One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century

The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. The obvious answer Is wrong:

…the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Homans summarizes:

The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them.

Source: marginalrevolution.com