Gulag

But the confusion is not surprising either. Frenkel’s name appears in many of the memoirs written about the early days of the camp system, and from them it is clear that even in his own lifetime the man’s identity was wreathed in myth. Official photographs show a calculatingly sinister-looking man in a leather cap and a carefully trimmed mustache; one memoirist remembers him “dressed as a dandy.”⁵² One of his OGPU colleagues, who greatly admired him, marveled at his perfect memory, and his ability to do sums in his head: “he never wrote anything down on paper.”⁵³ Soviet propaganda later waxed eloquent about the “incredible capacity of his memory” as well, and spoke of his “excellent knowledge of timber and forest work in general,” his agricultural and engineering expertise, and his extensive general knowledge:

One day, for instance, he got into a conversation with two workers of the trust that manufactures soap, perfumes and cosmetics. He very soon reduced them to silence, as he displayed an enormous knowledge of perfumery, and even turned out to be an expert on the world market and the peculiarities of the olfactory likes and dislikes of the inhabitants of the Malay islands! ⁵⁴

Others hated and feared him. In a series of special meetings of the Solovetsky Party cell in 1928, Frenkel’s colleagues accused him of organizing his own network of spies, “so he knows everything about everybody earlier than everyone else.”⁵⁵ As early as 1927, stories about him had reached as far as Paris. In one of the first books about Solovetsky, a French anti-communist wrote of Frenkel that “thanks to his horribly insensitive initiatives, millions of unhappy people are overwhelmed by terrible labor, by atrocious suffering.”⁵⁶

His contemporaries were also unclear about his origins. Solzhenitsyn called him a “Turkish Jew born in Constantinople.”⁵⁷ Another described him as a “Hungarian manufacturer.”⁵⁸ Shiryaev claimed he came from Odessa, while others said he was from Austria, or from Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford factory in America. ⁵⁹ The story is somewhat clarified by his prisoner registration card, which states clearly that he was born in 1883 in Haifa, at a time when Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire. From there, he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austro-Hungary) to the Soviet Union, where he described himself as a “merchant.”⁶⁰ In 1923 the authorities arrested him for “illegally crossing borders,” which could mean that he was a merchant who indulged in a bit of smuggling, or simply that he was a merchant who had become too successful for the Soviet Union to tolerate. They sentenced him to ten years of hard labor on Solovetsky. ⁶¹

How, precisely, Naftaly Frenkel managed the metamorphosis from prisoner to camp commander also remains mysterious. Legend has it that upon arriving in the camp, he was so shocked by the poor organization, by the sheer waste of money and labor, that he sat down and wrote a very precise letter, describing exactly what was wrong with every single one of the camp’s industries, forestry, farming, and brick-making among them. He put the letter into the prisoners’ “complaints box,” where it attracted the attention of an administrator who sent it, as a curiosity, to Genrikh Yagoda, the Chekist who was then moving rapidly up the ranks of the secret police bureaucracy, and would eventually become its leader. Allegedly, Yagoda immediately demanded to meet the letter’s author. According to one contemporary (and Solzhenitsyn as well, who names no source), Frenkel himself claimed that he was at one point whisked off to Moscow, where he discussed his ideas with Stalin and Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s henchmen, as well.⁶² This is where the legend grows mistier: although records show that Frenkel did indeed meet Stalin in the 1930s, and although he was protected by Stalin during the Party purge years, no record has yet been found of any visit in the 1920s. This is not to say that it did not happen: the records may simply not have survived. ⁶³