Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [38]
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.
At the same time, random cruelty was becoming less common. In 1930, the Shanin Commission, a special delegation of the OGPU, arrived on the island to investigate rumors of ill-treatment of prisoners. Their reports confirmed the stories of excessive beating and torture on the island. In a stunning reversal of previous policy, the commission sentenced and executed nineteen of the OGPU perpetrators.80 Such behavior was now considered out of place in an institution that valued trudosposobnost—“work capability”—above all else.
Finally, under Frenkel’s leadership, the concept of “political prisoner” changed for good. In the autumn of 1925, the artificial lines that had been drawn between those with criminal