Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [35]
Some of these changes were anticipated from the beginning, at the highest level, as the memo to Dzerzhinsky shows. Yet the techniques of the new system—the new methods of running camps, of organizing the prisoners and their work regime—were created on the island itself. Chaos may have ruled on Solovetsky in the mid-1920s, but out of that chaos the future Gulag system emerged.
At least a part of the explanation of how and why SLON changed revolves around the personality of Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a prisoner who rose through the ranks to become one of the most influential Solovetsky commanders. On the one hand, Solzhenitsyn claims in The Gulag Archipelago that Frenkel personally invented the plan to feed prisoners according to the quantity of their work. This deadly labor system, which destroyed weaker prisoners within a matter of weeks, would later cause uncounted numbers of deaths, as we shall see. On the other hand, a wide range of Russian and Western historians dispute Frenkel’s importance, and dismiss the many stories of Frenkel’s omnipotence as mere legend.50
In fact, Solzhenitsyn probably did give Frenkel too much credit: prisoners in earlier, pre-Solovetsky Bolshevik camps also mention being given extra food for extra work, and in any case the idea is in some sense obvious, and need not necessarily have been invented by one man.51 Nevertheless, recently opened archives, especially the regional archives of Karelia—the Soviet republic to which Solovetsky then belonged—do make his importance clear. Even if Frenkel did not invent every aspect of the system, he did find a way to turn a prison camp into an apparently profitable economic institution, and he did so at a time, in a place, and in a manner which may well have brought that idea to the attention of Stalin.
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