Gulag

Some circumstantial evidence backs up these stories. Naftaly Frenkel was, for example, promoted from prisoner to guard within a surprisingly short period, even by the chaotic standards of SLON. By November 1924, when Frenkel had been resident in the camp for less than a year, the SLON administration had already applied for his early release. The request was finally granted in 1927. In the meantime, the camp administration would regularly submit statements to the OGPU describing Frenkel in glowing terms: “in camp he conducted himself as such an exceptionally talented worker that he has won the confidence of the administration of SLON, and is treated with authority . . . he is one of the rare, responsible workers.”⁶⁴

We also know that Frenkel organized, and then ran, the Ekonomicheskayakommercheskaya chast, the Economic-Commercial Department of SLON, and in that capacity attempted to make the Solovetsky camps not merely self-supporting, as the decrees on concentration camps required, but actually profitable—to the point where they began to take jobs away from other enterprises. Although these were state enterprises, not private enterprises, elements of competition still remained in the Soviet economy in the 1920s, and Frenkel took advantage of them. By September 1925, with Frenkel running its economic department, SLON had already won the right to cut 130,000 cubic meters of wood in Karelia, outbidding a civilian forestry enterprise in the process. SLON had also become a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and was bidding for the right to build a road from Kem to the far northern city of Ukhta.⁶⁵

From the beginning the Karelian authorities were unnerved by all of this activity, particularly since they had initially opposed the construction of the camp altogether.⁶⁶ Later, their complaints grew louder. At a meeting called to discuss SLON’s expansion, local authorities complained that the camp had unfair access to cheap labor, and would therefore put ordinary foresters out of work. Still later, the mood of the meetings shifted, and those in attendance raised more serious objections. At a meeting of the Karelian Council of People’s Commissars—the government of the Karelian Republic—in February 1926, several local leaders attacked SLON for overcharging them, and for demanding too much money for the building of the road from Kem to Ukhta. “It has become clear,” summed up Comrade Yuzhnev angrily, that “SLON is a kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands, and that its basic goal is to make profits.”⁶⁷

The Karelian trading enterprise, a state company, was also up in arms against SLON’s decision to open its own shop in Kem. The state enterprise could not afford to open such a business, but SLON, which could demand longer hours from its prisoner employees, and could pay them far less— nothing, in fact—managed to do so.⁶⁸ Worse, the authorities complained, SLON’s special links with the OGPU allowed it to disregard local laws and avoid paying money into the regional budget.⁶⁹

The argument over the profitability, efficiency, and fairness of prison labor was to continue for the next quarter century (and will be discussed more thoroughly later in this book). But in the mid-1920s, the Karelian local authorities were not winning it. In his 1925 reports on the economic condition of the Solovetsky camp, Comrade Fyodor Eichmanns—at this point Nogtev’s deputy, although he would later run the camp—bragged about SLON’s economic achievements, claiming that its brick factory, formerly in a “pathetic state,” was now thriving, its woodcutting enterprises were overfulfilling that year’s plan, its power plant had been completed, and fish production had doubled.⁷⁰ Versions of these reports later appeared both in Solovetsky’s journals and elsewhere in the Soviet Union for popular consumption. ⁷¹ They contained careful calculations: one report estimated the average daily cost of rations at 29 kopeks, the annual cost of clothing at 34 rubles and 57 kopeks. The total expenditure on each prisoner, including medical care and transport, was said to be 211 rubles and 67 kopeks per year.⁷² Although as late as 1929, the camp was in fact running a deficit of 1.6 million rubles⁷³—quite possibly because the OGPU stole from the till— Solovetsky’s supposed economic success was still trumpeted far and wide.

That success soon became the central argument for the restructuring of the entire Soviet prison system. If it was to be achieved at the cost of worse rations and poorer living conditions for prisoners, no one much cared.⁷⁴ If it was to be achieved at the price of poor relations with local authorities, that bothered no one either.