The Truth About Soviet Whaling

I have always condemned (and to do anything more was not within our power or abilities) the illegal and sometimes destructive whaling by the Soviet Union. This opinion was expressed in numerous documents, including reports and records of presentations at scientific and other meetings; these documents are the witnesses to this condemnation. However, none of these documents ever saw the light of day: all of them were marked with the sinister stamp “secret.” When necessary in this memoir, my opinion of the whaling will be supported by data drawn from these docum

The Truth About Soviet Whaling: A Memoir

In November 1993, Professor Alexei Yablokov, who at the time was the Science Advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, stood on a podium in Galveston, Tex., and delivered a speech to the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s biennial conference, the premier international event in the field of marine mammal science. Addressing the 1,500 scientists present, he made what amounted to a national confession: that, beginning in 1948, the U.S.S.R. had begun a huge campaign of illegal whaling. Despite being a signatory to the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (signed in Washington, D.C., just 2 years before in 1946), the Soviets set out to pillage the world’s ocea

The reproduction trajectories of institutions in relation to social isolation of individual population groups in regions of Russia

This article deals with spatial socio-demographic isolation as a factor of the existing settlement system in Russian regions. Theoretically, the phenomena of solitude and social isolation have their own demographic, socio-economic, and psychological origin. Conceptually, they are reflected in theories of nucleation of society’s family structure, families losing its core functions, and the deprivation of personality (friends and family) in the context of the second demographic transition. In fact, the trending reluctance to having children, increases in cohabitation and divorces, men’s premature deaths resulting in widowhood are supplemented and accompanied by institutional factors that enhance a singular lifestyle, including various forms of personal isolation from social environment in post-industrial society. We examine the increasingly higher number of private households with single individuals ranging from young to old, the incidence of widowhood institution (effects of death rate risks on marriage and family), effects of labor, academic, survival, and consumer migration (both reversible and irreversible) on replacement levels as the major reasons of socio-demographic isolation. Psychological, demographic isolation of any given local communities favors the feel of solitude as the controller of communication and interaction intensity between individuals. In socio-economic terms, isolation of local communities is related to the factor of families’ living away from communication centers and real markets, to new Russian and global logistics, deprivation of traditional sources of income of households as specific forms of survival on the vast living space of Russian society.The article has been prepared with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research Grant 13-06-00008a “Creation and Enhancement of Quality of Life as a Priority for Socio-Economic Development of Russian Regions.