The Soviet Union, despite its formal adherence to the 1946 treaty regulating whaling, killed 180,000 more whales than the formally accepted limit. The North Pacific Right Whale (Eubalena japonica), for example, was nearly exterminated and made extinct in just three years of unregulated whaling by Soviet fishermen in the 1960s. The most absurd thing is that Soviet fishermen recovered almost only the blubber (about 30% of the total weight) and threw the rest back into the sea. The blubber was then converted into oil in the USSR, which was used for oil lamps and other purposes. The point is that the USSR had among the most abundant hydrocarbon reserves in the world and certainly had no need to obtain animal fats for fuel from whale blubber. The news was made public only in 1972, even within the USSR, and then after the end of the Cold War, thanks to the revelations of Alfred Berzin, a Russian scientist, in “The truth about Soviet whaling”, published in 2008.
