Cold war whaling: Bellingshausen and theSlavaflotilla

Abstract

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.

DVUKRATNYE IZYSKANIYA V YUZHNOM LYEDOVITOM OKEANE I PLAVANIYE VOKRUG SVETA V PRODOLZHENIYE 1819, 1820, I 1821 GODOV [TWO SEASONS OF EXPLORATION IN THE ANTARCTIC OCEAN AND A CIRCUMNAVIGATION, DURING THE YEARS 1819, 1820, AND 1821]. Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen. Editors G.V. Karpyuk, and E.I. Kharitonova. 2008. Moscow: Drofa, 991 p, illustrated, hard cover. ISBN 978-5-358-06889-6. 500 RUB.

“…Take the question of whether Two seasons uses Julian or naval (noon to noon) dates. Having recently downloaded the on line copy of the 1831 edition now generously provided by the Russian State Library, the present reviewer is less convinced than he was, alas, a few months ago by Belov's argument on this (Belov 1963;Bulkeley 2010). But that is one of several matters that any comprehensive new edition would need to address.…”

“…To expect a Russian scholar to admit to any connection between Cook's earlier and similar misunderstanding of glaciation and that experienced by his admirer Bellingshausen would be asking too much this side of Utopia. But the present reviewer must deplore the veil that Koryakin draws over most Soviet Antarctic historiography before 1949, including Shokalskii, Vvedenskii and the first edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia (Bulkeley 2010).…”

Estonia and Antarctica

“…Other problems were more topical. But the démarche of the Americans in the question of the Antarctic in August 1948 changed the situation (Bulkeley 2011). Bellingshausen's expedition was drawn into the political stage of the cold war (see Bulkeley 2011).…”

“…But the démarche of the Americans in the question of the Antarctic in August 1948 changed the situation (Bulkeley 2011). Bellingshausen's expedition was drawn into the political stage of the cold war (see Bulkeley 2011). The fact that the Russian expedition had taken place became a very important argument for the Soviet government, meaning that the country could not be ignored when solving the problem of the status of Antarctica.…”

MATERIK L’DA: PERVAYA RUSSKAYA ANTARKTICHESKAYA EKSPEDITSIYA I YEYË OTRAZHENIYE V SOVETSKOI ISTORIOGRAFII (1920-e – 1940-e GODY) [Continent of Ice: the first Russian Antarctic Expedition and its footprint in Soviet historiography from the 1920s to the 1940s]. Aleksandr Ovlashchenko. 2013. Saarbrücken: Palmarium, 307 p, softcover. ISBN 978-3-659-98556-0. £85.

“…It is certainly true that, on a close reading, treatments of the expedition by Berg and others during the Cold War suggest that some of them toed the priority line more out of political necessity than from conviction (Bulkeley 2011: 145–146). Where Ovlashchenko finds basely motivated disloyalty to the Motherland, however, others may detect the presence of universal intellectual values in and around the Soviet natural sciences that is associated, in the history of ideas, with the name of Vladimir Vernadskii (Bailes 1986), and that persisted after the Great Patriotic War in the work of leading figures such as Aleksandr Nesmeyanov and Vladimir Belousov.…”