Politics even interfered with saving the whales. While environmentalists often blame capitalism for environmental problems, it was communism that made whaling worse than it needed to be. After the fall of communism, historians found records that the Soviet Union was whaling at far higher numbers than they had admitted. It did so even though it was no longer profitable to do so, thanks to Soviet central planning. “Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers,” wrote a historian, “as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed
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Communism and whalers.
