Gulag

Within the camp itself, few doubted who was responsible for this alleged success. Everyone firmly identified Frenkel with the commercialization of the camp, and many equally firmly hated him for it. At a rancorous meeting of the Solovetsky Communist Party in 1928—so rancorous that part of the meeting’s protocols were declared too secret to keep in the archive, and are unavailable—one camp commander, Comrade Yashenko, complained that SLON’s Economic-Commercial Department had accrued far too much influence: “everything lies in its competence.” He also attacked Frenkel, “a former prisoner who was freed after three years’ work because at that time there were not enough people [guards] to work at the camp.” So important had Frenkel become, complained Yashenko (whose language contains a strong whiff of anti-Semitism), that “when a rumor came around that he might leave, people were saying, “we can’t work without him.”

Yashenko hated Frenkel so much, he confessed, that he had contemplated murdering him. Others asked why Frenkel, a former prisoner, received priority service and cheap prices in the SLON shops—as if he were the owner. Still others said SLON had become so commercial that it had forgotten its other tasks: all re-educational work in the camp had been halted, and prisoners were being held to unfair work standards. When prisoners mutilated themselves to escape work norms, their cases were not investigated.⁷⁵

But just as SLON was to win the argument against the Karelian authorities, so Frenkel was to win the argument, within SLON—perhaps thanks to his contacts in Moscow—about what kind of camp Solovetsky should become, how prisoners were to work in it, and how they should be treated.

As I have already mentioned, Frenkel probably did not invent the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, by which prisoners were given food rations according to the amount of work they completed. Nevertheless, he did preside over the development and flowering of that system, which grew from a slapdash arrangement in which work was sometimes “paid” with food, into a very precise, regulated method of food distribution and prisoner organization.

In fact, Frenkel’s system was quite straightforward. He divided the prisoners of SLON into three groups according to their physical abilities: those deemed capable of heavy work, those capable of light work, and invalids. Each group received a different set of tasks, and a set of norms to fulfill. They were then fed accordingly—and the differences between their rations were quite drastic. One chart, drawn up between 1928 and 1932, allotted 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat to the first group; 500 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the second group; and 400 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the third group. The lowest category of worker, in other words, received half as much food as the highest.⁷⁶

In practice, the system sorted prisoners very rapidly into those who would survive, and those who would not. Fed relatively well, the strong prisoners grew stronger. Deprived of food, the weak prisoners grew weaker, and eventually became ill or died. The process was made more rapid and more extreme because work norms were often set very high—impossibly high for some prisoners, particularly for city people who had never worked digging peat or cutting trees. In 1928, the central authorities punished a group of camp guards because they had forced 128 people to work in the forest all night during winter, in order to fulfill the norm. A month later, 75 percent of the prisoners were still seriously ill with severe frostbite.⁷⁷

Under Frenkel, the nature of SLON’s work changed as well: he was not interested in fripperies such as fur farming, or the cultivation of exotic Arctic plants. Instead, he sent prisoners to build roads and cut trees, taking advantage of the free, unskilled labor that SLON possessed in abundance. ⁷⁸ The nature of the work quickly changed the nature of the camp, or rather of the camps, for SLON now began to expand well beyond the Solovetsky archipelago. Frenkel no longer cared, particularly, whether prisoners were kept in a prison setting, in prison buildings, behind barbed wire. He sent teams of convict laborers all over the Karelian Republic and the Arkhangelsk region of the Russian mainland, thousands of kilometers away from Solovetsky, to wherever they were most needed.⁷⁹

Like a management consultant taking over a failing company, Frenkel “rationalized” other aspects of camp life as well, slowly discarding everything that did not contribute to the camp’s economic productivity. All pretense of re-education was rapidly dropped. As Frenkel’s detractors complained, he had shut down the camp’s journals and newspapers, and halted the meetings of the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore. The Solovetsky museum and theater continued to exist, but solely in order to impress visiting bigwigs.