The Soviet authorities carefully altered documents and fudged numbers to hide the true scale of their whaling operation. Between 1946 and 1986, they reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales. In reality, they slaughtered over 13,000 in 1959 alone. In total, Soviet whalers secretly killed around 180,000 more whales than officially reported.
It was a complete bloodbath. Whales were killed so quickly that the bodies rotted before they could be processed. In 1957, the humpback whales off New Zealand were so thick it was joked you could land a helicopter on their backs. By 1961, the ocean was “a desert.” In the North Pacific, whales were so common in the '50s that one Soviet scientist remembered thinking the spouts from their blowholes looked like a forest. When he went back with a whaling fleet years later he found the water filled with floating whale corpses. And things weren’t much better for the whalers, who experienced a high casualty rate (one guy died when his foot got caught in a loop of whale intestine as it slid overboard).
But the killing continued at a steady rate, as did the cover-up. In 1972, an international treaty began requiring whaling ships to be monitored by an independent observer. So the Soviets simply exchanged observers with Japan, which was also illegally catching whales, although on a smaller scale than the Soviets. Unsurprisingly, both sets of observers somehow failed to notice anything was going on. In fact, we only have any evidence of the true scale of Soviet whaling thanks to a scientist named Dmitri Tormosov, who secretly kept copies of the yearly reports in his potato cellar. The hunts continued until 1986, when the declining numbers prompted a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling.
Why did the Soviets hunt so many whales? No reason in particular. The USSR had no use for whale meat, and precious little for blubber. Many of the whales caught were simply butchered and then dumped back in the sea to rot. As it turned out, Soviet economic planners had been setting whaling quotas based on historic whaling as a percentage of the fisheries industry, regardless of its actual usefulness. When Soviet scientists complained to the fisheries minister that their grandchildren would live in a world without whales, they were told “your grandchildren aren’t the ones who can remove me from my job.” Meanwhile, the world’s whales were massacred for basically no reason at all, except to meet a line item in an economic plan.