The Transformation of the Gulag

This piece was published as a guest article on 'Explaining History': http://www.explaininghistory.com/guest-articles/

‘We have been happily borne – or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way – down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labour but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.’

Thus did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn open his book, ‘The Gulag Archipelago.’ The first camp of this system, termed by him as a ‘mother tumour’ exuding ‘more metastases from itself’ was Solovki, known as SLON, situated on the Solovetsky islands. The transformation of this prison laid the foundations of the infamous Soviet labour camp organism: it was the prototype for the future brutality. Although not the only place where dissidents could be incarcerated in the early 1920s, it was, however, the guinea-pig of the Soviet secret police: they developed methods there which led to slave-labour becoming a profitable asset to the regime.

Clustered in the White Sea, the islands themselves are remote and isolated, although they have been the backdrop to a compelling historical vignette since the early 15^th century. Half a millennium before the Soviet Union rose to power, two Russian Orthodox monks stumbled upon the islands and remarked upon the absence of predators there, leading them to assume that the archipelago was sacred. Inspired by this blessed place, they established a monastery there. The Solovetsky Monastery became an economic and political hub in the following centuries: loyal devotees of the tsar, the monks aided him in exiling church heretics and opponents of autocracy, including Alexander Pushkin’s uncle, who had supported the Decembrist uprising. The monastery, supplied with a strong garrison and protected by an imposing fortress, was also on the border of the Russian Empire. As a result, it was crucial in repelling attacks from the Swedes, the Danes, and even the British during the Crimean War.

The incarcerations of the monastic era were eerily prophetic of what was to come. In the uncertain early days of the Soviet regime, White Army officers, aristocrats and other objectors were imprisoned at SLON from 1923 onwards. They shared the island not only with the monks and the guards, but also with a select group of socialist ‘politicals,’ who were granted privileges such as the right to newspapers and books, and freedom from work. However, the initial disparity between the conditions of the two groups was not to endure.

Arbitrary, vicious cruelty was commonplace. As documented by many survivors, the expression ‘there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority’ would become a familiar dictum. Alongside more conventional examples of torture, such as the threat of and subsequent carrying out of executions and beatings, several methods seem to be more unique to their setting: being sentenced ‘to the mosquitoes’ entailed the prisoner being tied to a post without any clothes on, and then left to be overrun by mosquitoes; rumours suggest that men were also killed by being thrown down a flight of 365 steep wooden steps. Disease and illness were rife, particularly typhus, which claimed around 1,500 lives in the winter of 1925-26. A former White Army soldier, Kiselev-Gromov, recounts in his memoirs that prisoners on one of the smaller islands, Anzer, were so desperate to escape the hard labour that they cut off their own hands and feet.

The camp was characterised by unpredictability in its early years, but this disorder was the catalyst for the birth of the Gulag system. It was as though the camp was unsure of its potential; as though ‘the child had not yet guessed its character.’ It was not clear whether the system was supposed to indoctrinate the prisoners, to punish them, or to generate earnings for the regime. However, by the middle of the decade, the Communists became acutely aware that SLON was failing in one of its crucial intended purposes: to become self-sufficient and profitable. Until as late as 1929, official figures state that in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union ‘only 34 – 41% of all prisoners were engaged in work.’ In the first years of the camps, the country’s economy did not yet revolve around the Gulag, and the Five-Year plan, which demanded vast amounts of coal, oil, gas and wood, had not yet materialised. As Solzhenitsyn declared, ‘slave-driving the workers and allotting back-breaking work norms took the form of periodic outbursts, transitory anger; they had not yet become a vice-like system.’ When this shift occurred, punishments such as the pouring of water over prisoners in freezing temperatures, or allowing them to be consumed by mosquitoes were made redundant, as the new system venerated ‘trudosposobnost’, or the ‘capacity to work’, above all else.

Any pretence of rehabilitating the prisoners was dropped. Counter-revolutionaries and those with criminal convictions were amalgamated into one mass labour force, and the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore was closed, as were the camp’s newspapers and journals. Bizarrely, the only elements of the past system to remain were the Solovetsky theatre and museum, maintained to impress esteemed visitors such as the writer, Maxim Gorky. These drastic changes were partly the product of wider forces and structures, such as the pressing need for income and resources from the camps, and the futility of the chaos, which conspired to provoke perhaps an inevitable development in the camp’s functioning. On the other hand, agents of historical change cannot be overlooked either, and one individual’s remarkable role in its alteration is particularly significant.

Naftaly Frenkel remains an elusive and enigmatic character years after his death. According to Solzhenitsyn, he was born in Constantinople in 1883, the son of Turkish Jews. This is confirmed by his prisoner registration card, although claims of his purported origins ranged from being a manufacturer from Hungary to a worker in the Ford factory in America. Having travelled to the Soviet Union as a merchant, he was arrested in 1923 for ‘illegally crossing borders’ and was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour on Solovetsky. It is this inauspicious entry to SLON that makes the remainder of his tale so extraordinary: in a relatively short space of time, he was elevated from a prisoner to the camp’s commander, and was subsequently instrumental in its transformation.

It is widely believed that he was appalled at the economic mismanagement and disorder upon his arrival at the camp, and promptly submitted a detailed analysis to the prisoners’ complaints box. From here, the letter found its way into the hands of an administrator, who, believing it to be of interest to those above him in the hierarchy, forwarded it to Genrikh Yagoda, a Chekist bureaucrat who would ultimately lead the secret police. It is believed that Yagoda was so intrigued by this letter that he summoned Frenkel to meet with him in person. At this point, the story becomes further shrouded in mystery, for Frenkel himself claims to have been taken to Moscow, where he met with Stalin. However, the records seem to disprove this, as there is no mention of a meeting with the Party leader in the 1920s, although Frenkel did convene with Stalin in the 1930s, as well as benefiting from his protection during the purge years.

Frenkel was first the organiser and then the leader of the Economic-Commercial Department of SLON, and advanced its capabilities so greatly that the camps were seen not only to become self-supporting, but even profitable, as they began to divert business from others. They were, however, only seen to be self-supporting and profitable; in reality, SLON’s revenue in 1929 was falling short by 1.6 million roubles. Nevertheless, in 1925, for example, SLON outbid a local civilian forestry company for the right to deforest wood in Karelia, a development which created disquiet amongst the authorities. SLON was condemned as a ‘kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands,’ whose ‘basic goal is to make profits.’

‘Every genuine prophet,’ pronounced Solzhenitsyn, ‘arrives when he is most acutely needed.’ The writer credited Frenkel as being ‘the nerve of the Archipelago’, as well as the innovator of the infamous system whereby prisoners were fed according to the amount of labour they performed. Frenkel implemented this simple process rigorously, creating three categories: those who carried out heavy work, those who carried out lighter work, and invalids. Each of these groups was instructed to meet certain standards and to carry out tasks specific to their capabilities, before being fed with rations commensurate with their individual performances. Anne Applebaum elaborates on this method: ‘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.’ Evidence indicates that this system of food proportionate to labour was employed before Frenkel’s rule, but, as Applebaum considers: ‘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.’

A historian should not be a ‘hanging judge.’ On the contrary, those who study the past should detach themselves in order not to pass moral sentencing on those before them: the standards of the present should not be applied to the past. However, one can only wonder at Frenkel’s character, at his ability to distance himself callously from those with whom he was once imprisoned, and to treat them merely as a means to a profit. Solzhenitsyn paid no such heed to reservation, describing Frenkel’s face as brimming ‘with a vicious, human-hating animus,’ and ending his discussion of him by exclaiming that ‘I have the feeling he really hated his country!’

Upon his release from SLON, Raymond Duguet declared that ‘thanks to [Frenkel’s] horribly insensitive initiatives, millions of unhappy people are overwhelmed by terrible labour, by atrocious suffering.’ As noted above, Frenkel was saved from the Great Terror by personal favour with Stalin, despite the deaths of nearly all his former colleagues. Prior to this, when the Solovetsky archipelago became just another organ of Belomor-Baltiiskii Corrective Labour Camp, or ‘Belbeltlag,’ he was transferred to oversee the daily labour on the White Sea Canal from November 1931 until the end of its construction. He was awarded the Order of Lenin three times, and was released from his duties in 1947, before his death in 1960.

In the late 1930s, Soviet authorities still proclaimed Solovki to be economically unsustainable, and shut it down. More than 1,000 of its prisoners then vanished; it was not until 1995 that researchers finally unearthed documents indicating that the prisoners had been moved to the mainland in a clandestine operation, before being systematically executed and dumped in mass graves in a remote forest. Its legacy as the alma mater of the Gulag is notorious: like a shadow creeping across the ground, the practices brought to fruition in Solovki began to insinuate themselves into the mentality of the other labour camps across the nation. Solzhenitsyn’s words are chillingly accurate: ‘Then in in the thirties, a new camp era began, when Solovki even ceased to be Solovki – and became a mere run-of-the-mill Corrective Labour Camp. And the black star of the ideologist of that new era, Naftaly Frenkel, rose in the heavens, while his formula became the supreme law of the Archipelago: “We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months – after that, we don’t need him anymore.”’

Sources:

Anne Applebaum – ‘Gulag’

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – ‘Gulag Archipelago’