Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the Soviet example, I will contribute to the hypothesis by showcasing the transition to a new fish resource management regime in the first post-war decades, enabled by the new producing and transporting capacities due to fossil energies and amplified by the context of the Cold war.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the archival and printed sources, this paper brings to discussion the specificity of fish resource management in URSS in the 1945-1975 period. While the Soviet case follows the global tendencies, peculiarities are observed in the chronology, official discourse, political economy and the consumer patterns.

While the ichthyologists had been warning since 1920s that the populations of valuable commercial fish species of the Caspian Sea could be depleted, their exploitation was only banned after these fish became extinct in the wild. Technical solutions intended to mitigate this problem (artificial hatcheries, passages across the hydroelectric dams etc.) were both ineffective and implemented with considerable delay. It wasn't until the early 1960s that the exploitation of depleted species was banned or restricted in the Volga-Caspian basin.

This extinction in an inland sea has not shaken the certainty of the Soviet industrialists that the sea fish was inexhaustible. In 1960s, the USSR invests in large fish processing vessels to capture fish and whales in the global ocean, especially in the waters of newly independent states.

The freshwater river fish followed a different pattern. As its share in total catches declined, largely due to water pollution, the Ministry of Fisheries massively invests in intensive fish farming in artificial reservoirs. However, the species cultivated are not the same as those that inhabited the rivers.