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Russian whaling has been conducted by native peoples in the Chukotka region of
Russian whaling has been conducted by native peoples in the Chukotka region of Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...
since at least 4,000 years ago by native Yupik Yupik may refer to:
* Yupik peoples, a group of indigenous peoples of Alaska and the Russian Far East
* Yupik languages, a group of Eskimo-Aleut languages
Yupꞌik (with the apostrophe) may refer to:
* Yup'ik people, a Yupik people from western ...
and Chukchi people
The Chukchi, or Chukchee ( ckt, Ԓыгъоравэтԓьэт, О'равэтԓьэт, ''Ḷygʺoravètḷʹèt, O'ravètḷʹèt''), are a Indigenous peoples of Siberia, Siberian indigenous people native to the Chukchi Peninsula, the shores of ...
, but commercial whaling did not begin until the mid-19th century, when companies based in Finland
Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bo ...
(then part of Imperial Russia
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. T ...
) sent out vessels to the Pacific. It was not until 1932 that modern pelagic whaling began to take off with the purchase of an American cargo ship which was renamed the ''Aleut,'' which was the only Soviet factory ship until World War II. After the war, with the need for a stronger Soviet economy and rapid industrialization of the country during the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet whaling took off and became a truly global industry. The first Soviet whalers reached the Antarctic during the 1946–47 season with the factory ship ''Slava'' (taken from the Germans as a prize of war) and then underwent a rapid expansion during the late 1950s in which 5 new fleets were added within a 4-year span: ''Sovetskaya Ukraina'' in 1959, ''Yuriy Dolgorukiy'' in 1960, and ''Sovetskaya Rossiya'' in 1961 for the Antarctic, and finally two large fleets (''Dalniy Vostok'' and ''Vladivostok'') in 1963 for the North Pacific. Thus, by the early 1960s Soviet whaling had truly become a global industry, operating in every ocean except the North Atlantic and undertaking voyages that could last as long as seven months each. From 1964 to 1973, the Soviet Union was considered by some the biggest whaling na