Alexey Yablokov

person · earth · Russia / former USSR

The Russian biologist who made the falsification of Soviet whaling records public. The USSR ran a global campaign of illegal whaling from 1948, with fleets keeping two sets of books - a falsified return for the International Whaling Commission and a true record retained internally. Yablokov published the first account of the real scale in 1994. On the reconstructed figures, Soviet fleets killed on the order of 330,000 whales in the Southern Ocean while reporting about 185,000, and took protected blue whales in numbers subsequently revised upward past three thousand. The relevance to this Journey is not the crime but the epistemics: the catch series used to reconstruct blue whale populations had to be repaired decades after the fact.