information," Cherny says. |
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