Not long before the holiday, the new boss of the division demanded that all who wanted to go to church should present him with a declaration. Almost no one did so at first—people were afraid of the consequences. But just before Easter, a huge number made their declarations . . . Along the road to Onufrievskaya church, the cemetery chapel, marched a great procession, people walked in several rows. Of course we didn’t all fit into the chapel. People stood outside, and those who came late couldn’t even hear the service. 34
Even the May 1924 edition of Solovetskoi Lageram, another prison journal, editorialized cautiously but positively on the subject of Easter, “an ancient holiday celebrating the coming of spring,” which “under a Red banner, can still be observed.”35
Along with religious holidays, a small handful of the original monks also continued to survive, to the amazement of many prisoners, well into the latter half of the decade. They functioned as “monk-instructors,” supposedly transmitting to the prisoners the skills needed to run their formerly successful farming and fishing enterprises—Solovetsky herring had once been a feature of the Czar’s table—as well as the secrets of the complex canal system which they had used to link the island churches for centuries. The monks were joined, over the years, by dozens more Soviet priests and members of the Church hierarchy, both Orthodox and Catholic, who had opposed the confiscation of Church wealth, or who had violated the “decree on separation of Church and state.” The clergy, somewhat like the socialist politicals, were allowed to live separately, in one particular barrack of the kremlin, and were also allowed to hold services in the small chapel of the former cemetery right up until 1930–31—a luxury forbidden to other prisoners except on special occasions.
These “privileges” appear to have caused some resentment, and there were occasional tensions between the clergy and the ordinary prisoners. One female prisoner, removed to a special maternal colony on the island of Anzer after giving birth, remembered that the nuns on the island “held themselves away from us unbelievers . . . they were angry, they didn’t like the children, and they hated us.” Other clergy, as many memoirs repeat, took quite the opposite attitude, devoting themselves to active evangelism and social work, among criminals as well as other politicals.36
For those who had it, money could also buy relief from work in the forests, and insurance against torture and death. Solovetsky had a restaurant which could (illegally) serve prisoners. Those who could afford the necessary bribes could import their own food as well.37 The camp administration at one point even set up “shops” on the island, where prisoners could purchase items of clothing, at prices twice as high as in normal Soviet shops.38 One person who allegedly bought his way out of suffering was “Count Violaro,” a swashbuckling figure whose name appears (with a wide variety of spellings) in several memoirs. The Count, usually described as the “Mexican ambassador to Egypt,” had made the mistake of going to visit his wife’s family in Soviet Georgia just after the Revolution. Both he and his wife were arrested, and deported to the far north. Although they were at first imprisoned—and the Countess was put to work doing laundry—camp legend recalls that for the sum of 5,000 rubles, the Count bought the right for both of them to live in a separate house, with a horse and a servant.39 Others recall the presence of a rich Indian merchant from Bombay, who later left with the help of the British consulate in Moscow. His memoirs were later published in the émigré press.40
So striking were these and other examples of wealthy prisoners living well—and leaving early—that in 1926 a group of less privileged prisoners wrote a letter to the Presidium of the Communist Party Central Committee, denouncing the “chaos and violence which rule the Solovetsky concentration camp.” Using phrases designed to appeal to the communist leadership, they complained that “those with money can fix themselves up with the money, thereby placing all of the hardship upon the shoulders of the workers and peasants who have no money.” While the rich bought themselves easier jobs, they wrote, “the poor work 14–16 hours a day.”41 As it turned out, they were not the only ones feeling dissatisfied with the haphazard practices of the Solovetsky camp commanders.
If random violence and unfair treatment bothered the prisoners, those higher up the Soviet hierarchy were disturbed by somewhat different issues. By the middle of the decade, it had become clear that the camps of SLON, like the rest of the “ordinary” prison system, had failed to meet the most important of their stated goals: to become self-supporting. 42 In fact, not only were Soviet concentration camps, both “special” and “ordinary,” failing to make a profit, their commanders were also constantly demanding more money.
In this, Solovetsky resembled the other Soviet prisons of the time. On the island, the extremes of cruelty and comfort were probably starker than elsewhere, due to the special nature of the prisoners and the guards, but the same irregularities would have characterized other camps and prisons across the Soviet Union at this time as well. In theory, the ordinary prison system also consisted of work “colonies” linked to farms, workshops, and factories, and their economic activity too was badly organized and unprofitable. 43 A 1928 inspector’s report on one such camp, in rural Karelia—fifty-nine prisoners, plus seven horses, two pigs, and twenty-one cows—complained that only half the prisoners had blankets; that horses were in poor condition (and one had been sold to a Gypsy, without authorization); that other horses were regularly used to run errands for the camp guards; that when the camp’s prisoner blacksmith was freed, he walked away with all of his tools; that none of the camp’s buildings had heating or even insulation, with the exception of the chief administrator’s residence. Worse, that same chief administrator spent three or four days a week outside the camp; frequently released prisoners early without permission; “stubbornly refused” to teach agronomy to the prisoners; and openly stated his belief in the “uselessness” of prisoner re-education. Some of the prisoners’ wives lived at the camp; other wives came for long visits and disappeared into the woods with their husbands. The guards indulged in “petty quarrels and drunkenness.”44 No wonder higher authorities took the local Karelian government to task in 1929 for “failing to understand the importance of forced labor as a measure of social defense and its advantageousness to the state and society.”45
Such camps were clearly unprofitable, and had been from the start, as the records show. As early as July 1919, the leaders of the Cheka in Gomel, Belorussia, sent a letter to Dzerzhinsky demanding an urgent 500,000-ruble subsidy: construction of their local camp had ground to a halt for lack of funding.46 Over the subsequent decade, the different ministries and institutions that vied for the right to control prison camps continued to squabble over funding as well as power. Periodic amnesties were declared to relieve the prison system, culminating in a major amnesty in the autumn of 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. More than 50,000 people were released from the ordinary prison system, largely because of the need to relieve overcrowding and save money.47
By November 10, 1925, the need to “make better use of prisoners” was recognized at the highest level. At that time, G. L. Pyatakov, a Bolshevik who would hold a series of influential economic positions, wrote to Dzerzhinsky. “I have come to the conclusion,” his letter explained, “that in order to create the most elementary conditions for work culture, compulsory labor settlements will have to be established in certain regions. Such settlements could relieve overcrowding in places of incarceration. The GPU should be instructed to explore these issues.” He then listed four regions which needed urgent development, all of which—the island of Sakhalin in the far east, the land around the mouth of the Yenisei River in the far north, the Kazakh steppe, and the area around the Siberian city of Nerchinsk— later became camps. Dzerzhinsky approved the memo, and sent it on to two other colleagues to develop further.48
At first, nothing happened, perhaps because Dzerzhinsky himself died soon after. Nevertheless, the memo proved a harbinger of change. Up until the middle of the 192
0s, the Soviet leadership had not been clear whether its prisons and camps were primarily intended to re-educate prisoners, to punish prisoners, or to make profits for the regime. Now, the many institutions with a stake in the fate of the concentration camps were slowly reaching a consensus: the prisons were to be self-sufficient. By the end of the decade, the messy world of the post-revolutionary Soviet prisons would be transformed, and a new system would emerge from the chaos. Solovetsky would become not just an organized economic concern but also a model camp, an example to be cloned many thousands of times, all across the USSR.
Even if no one was aware of it at the time, the importance of Solovetsky would become clear enough in retrospect. Later, reporting back to a Solovetsky Party meeting in 1930, a local commander named Comrade Uspensky would declare that “the experience of the work of the Solovetsky camp persuaded the Party and the government that the system of prisons across the Soviet Union must be exchanged for a system of corrective-labor camps.”49
Some of these changes were anticipated from the beginning, at the highest level, as the memo to Dzerzhinsky shows. Yet the techniques of the new system—the new methods of running camps, of organizing the prisoners and their work regime—were created on the island itself. Chaos may have ruled on Solovetsky in the mid-1920s, but out of that chaos the future Gulag system emerged.
At least a part of the explanation of how and why SLON changed revolves around the personality of Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a prisoner who rose through the ranks to become one of the most influential Solovetsky commanders. On the one hand, Solzhenitsyn claims in The Gulag Archipelago that Frenkel personally invented the plan to feed prisoners according to the quantity of their work. This deadly labor system, which destroyed weaker prisoners within a matter of weeks, would later cause uncounted numbers of deaths, as we shall see. On the other hand, a wide range of Russian and Western historians dispute Frenkel’s importance, and dismiss the many stories of Frenkel’s omnipotence as mere legend.50
In fact, Solzhenitsyn probably did give Frenkel too much credit: prisoners in earlier, pre-Solovetsky Bolshevik camps also mention being given extra food for extra work, and in any case the idea is in some sense obvious, and need not necessarily have been invented by one man.51 Nevertheless, recently opened archives, especially the regional archives of Karelia—the Soviet republic to which Solovetsky then belonged—do make his importance clear. 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.
But the confusion is not surprising either. Frenkel’s name appears in many of the memoirs written about the early days of the camp system, and from them it is clear that even in his own lifetime the man’s identity was wreathed in myth. Official photographs show a calculatingly sinister-looking man in a leather cap and a carefully trimmed mustache; one memoirist remembers him “dressed as a dandy.”52 One of his OGPU colleagues, who greatly admired him, marveled at his perfect memory, and his ability to do sums in his head: “he never wrote anything down on paper.”53 Soviet propaganda later waxed eloquent about the “incredible capacity of his memory” as well, and spoke of his “excellent knowledge of timber and forest work in general,” his agricultural and engineering expertise, and his extensive general knowledge:
One day, for instance, he got into a conversation with two workers of the trust that manufactures soap, perfumes and cosmetics. He very soon reduced them to silence, as he displayed an enormous knowledge of perfumery, and even turned out to be an expert on the world market and the peculiarities of the olfactory likes and dislikes of the inhabitants of the Malay islands! 54
Others hated and feared him. In a series of special meetings of the Solovetsky Party cell in 1928, Frenkel’s colleagues accused him of organizing his own network of spies, “so he knows everything about everybody earlier than everyone else.”55 As early as 1927, stories about him had reached as far as Paris. In one of the first books about Solovetsky, a French anti-communist wrote of Frenkel that “thanks to his horribly insensitive initiatives, millions of unhappy people are overwhelmed by terrible labor, by atrocious suffering.”56
His contemporaries were also unclear about his origins. Solzhenitsyn called him a “Turkish Jew born in Constantinople.”57 Another described him as a “Hungarian manufacturer.”58 Shiryaev claimed he came from Odessa, while others said he was from Austria, or from Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford factory in America. 59 The story is somewhat clarified by his prisoner registration card, which states clearly that he was born in 1883 in Haifa, at a time when Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire. From there, he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austro-Hungary) to the Soviet Union, where he described himself as a “merchant.”60 In 1923 the authorities arrested him for “illegally crossing borders,” which could mean that he was a merchant who indulged in a bit of smuggling, or simply that he was a merchant who had become too successful for the Soviet Union to tolerate. They sentenced him to ten years of hard labor on Solovetsky. 61
How, precisely, Naftaly Frenkel managed the metamorphosis from prisoner to camp commander also remains mysterious. Legend has it that upon arriving in the camp, he was so shocked by the poor organization, by the sheer waste of money and labor, that he sat down and wrote a very precise letter, describing exactly what was wrong with every single one of the camp’s industries, forestry, farming, and brick-making among them. He put the letter into the prisoners’ “complaints box,” where it attracted the attention of an administrator who sent it, as a curiosity, to Genrikh Yagoda, the Chekist who was then moving rapidly up the ranks of the secret police bureaucracy, and would eventually become its leader. Allegedly, Yagoda immediately demanded to meet the letter’s author. According to one contemporary (and Solzhenitsyn as well, who names no source), Frenkel himself claimed that he was at one point whisked off to Moscow, where he discussed his ideas with Stalin and Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s henchmen, as well.62 This is where the legend grows mistier: although records show that Frenkel did indeed meet Stalin in the 1930s, and although he was protected by Stalin during the Party purge years, no record has yet been found of any visit in the 1920s. This is not to say that it did not happen: the records may simply not have survived. 63
Some circumstantial evidence backs up these stories. Naftaly Frenkel was, for example, promoted from prisoner to guard within a surprisingly short period, even by the chaotic standards of SLON. By November 1924, when Frenkel had been resident in the camp for less than a year, the SLON administration had already applied for his early release. The request was finally granted in 1927. In the meantime, the camp administration would regularly submit statements to the OGPU describing Frenkel in glowing terms: “in camp he conducted himself as such an exceptionally talented worker that he has won the confidence of the administration of SLON, and is treated with authority . . . he is one of the rare, responsible workers.”64
We also know that Frenkel organized, and then ran, the Ekonomicheskayakommercheskaya chast, the Economic-Commercial Department of SLON, and in that capacity attempted to make the Solovetsky camps not merely self-supporting, as the decrees on concentration camps required, but actually profitable—to the point where they began to take jobs away from other enterprises. Although these were state enterprises, not private enterprises, elements of competition still remained in the Soviet economy in the 1920s, and Frenkel took advantage of them. By September 1925, with Frenkel running its economic department, SLON had already won the right to cut 130,000 cubic meters of wood in Karelia, outbidding a civilian forestry enterprise in the process. SLON had also become a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and was bidding for the right to build a road from Kem to the far northern city of Ukhta.65
From the beginning the Karelian authorities were unnerved by all of this activity, particularly since they had initially opposed the construct
ion of the camp altogether.66 Later, their complaints grew louder. At a meeting called to discuss SLON’s expansion, local authorities complained that the camp had unfair access to cheap labor, and would therefore put ordinary foresters out of work. Still later, the mood of the meetings shifted, and those in attendance raised more serious objections. At a meeting of the Karelian Council of People’s Commissars—the government of the Karelian Republic—in February 1926, several local leaders attacked SLON for overcharging them, and for demanding too much money for the building of the road from Kem to Ukhta. “It has become clear,” summed up Comrade Yuzhnev angrily, that “SLON is a kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands, and that its basic goal is to make profits.”67
The Karelian trading enterprise, a state company, was also up in arms against SLON’s decision to open its own shop in Kem. The state enterprise could not afford to open such a business, but SLON, which could demand longer hours from its prisoner employees, and could pay them far less— nothing, in fact—managed to do so.68 Worse, the authorities complained, SLON’s special links with the OGPU allowed it to disregard local laws and avoid paying money into the regional budget.69
The argument over the profitability, efficiency, and fairness of prison labor was to continue for the next quarter century (and will be discussed more thoroughly later in this book). But in the mid-1920s, the Karelian local authorities were not winning it. In his 1925 reports on the economic condition of the Solovetsky camp, Comrade Fyodor Eichmanns—at this point Nogtev’s deputy, although he would later run the camp—bragged about SLON’s economic achievements, claiming that its brick factory, formerly in a “pathetic state,” was now thriving, its woodcutting enterprises were overfulfilling that year’s plan, its power plant had been completed, and fish production had doubled.70 Versions of these reports later appeared both in Solovetsky’s journals and elsewhere in the Soviet Union for popular consumption. 71 They contained careful calculations: one report estimated the average daily cost of rations at 29 kopeks, the annual cost of clothing at 34 rubles and 57 kopeks. The total expenditure on each prisoner, including medical care and transport, was said to be 211 rubles and 67 kopeks per year.72 Although as late as 1929, the camp was in fact running a deficit of 1.6 million rubles73—quite possibly because the OGPU stole from the till— Solovetsky’s supposed economic success was still trumpeted far and wide.
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