From prisoner to directorate chief, and dead in his own bed
The formula Solzhenitsyn recorded as Frenkel's: "From a prisoner we must take everything in the first three months — after that we don't need him!"
A Jewish merchant born in Constantinople who became known as the 'Timber King of the Black Sea' in Odessa and ran a smuggling operation. Arrested in 1923 and sent to Solovki, he proposed tying food rations to labour output (the 'nourishment scale') and was elevated from prisoner to camp administrator within a year. He went on to lead construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, BAM, and the NKVD railway directorate, becoming the de facto architect of the Gulag forced-labour system. During the Battle of Stalingrad his crews built the Volga rockada railway in six months, a feat that earned him his third Order of Lenin. Retired as a lieutenant general and died in his Moscow bed.
Career Timeline
- 1924–1927Prisoner turned administrator at the Solovki camp
- 1931–1933Chief of works, White Sea-Baltic Canal
- 1933–1937Chief of BAMLag, the Baikal-Amur railway camp
- 1937–1947Chief of the Main Directorate of Railway Construction, NKVD and MVD
- 1947Retired with the rank of lieutenant general and a pension
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationThe administrator who tied rations to outputHe went from Solovki prisoner to administrator, ran the works at Belomor, and from 1937 headed the NKVD's entire railway construction directorate. He is associated with the system that tied a prisoner's ration to his output, which killed the weakest first.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarGulag railway construction chief, used prison labor to build strategic railways and roads
The Nourishment Scale: You Eat as You Work
The 'nourishment scale' (шкала питания) that Frenkel introduced at the Solovki camp was the pivotal mechanism that transformed the Gulag from a place of detention into a forced-labour economic engine. When Frenkel arrived at Solovki in 1924, the camp was ravaged by typhus and extreme inefficiency. His system divided prisoners into three categories (those capable of heavy labour, those capable of light labour, and invalids) and linked each category's work quotas to an exact scale of food rations.
Prisoners in the heavy-labour category received 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat per day; invalids received half of that. Those who failed to meet their quotas had their rations cut further, creating a descending spiral: malnutrition weakened the prisoner, output fell, rations were reduced again, and death followed within weeks. The system valued only 'labour capacity' (трудоспособность), so the original camp ideology of 're-education' was discarded wholesale. Camp newspapers were shuttered, the distinction between political and criminal prisoners was erased, and inmates were evaluated purely as units of labour.
By 1926 the system had turned the Solovki camp into a profit-making enterprise, and Frenkel was appointed head of its Economic-Commercial Department (ЭКО ЭКЧ). His department outbid civilian firms to win logging rights for 130,000 cubic metres of timber in Karelia, became a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and dispatched prisoners to road construction and logging sites on the mainland. Karelian local authorities protested that 'SLON is a kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands, and its basic goal is to make profits,' but the economic output generated by camp labour silenced such complaints.
Anne Applebaum writes: '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.' The model spread across the entire Soviet Gulag, and Frenkel himself applied its principles to the White Sea–Baltic Canal, the BAM, and Gulag railway construction at large, harnessing millions of prisoner-labourers as the engine of Soviet industrialisation.