Naftaly Frenkel - Kommersant

Kommersant

Before his early release was granted, Frenkel had organised and then managed the Ekonomicheskaya kommercheskaya chast, the Economic-Commercial Department of SLON, through which he tried to make the Solovetsky camps not merely self-supporting in accordance with the concentration camp decrees but profitable with the result that they began to take work away from other state undertakings: an element of competition remained in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and Frenkel took advantage of this. With Frenkel running its Economic-Commercial Department, SLON had already outbid a civilian forestry undertaking and had won the right to fell 130,000 cubic metres of wood in Karelia. SLON had also become a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and was tendering for the construction of a road from Kem to the far northern city of Ukhta.

From the outset the Karelian local authorities had been unnerved by all of this activity, not least as they had initially opposed the creation of the camp altogether. The authorities' complaints grew louder as time went by: at a meeting to discuss SLON's expansion, local authorities complained about the unfair access which SLON had to cheap labour which would put ordinary forresters out of work; at a subsequent meeting of the Karelian Council of People's Commissars (being the government of the Karelian Republic) in February 1926 SLON was attacked for overcharging for the Kem to Ukhta road with the following summing up by an indignant Comrade Yuzhnev:

"It has become clear SLON is a kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands, and that its basic goal is to make profits."

The authorities also complained about SLON's special links with the OGPU which allowed SLON to disregard local laws and avoid paying money into the regional budget. Within the camp itself, few doubted that Frenkel was the architect of this alleged success: he was firmly identified with the commercialisation of the camp and hated for it; at an acrimonious meeting of the Solovetsky Communist Party in 1928 - so acrimonious that part of the meeting's conclusions were deemed too secret to be kept in the archive - one camp commander Yashenko complained about the extent of the Economic-Commercial Department's influence and went on to attack Frenkel, admitting that he hated Frenkel so much that he had contemplated murdering him:

"a former prisoner who was freed after three years' work because at that time there were not enough people to work at the camp when a rumour came round that he might leave, people were saying, 'We can't work without him.'"

Others asked why Frenkel received priority service and cheap prices at SLON shops (one of which had been opened in Kem as if he were the owner; yet more queried why SLON had become so commercialised that it neglected its other tasks: all re-educational work in the camp had ceased; prisoners were being held to unfair work standards; and when prisoners mutilated themselves in protest at the work norms their cases were not investigated.

Anne Applebaum wrote:

"The argument over the profitability, efficiency and fairness of prison labour was to continue for the next quarter-century in the mid 1920s the Karelian local authorities were not winning although as late as 1929, the camp was in fact running a deficit of 1.6 million roubles - quite possibly because OGPU stole from the till - Solovetsky's supposed economic success was still trumpeted far and wide."

The perception that the Solovetsky camps under Frenkel were profitable was shared by Stalin: Stalin's preference for prison labour over ordinary labor can be found in Stalin's continuing interest throughout his life in the intimate details of camp administration. High-level approval of Frenkel's methods quickly led to the duplication of his system around the country and then Frenkel was named chief of construction on the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the first major project of the Stalin-era Gulag and an extremely high post for a former prisoner. Frenkel managed the daily work on the White Sea-Baltic Canal from November 1931 until its completion.