Ryan Jones has written an overall thrilling, contemporarily focused, provocative, and deeply scholarly researched volume on Soviet maritime history. The contribution of this book to both genres of global history and the history of Russian and Soviet foreign affairs is significant enough to comfortably transcend recent years’ debates about a divide between the discovery of social and industrial histories of smaller eastern European socialist states across the global south, rather than the old global political history of the Soviet Union.

Red Leviathan focuses on both the ecology and the economy of the Soviet system by telling the history of its whaling industry and the enterprises and innovations it engaged from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Soviet Union. The book consists of twelve thematic and chronological chapters. It is well written from profound archival evidence emanating from the state archives of Great Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as regional files including Kaliningrad and Vladivostok.

The narrative is communicated in emotive but clear language and the volume reaches its stated goal of revealing the exact compound causes of the near destruction of whales. The book is made persuasive also by rich use of illustrative images and maps often missing from Sovietology today.

Jones accounts the building of the key city of Vladivostok as a multicultural trade, military, and governance microcosmos that since its founding in 1860 “welcomed capitalists from around the globe in search of business opportunities offered by this meeting of Europe and Asia” (p. 25). Keys to early whaling history are found also in Norwegian technological innovations of “a deck-mounted harpoon gun armed with an exploding grenade replacing the old hand thrown iron” (p. 28) and the Norwegians bringing the first floating whaling factory to the Antarctic in 1920 (p. 50). The Russian American joint- Stock Company with government ties created to run the Alaskan colony in 1825 (p. 12) is an important antecedent, while the Russian-Finnish Whaling Company out of Turku “was to be the closest the Russians would come to a successful whaling industry prior to the Bolshevik Revolution” (p. 16). Later on, differences for the industry were made from changes in Soviet leadership as “[Nikita] Khrushchev reoriented the Soviet Union away from military confrontation with the West and toward economic competition” (p. 75). His 1956 Five-Year Plan stated the intention to stage a breathtaking expansion with seven new whaling fleets—four in the Antarctic and three in the Pacific – making the Soviet Union the world’s premier whaling nation (p. 90). In 1959 the Soviet fleets thereafter killed 11,778 whales in Area V alone, and another 1,167 in nearby Area VI, which the International Whaling Commission had designated a whale sanctuary and the year’s annual plan was fulfilled by 153 percent in a massive slaughter of whales not seen since the 1920s (p. 91).

Business historians could have used more details about the measured economic profits of the rise and fall of the industry in addition to whale deaths. At the center of this volume are questions of animal welfare with a clear indication that they should be investigated globally. The perspective is one future generations of decision makers will inhabit. The book also considers the dangers of state enterprise led ecocide and its benefits of super production. The analysis of the pursuit of state vs private enterprise here should not be missed.

Jones’ narrative connects coasts of the Soviet Union by way of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, Odessa on the Black Sea and Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea while drawing a map of interconnections of an industry and the Soviet empire. The volume reveals key relationships between living organisms, their physical environment, and the overall politics of global oceans over a hundred years. In Red Leviathan, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Russian, and American enterprises and innovations confront each other while also responding to the life cycle of the Soviet experiment. The Soviet Union in this history consists of the relationships with foreign industrialists and international governing bodies including the IWC. The global world here is not governed by superpower polls to an overwhelming extent. Instead, Jones offers an explanation of the Soviet Kollektive – the basic unit of Soviet political and economic life – as having close to a capitalist economic rational, predicament, and social construct (p. 103).

In many ways Red Leviathan transcends what has been written about the Soviet Union before and is a good example of a global history. As such it must bring warmth to the hearts of the pioneers of this profoundly diverse emerging field of history including Jeremy Adelman (Cambridge University), Sven Beckert (Harvard University), Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin), Akita Shigeru (Osaka University), and Holger Weiss (Åbo Akademie) who have endeavored to bring about the discipline.

Red Leviathan discusses human and animal emotions asking questions about the feelings of the whales being hunted and of their whalers. It’s not clear whether Jones considers whales to possess equal value to humans, but he accounts the living beings’ inherent value constantly. Jones recounts his personal interactions with whalers from the Soviet Union and their memories of these huge mammals, as well as his own interactions with whales while swimming with them in the South Pacific (p. 132) Yet, the volume is remarkable for its lack of condemnation of the whalers who participated in the termed genocide of the whales. The emotive language works as it is embedded in sound scientific research.

Jones makes the topic of Soviet history more interesting to current students. In an era where Russia is conducting war on Ukraine and is defining how historians of Russia can access archives of the Soviet Union, this book becomes even more important. Ukraine and Ukrainians were an inalienable and distinct part of both the Soviet Union and whaling with significant impact, talent, and a voice of their own in this volume. Jones shows his readers among other things how distinctive a part of the Soviet Union Ukrainians in Soviet times were, and his contribution is laudable. (1000 words)