Naftaly Frenkel - Commandant

Commandant

Frenkel emerged as one of the most influential Solovetsky commanders. His reputation is, however, controversial: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claims that Frenkel personally invented the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, also known as the nourishment scale, which destroyed weaker prisoners in weeks and would later cause uncounted casualties; on the other hand, a wide range of Russian and Western historians dismiss the many stories of Frenkel's omnipotence as legend. Anne Applebaum states,

"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."

Frenkel presided over the development of the nourishment scale, or the "you-eat-as-you-work system", from a careless arrangement by which workers were sometimes 'paid' with food into a very precise method of food distribution and prisoner organisation: he divided the SLON prisoners into (1) those deemed capable of heavy work, (2) those capable of light work and (3) invalids; each group received a different set of tasks and quotas to meet and were fed accordingly, with drastic differences between the prisoners' rations and their fate. Those deemed capable of heavy work were allotted 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat; invalids received half those amounts. In practice the system divided prisoners very rapidly into those who would survive and those who would perish.

Under Frenkel the nature of the work undertaken by SLON prisoners changed from such trifles as fur farming and the cultivation of exotic Arctic plants to road building and tree felling: the change in the nature of the work changed the nature of the camp and the regimes which SLON developed beyond the Solovetsky archipelago such as in the Arkhangelsk region of the Russian mainland, thousand of kilometres away from Solovetsky, to which Frenkel despatched prison labourers.

Frenkel ensured that everything that did not contribute to the camp's economic productivity was discarded: all pretence of re-education was dropped; the camp's journals and newspapers were closed; the distinction between those with criminal convictions and those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes was dropped as both groups were set to work alongside one another simply as labourers; and the meetings of the camp's Solovetsky Society for Local Lore were stopped although, to impress visiting dignitaries, the Solovetsky museum and theatre continued to exist. At the same time random cruelty inflicted by the captors on the captives decreased: such behaviour was now considered inappropriate in an institution which valued trudosposobnost - 'the capacity to work' - above all.

Some remembered him as a dandy who had a good head for figures and, according to Maxim Gorky (who visited and approved Solovetsky Islands in June 1929) and others, a perfect memory.

Others hated and feared him: in 1927 the year of his early release, in one of the first foreign publications about the Solovetsky Islands, it was written by the French anti-communist Raymond Duguet that,

"thanks to his horribly insensitive initiatives, millions of unhappy people are overwhelmed by terrible labour, by atrocious suffering."

He was accused in 1928 by his comrades in the Solovetsky Islands Communist Party cell of organising a personal network of spies "so he knows everything about everybody earlier than everyone else."