Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [37]
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.
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