 Most of the whaling in the pre-war days took place around Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea.Before WW2, the annual catch of whales from the Aleut fleet rarely exceeded 1,000; however, such kills did indeed need to meet annual production targets, and a failure to meet the goals for the Second Five-Year Plan led to Captain A. Dudnik (who ironically had been awarded the Order of Lenin only a year before for his performance as captain) being sacked from his position in 1937 and arrested on charges of being a Japanese agent trying to sell the fleet to Japan, despite there being no evidence of this.After the war, an expansion of the North Pacific whaling fleet was undertaken with the purchase of several American-built minesweepers from the war, which were converted into catchers and worked out of several of the Kuril Island, utilizing old whaling stations built by the Japanese during the period of Japanese rule over the islands.