Estimating the average colony at 2,500 acres, we learn that at this time, without counting the other Soviet republics, there were already more than three hundred such Selkhozy alone, in other words the lowest grade and most privileged form of camp.
A stubborn legend persists in the Archipelago to the effect that “The camps were thought up by Frenkel.”
It seems to me that this fanciful idea, both unpatriotic and even insulting to the authorities, is quite sufficiently refuted by the preceding chapters. Even with the meager means at our disposal we succeeded, I hope, in showing the birth of camps for repression and labor back in 1918. Without any Frenkel whatsoever they arrived at the conclusion that prisoners must not waste their time in moral contemplation (“The purpose of Soviet corrective labor policy is not at all individual correction in its traditional meaning”) but must labor, and at the same time must be given very severe, almost unbearable work norms to achieve. Long before Frenkel they already used to say: “correction through labor” (and as far back as Eichmans they already understood this to mean “destruction through labor”).
Nonetheless, 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.
Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a Turkish Jew, was born in Constantinople. He graduated from the commercial institute there and took up the timber trade. He founded a firm in Mariupol and soon became a millionaire, “the timber king of the Black Sea.” He had his own steamers, and he even published his own newspaper in Mariupol called The Kopeck, whose function was to slander and persecute his competitors. During World War I Frenkel conducted some speculative arms deals through Gallipoli. In 1916, sensing the pending storm in Russia, he transferred his capital to Turkey even before the February Revolution, and in 1917 he himself went to Constantinople in pursuit of it.
And he could have gone on living the sweetly exciting life of a merchant, and he would have known no bitter grief and would not have turned into a legend. But some fateful force beckoned him to the Red power.
The rumor is unverified that in those years in Constantinople he became the resident Soviet intelligence agent (perhaps for ideological reasons, for it is otherwise difficult to see why he needed it). But it is a fact that in the NEP years he came to the U.S.S.R., and here, on secret instructions from the GPU, created, as if in his own name, a black market for the purchase of valuables and gold in return for Soviet paper rubles. Business operators and manipulators remembered him very well indeed from the old days; they trusted him—and the gold flowed into the coffers of the GPU. The purchasing operation came to an end, and, in gratitude, the GPU arrested him. Every wise man has enough of the simpleton in him.
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. In 1928 he was already in Kem. There he created a profitable auxiliary enterprise. He brought to Kem the leather which had been accumulated by the monks for decades and had been lying uselessly in the monastery warehouses. He recruited furriers and shoemakers from among the prisoners and supplied fashionable high-quality footwear and leather goods directly to a special shop on Kuznetsky Most in Moscow.
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.
And here he is himself (see here and here). It is evident from his face how he brimmed with a vicious human-hating animus. In the book on the Belomor Canal—the White Sea–Baltic Canal—wishing to laud Frenkel, one Soviet writer would soon describe him thus: “. . . the eyes of an interrogator and a prosecutor, the lips of a skeptic and a satirist . . . A man with enormous love of power and pride, for whom the main thing is unlimited power. If it is necessary for him to be feared, then let him be feared. He spoke harshly to the engineers, attempting to humiliate them.”
This last phrase seems to us a keystone—to both the character and biography of Frenkel.
By the start of Belomorstroi Frenkel had been freed.
The whole long history of the Archipelago, about which it has fallen to me to write this home-grown, homemade book, has, in the course of half a century, found in the Soviet Union almost no expression whatever in the printed word. In this a role was played by that same unfortunate happenstance by which camp watchtowers never got into scenes in films nor into landscapes painted by our artists.
But this was not true of the White Sea–Baltic Canal nor of the Moscow-Volga Canal. There is a book about each at our disposal, and we can write this chapter at least on the basis of documentary and responsible source material.
In diligently researched studies, before making use of a particular source, it is considered proper to characterize it. We shall do so.
Here before us lies the volume, in format almost equal to the Holy Gospels, with the portrait of the Demigod engraved in bas-relief on the cardboard covers. The book, entitled The White Sea–Baltic Stalin Canal, was issued by the State Publishing House in 1934 and dedicated by the authors to the Seventeenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and it was evidently published for the Congress. It is an extension of the Gorky project of “Histories of Factories and Plants.” Its editors were Maxim Gorky, Ida Leonidovna Averbakh, and S. G. Firin. This last name is little known in literary circles, and we shall explain why: Semyon Firin, notwithstanding his youth, was Deputy Chief of Gulag.
Nobody was more famous in Soviet literature at that time than Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh, brother of Ida Leonidovna. He was the director of the magazine Na literaturnom postu (“On Literary Guard”), he played a prominent role among those in charge of clubbing writers, and he was also Sverdlov’s nephew.
That charming Sverdlov family somehow remained in the shadows of revolutionary history, thanks to the early death o
f Yakov, who had managed, however, to take an active part in the executions, including that of the tsar and his family. Here we have his amiable nephews; there was also his son Andrew, quite a remarkable prosecutor and hangman, whose hobby was to pretend that he was a prisoner in order to denounce his fellow inmates. Sverdlov’s wife, Claudia Novgorodtseva, kept at home a fortune in diamonds and brilliants, the so-called “party fund”: a product of Bolshevik robberies during the revolution. The Politburo gang had put aside this reserve in case they lost power and had to flee the government buildings in a hurry.
The history of the above-mentioned book is as follows: On August 17, 1933, an outing of 120 writers took place aboard a steamer on the just completed canal. D. P. Vitkovsky, a prisoner who was a construction superintendent on the canal, witnessed the way these people in white suits crowded on the deck during the steamer’s passage through the locks, summoned prisoners from the area of the locks (where by this time they were more operational workers than construction workers), and, in the presence of the canal chiefs, asked a prisoner whether he loved his canal and his work, and did he think that he had managed to reform here, and did the chiefs take enough interest in the welfare of the prisoners? There were many questions, all in this general vein, and all asked from shipboard to shore in the presence of the chiefs and only while the steamer was passing through the locks. And after this outing eighty-four of these writers somehow or other managed nonetheless to worm their way out of participating in Gorky’s collective work (though perhaps they wrote their own admiring verses and essays), and the remaining thirty-six constituted an authors’ collective. By virtue of intensive work in the fall and winter of 1933 they created this unique book.
This book was published to last for all eternity, so that future generations would read it and be astounded. But by a fateful coincidence, most of the leaders depicted in its photographs and glorified in its text were exposed as enemies of the people within two or three years. Naturally all copies of the book were thereupon removed from libraries and destroyed. Private owners also destroyed it in 1937, not wishing to earn themselves a term for owning it. And that is why very few copies have remained intact to the present; and there is no hope that it may be reissued—and therefore all the heavier is the obligation to my fellow countrymen I feel on my shoulders not to permit the principal ideas and facts described in this book to perish.
Their general enthusiasm for the camp way of life led the authors of the collective work to this panegyric: “No matter to what corner of the Soviet Union fate should take us, even if it be the most remote wilderness and backwoods, the imprint of order . . . of precision and of conscientiousness . . . marks each OGPU organization.” And what OGPU organization exists in the Russian backwoods? Only the camps. The camp as a torch of progress—that is the level of this historical source of ours.
The editor in chief has something to say about this himself. Addressing the last rally of Belomorstroi officials on August 25, 1933, in the city of Dmitrov (they had already moved over to the Moscow-Volga Canal project), Gorky said: “Ever since 1928 I have watched how the GPU re-educates people.” (And what this means is that even before his visit to Solovki, even before that boy was shot, ever since, in fact, he first returned to the Soviet Union, he had been watching them.) And by then hardly able to restrain his tears, he addressed the Chekists present: “You devils in woolen overcoats, you yourselves don’t know what you have done.” And the authors note: the Chekists there merely smiled. (They knew what they had done. . . .) And Gorky noted the extraordinary modesty of the Chekists in the book itself. (This dislike of theirs for publicity was truly a touching trait.)
The collective authors do not simply keep silent about the deaths on the Belomor Canal during construction. They do not follow the cowardly recipe of half-truths. Instead, they write directly that no one died during construction. (Probably they calculated it this way: One hundred thousand started the canal and one hundred thousand finished. And that meant they were all alive. They simply forgot about the prisoner transports devoured by the construction in the course of two fierce winters. But this is already on the level of the cosine of the cheating engineering profession.)
The authors see nothing more inspiring than this camp labor. They find in forced labor one of the highest forms of blazing, conscientious creativity. Here is the theoretical basis of re-education: “Criminals are the result of the repulsive conditions of former times, and our country is beautiful, powerful and generous, and it needs to be beautified.” In their opinion all those driven to work on the canal would never have found their paths in life if the employers had not assigned them to unite the White Sea with the Baltic. Because, after all, “Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work than wood.” What language! What profundity! Who said that? Gorky said it in his book, disputing the “verbal trumpery of humanism.” And Zoshchenko, with profound insight, wrote: “Reforging—this is not the desire to serve out one’s term and be freed [So such suspicions did exist?—A.S.], but is in actual fact a restructuring of the consciousness and the pride of a builder.” What a student of man! Did you ever push a canal wheelbarrow—and on a penalty ration too?
We were in such a rush that trainloads of zeks kept on arriving and arriving at the canal site before there were any barracks there, or supplies, or tools, or a precise plan. And what was to be done?
And our authors rave. In the jolly tone of inveterate merrymakers they tell us: Women came in silk dresses and were handed a wheelbarrow on the spot! Almost choking with laughter, they tell us: From the Krasnovodsk camps in Central Asia, from Stalinabad, from Samarkand, they brought Turkmenians and Tadzhiks in their Bukhara robes and turbans—here to the Karelian subzero winter cold! Now that was something the Basmachi rebels never expected! The norm here was to break up two and a half cubic yards of granite and to move it a distance of a hundred yards in a wheelbarrow. And the snow kept falling and covering everything up, and the wheelbarrows somersaulted off the gangways into the snow.
The basic transportation at Belomorstroi consisted of grabarki, dray carts, with boxes mounted on them for carrying earth, as we learn from the book. And in addition there were also Belomor Fords! And here is what they were: heavy wooden platforms placed on four wooden logs (rollers), and two horses dragged this Ford along and carried stones away on it. And a wheelbarrow was handled by a team of two men—on slopes it was caught and pulled upward by a hookman—a worker using a hook. And how were trees to be felled if there were neither saws nor axes? Our inventiveness could find the answer to that one: ropes were tied around the trees, and they were rocked back and forth by brigades pulling in different directions—they rocked the trees out. Our inventiveness can solve any problem at all—and why? Because the canal was being built on the initiative and instructions of Comrade Stalin!
The very grandeur of this construction project consisted in the fact that it was carried out without contemporary technology and equipment and without any supplies from the nation as a whole! “These are not the tempos of noxious European-American capitalism, these are socialist tempos!” the authors brag.
No, it would be unjust, most unjust, unfair, to compare this most savage construction project of the twentieth century, this continental canal built “with wheelbarrow and pick,” with the Egyptian pyramids; after all, the pyramids were built with the contemporary technology!! And we used the technology of forty centuries earlier!
That’s what our gas execution van consisted of. We didn’t have any gas for the gas chamber.
And meanwhile it is incessantly dinned into our ears: “The canal is being built on the initiative and orders of Comrade Stalin!” “The radio in the barracks, on the canal site, by the stream, in a Karelian hut, on a truck, the radio which sleeps neither day nor night [just imagine it!], those innumerable black mouths, those black masks without eyes [imagery!] cry out incessantly: what do the Chekists of the whole country think about the canal project, what does the Party have to say about it?” A
nd you, too, better think the same! You, too, better think the same! “Nature we will teach—and freedom we will reach.” Hail socialist competition and the shock-worker movement. Competition between work brigades! Competition between phalanxes (from 250 to 300 persons)! Competition between labor collectives! Competition between locks! And then, finally, the Vokhrovtsy—the Militarized Camp Guards—entered into competition with the zeks. (And the obligation of the Vokhrovtsy? To guard you better.)
But the main reliance was, of course, on the socially friendly elements—in other words, the thieves! These concepts had already merged at the canal. Deeply touched, Gorky shouted to them from the rostrum: “After all, any capitalist steals more than all of you combined!” The thieves roared with approval, flattered.
The food norm was not provided, it was cold in the barracks, there was an infestation of lice, and people were ill—never mind, we’ll manage! An atmosphere of constant battle alert was created. All of a sudden a night of storm assault was proclaimed. It was decided: to double the work norms! So a universal day of records is proclaimed! A blow against tempo interrupters. Bonus pirozhki are distributed to a brigade. Why such haggard faces? The longed-for moment—but no gladness . . .
The wooden cranes
The earliest machinery
Women’s shock brigade
“Volunteers”
In January came the storm of the watershed! All the phalanxes, with their kitchens and property, were to be thrown into one single sector! There were not enough tents for everyone. They slept out on the snow—never mind. We’ll manage!
The Gulag Archipelago Page 25