Operation Beluga

Operation Beluga — or how a Soviet ice breaker played music to thousands of ice-trapped whales to save them from starving

Sometimes, you just need an icebreaker and some classical music to make your day better.

The Soviet Union (USSR) is a thing most people today know only from memory or history books. And many parts of its history are unsavory, to say the least. But Operation Beluga (‘Belukha’ in Russian) isn’t one of those. Operation Beluga was not your typical Cold War covert ops. It involved sending an ice-breaker and blasting classical music at full volume to save a pack of thousands of whales that were trapped by ice in the Chukchi Peninsula.

In 1959, the Finish company Wärtsilä delivered the ice-breaker Moskva to the USSR. The contract for this ship was signed three years prior, and as part of its stipulations, the ship was equipped with one of the most powerful diesel-electric engines at the time. It would go on to help hundreds of ships navigate the iced-covered Northern Sea Route, which spans from Murmansk to Vladivostok, cutting the travel time down to an average of only ten days — which was quite fast for the day. Moskva’s powerful engines allowed it to break through thicker ice than its peers at the time, which effectively extended the shipping season possible along this route. Crowned with shipping glory, the Moskva was later stationed in Vladivostok and sent to escort ships along the eastern stretches of the Northern Sea Route.

But as fate would have it, this would not be the last time we heard of the Moskva’s adventures — ‘we’ here meaning us humans, as well as beluga whales. Every good heroic story needs someone in need, and around December 1984, thousands of such someones were found. Along the frigid landscape of the Chukchi Peninsula (this is the bit of Russia that’s across the pond from Alaska) lives the Chukchi or Chukchee, an indigenous people closely related to the original inhabitants of the Americas. Their traditions and lifestyle hadn’t changed much until 1920 when the Soviet government organized state-run schools and industries in the area.

Even after this point the Chukchi relied heavily on local wildlife for food and provided raw materials for some of those newly-minted industries in the form of fishing, hunting of marine mammals, or reindeer herding. Subsistence hunting (for the purpose of obtaining food) is still practiced by the Chukchi to this day, although it’s greatly reduced in scope. In late December 1984, a Chukchi hunter or hunting party — it’s not known exactly how many people were present at that point — happened upon the motherlode of prey: roughly 3,000 beluga whales trapped in the frozen waters of the peninsula’s Senyavin Strait. The hunter realized they were trapped because the whales (a prime local source of food) were flocking around small pools of open water dotting the strait, desperate to catch a breath of air.


https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/history-and-humanities/history/operation-beluga-whale-rescue/