T
O HAVE THE once-in-a-lifetime chance
to see rare Black Sea dolphins, people
in the landlocked town of Kaluga, a
hundred miles from Moscow, don’t
have to leave their city. In the parking
lot of the Torgoviy Kvartal shoppingmall, next to a hardware store, is a white inflat-
able pop-up aquarium: the Moscow Traveling
Dolphinarium. It looks like a children’s bouncy
castle that’s been drained of its color.
Inside the puffy dome, parents buy their kidsdolphin-shaped trinkets: fuzzy dolls and Mylar
balloons, paper dolphin hats, and drinks in plas-
tic dolphin tumblers. Families take their seats
around a small pool. The venue is so intimate
that even the cheapest seats, at nine dollars
apiece, are within splashing distance.
“My kids are jumping for joy,” says a woman
named Anya, motioning toward her two giddy
boys, bouncing in their seats.
In the middle of the jubilant atmosphere, in
water that seems much too shallow and much too
murky, two dolphins swim listlessly in circles.
Russia is one of only a few countries (Indo-
nesia is another) where traveling oceanariums
exist. Dolphins and beluga whales, which need
to be immersed in water to stay alive, are put
in tubs on trucks and carted from city to city in
a loop that usually ends when they die. These
traveling shows are aboveboard: Russia has no
laws that regulate how marine mammals should
be treated in captivity.
The shows are the domestic arm of a brisk Rus-
sian global trade in dolphins and small whales.66 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC