 The USSR, which was at the forefront of opposition, agreed only to (after final quotas for each species would be established) have observers come from communist countries, presumably as an attempt to ensure illegal catches could continue as observers from communist countries could easily be manipulated through economic threats to bow to the whalers’ wishes or face possible intervention from the Soviet Union.By the time the IOS was effective in 1973, so few whales remained that even if it had never been implemented, it would have saved few cetaceans as little would have been left to kill in the first place.Yuri Mikhalev and Dmitriy Tormosov (another one of the scientists who witnessed the destruction of the whale stocks) told Phil Clapham and Yulia Ivashchenko decades after the USSR collapsed that senior personnel in the Ministry of Fisheries were well aware of the destruction of whale stocks by the whaling industry, yet stood by and defended the illegal catches as necessary for the Five-Year Plans and did nothing to stop them.