Like many great institutions, the Antarctic Treaty system has its own creation myth, according to which it was brought into being by the Antarctic science programme of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). As myths are prone to do, this one combines both an important truth and a good deal of misinformation. After fifty years in which it has shamelessly flattered the earth scientists, who are understandably rather fond of it, and undervalued the many non-scientists who advocated the internationalisation of Antarctica from 1910 onwards, it is time to lay it to rest. But before summarising the intermeshing contributions of private citizens, diplomats and other officials, and scientists, we should first take note of a different factor altogether, political geography.
On 7 December 1945 a captured German whaling factory, Wikinger, was allocated to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement between that country, the United States and the United Kingdom. In the first section, this article presents the first detailed account of how Wikinger was seized by the Royal Navy and eventually transferred to Soviet ownership. The second section illustrates the hostile attitudes of western governments towards the Slava whaling flotilla during the cold war, and the degree to which their suspicions were focused on the work of scientists assigned to the flotilla. The next four sections trace the fluctuating perceptions and presentations, during the Tsarist and early Soviet periods, of the Imperial Russian Navy's Antarctic expedition of 1819–1821, the problems in respect of Antarctica which confronted Soviet diplomacy and propaganda in the 1940s, and the new story, about Russians having been the first people to discover Antarctica, which was developed in order to address them. It is then possible, in the seventh section, to explain the political utility of the Slava flotilla in the early 1950s. An eighth section sketches the divergent cultural fortunes of the Bellingshausen expedition and the Slava flotilla after the period under consideration.This article discusses the use of whaling and history in support of Soviet Antarctic policy between the end of World War 2 and the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958. But the Slava whaling flotilla did not just play a part in the historicisation of Soviet Antarctic policy. It was itself a historically constituted object, fraught with meanings on both sides of the cold war. For that reason the opportunity is taken to give a more detailed account of the flotilla's origins than has been available hitherto. The author notes that two contributors to this journal have preceded him in some of these matters (Armstrong 1950, 1971; Gan 2009). He ventures to suggest, however, that the connections between whaling, historiography and public information management in Soviet Antarctic policy have not been fully demonstrated before this.
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