 Despite strong efforts by the Soviet government to provide adequate funding for this fleet to continue whaling, the international moratorium on whaling issued by the IWC in 1982, combined with the high cost of maintaining this fleet, caused all Soviet whaling to end after the 1986–87 whaling season; the USSR abolished whaling on 22 May of that year.Currently whaling in Russia is practiced solely by the Chukotka peoples of the Russian Far East, who take 136 gray whales yearly on an annual quota provided by the IWC, and also take an occasional bowhead whale as well.In 1993 Alexey Yablokov, a former scientist on board the Soviet whaling fleets and at the time an advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin on ecology and health, revealed that the USSR had committed mass falsifications of its whaling data during the period 1948–1973 and had killed nearly 180,000 whales that they did not report, mostly because such catches comprised protected species or ignored quotas or regulations with regards to legal size, females with calves, or catching outside legal hunting areas.