 The falsified data was somewhat corrected in the late 1990s, but not until 2008, shortly after the publication of former whale biologist Alfred Berzin’s memoir The Truth about Soviet Whaling, was the full, corrected data for both the Antarctic and North Pacific regions revealed (the North Pacific data was almost entirely unknown until the 2000s).According to Charles Homans, a writer for "Pacific Standard" magazine, the Soviet whaling program represented “the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century.”

The first records of aboriginal whaling in the Russian Far East region of Chukotka date back at least 4,000 years, when Eskimo hunters from Alaska crossed the Bering Strait region to the Chukotka region of far northeastern Asia.The prime target of the early whalers was primarily the bowhead whale, because it provided spoil-resistant meat in huge quantities, enough to keep an entire village fed over the course of a long, harsh winter.