It struck me how sick it is that a non-Russian was the "nerve" of the gulag archipelago. Most Bolsheviks were also not Russian to begin with as well.
>Naftaly Frenkel's origins are uncertain. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called him a "Turkish Jew born in Constantinople".[1] Another described him as a "Hungarian manufacturer".[2] Yet another claimed that Frenkel came from Odessa.[3] Yet more said he was from Austria, or Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford motor plant in the USA. His prisoner registration card states clearly that he was born in Haifa, then part of the Ottoman Empire. From Haifa he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austria-Hungary) to the Soviet Union where he described himself as a 'merchant'.[3][4]
From The Gulag Archipelago:
>Frenkel really did become the nerve of the Archipelago. He was one of those successful men of action whom History hungrily awaits and summons to itself. It would seem that there had been camps even before Frenkel, but they had not taken on that final and unified form which savors of perfection. Every genuine prophet arrives when he is most acutely needed. Frenkel arrived in the Archipelago just at the beginning of the metastases.
He was arrested and somehow weaseled out of it:
>However, inexhaustible and holding no grudges, Frenkel, while still in the Lubyanka or on the way to Solovki, sent some sort of declaration to the top. Finding himself in a trap, he evidently decided to make a business analysis of this life too. He was brought to Solovki in 1927, but was immediately separated from the prisoner transport, settled into a stone booth outside the bounds of the monastery itself, provided with an orderly to look after him, and permitted free movement about the island. We have already recalled that he became the Chief of the Economic Section (the privilege of a free man) and expressed his famous thesis about using up the prisoner in the first three months.
Privileged enough for a direct meeting with Stalin too. As for the White Sea–Baltic Canal Construction Project; it's one of the greatest shit shows in history. I can't imagine how many dead bodies it produced for nothing at all.
>One day in 1929 an airplane flew from Moscow to get Frenkel and brought him to an appointment with Stalin. The Best Friend of prisoners (and the Best Friend of the Chekists) talked interestedly with Frenkel for three hours. The stenographic report of this conversation will never become public. There simply was none. But it is clear that Frenkel unfolded before the Father of the Peoples dazzling prospects for constructing socialism through the use of prisoner labor. Much of the geography of the Archipelago being described in the aftermath by my obedient pen, he sketched in bold strokes on the map of the Soviet Union to the accompaniment of the puffing of his interlocutor’s pipe. It was Frenkel in person, and in this very conversation, who proposed renouncing the reactionary system of equality in feeding prisoners and who outlined a unified system of redistribution of the meager food supplies for the whole Archipelago—a scale for bread rations and a scale for hot-food rations which was adapted by him from the Eskimos: a fish on a pole held out in front of the running dog team. In addition, he proposed time off sentence and release ahead of term as rewards for good work (but in this respect he was hardly original—for in 1890, in Sakhalin hard labor, Chekhov discovered both the one and the other). In all probability the first experimental field was set up here too—the great Belomorstroi, the White Sea–Baltic Canal Construction Project, to which the enterprising foreign-exchange and gold speculator would soon be appointed—not as chief of construction nor as chief of a camp either, but to the post especially dreamed up for him of “works chief”—the chief overseer of the labor battle.
It struck me how sick it is that a non-Russian was the "nerve" of the gulag archipelago. Most Bolsheviks were also not Russian to begin with as well.
[Naftaly Frenkel](http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Naftaly_Frenkel)
>>Naftaly Frenkel's origins are uncertain. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called him a "Turkish Jew born in Constantinople".[1] Another described him as a "Hungarian manufacturer".[2] Yet another claimed that Frenkel came from Odessa.[3] Yet more said he was from Austria, or Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford motor plant in the USA. His prisoner registration card states clearly that he was born in Haifa, then part of the Ottoman Empire. From Haifa he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austria-Hungary) to the Soviet Union where he described himself as a 'merchant'.[3][4]
From The Gulag Archipelago:
>>Frenkel really did become the nerve of the Archipelago. He was one of those successful men of action whom History hungrily awaits and summons to itself. It would seem that there had been camps even before Frenkel, but they had not taken on that final and unified form which savors of perfection. Every genuine prophet arrives when he is most acutely needed. Frenkel arrived in the Archipelago just at the beginning of the metastases.
He was arrested and somehow weaseled out of it:
>>However, inexhaustible and holding no grudges, Frenkel, while still in the Lubyanka or on the way to Solovki, sent some sort of declaration to the top. Finding himself in a trap, he evidently decided to make a business analysis of this life too. He was brought to Solovki in 1927, but was immediately separated from the prisoner transport, settled into a stone booth outside the bounds of the monastery itself, provided with an orderly to look after him, and permitted free movement about the island. We have already recalled that he became the Chief of the Economic Section (the privilege of a free man) and expressed his famous thesis about using up the prisoner in the first three months.
Privileged enough for a direct meeting with Stalin too. As for the White Sea–Baltic Canal Construction Project; it's one of the greatest shit shows in history. I can't imagine how many dead bodies it produced for nothing at all.
>>One day in 1929 an airplane flew from Moscow to get Frenkel and brought him to an appointment with Stalin. The Best Friend of prisoners (and the Best Friend of the Chekists) talked interestedly with Frenkel for three hours. The stenographic report of this conversation will never become public. There simply was none. But it is clear that Frenkel unfolded before the Father of the Peoples dazzling prospects for constructing socialism through the use of prisoner labor. Much of the geography of the Archipelago being described in the aftermath by my obedient pen, he sketched in bold strokes on the map of the Soviet Union to the accompaniment of the puffing of his interlocutor’s pipe. It was Frenkel in person, and in this very conversation, who proposed renouncing the reactionary system of equality in feeding prisoners and who outlined a unified system of redistribution of the meager food supplies for the whole Archipelago—a scale for bread rations and a scale for hot-food rations which was adapted by him from the Eskimos: a fish on a pole held out in front of the running dog team. In addition, he proposed time off sentence and release ahead of term as rewards for good work (but in this respect he was hardly original—for in 1890, in Sakhalin hard labor, Chekhov discovered both the one and the other). In all probability the first experimental field was set up here too—the great Belomorstroi, the White Sea–Baltic Canal Construction Project, to which the enterprising foreign-exchange and gold speculator would soon be appointed—not as chief of construction nor as chief of a camp either, but to the post especially dreamed up for him of “works chief”—the chief overseer of the labor battle.
(post is archived)