Red Leviathan

"""This is a really important story. Jones has set out to reframe much of what we know about twentieth-century environmental history, particularly of the oceans. His archival work is extraordinarily impressive, and the oral history interviews with Russian whalers and marine biologists are, to my knowledge, unique in English-language historical scholarship. But it is Jones's incorporation of whale science and his own personal vignettes that make this book special. Soviet whaling had the single greatest impact on world whale populations in the postwar period, but no other historian has told its inside story. Red Leviathan is a game-changer."" -- Jason M. Colby, University of Victoria, author of ""Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator"" ""American environmentalists are inclined to see the United States' Cold War opponent as a villain. Telling the story of the Soviet role in modern whaling, Jones complicates this perspective by acknowledging the Soviets' disproportionate impact while also looking beyond it. He illuminates the contradictions and tensions among different players within the Soviet whaling industry-whalers, the whale scientists who worked with them, and other Russians not directly involved in but still impacted by and shaping the demands of the industry. From the first attempts at whaling in Peter's Russia to the protest era and pushback against whaling by Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherds, Red Leviathan combines thorough research and great storytelling to fill a necessary gap in the history of global whaling."" -- Jakobina K. Arch, Whitman College, author of ""Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan"""