Find Christ, my Frens.
(media.scored.co)
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The 'Save The Whales' thing is both funnier/more sinister in retrospect. Because it ended up being Soviet whaling that was depressing the population the whole time.
Whaling was seen as a glamorous profession to the early soviet union in the 30s, so their command economy built a whaling fleet and assigned people to work in it. But much like how we still have flocks of mohair goats in our military strategic reserve, despite having switch away from mohair uniforms during the Spanish American War, they kept whaling decades after there ceased to be any demand for whale carcasses in the Soviet Union. The did this even after signing treaties to stop and telling their own public they would stop.
It wasn't until the whole Soviet Union fell in the early 90s that they stopped paying for maintenance on the whaling ships and paying the whalers.
After that the whale stocks started to recover.
I remember a docco about a really remote Siberian port. They'd stopped whaling by then, but an older fellow explained the mounds of whalebones on the shore. They were required to bring in 20 whales per boat each season. The demand had ended long ago, but if they failed they faced prison :/
It used to be an important resource though.