Born in Haifa, Israel. Got sent to Soviet prison in 1923 for illegal smuggling. Rose from prisoner to prison commandant in surprisingly short time. Allegedly for writing a letter which was read by Stalin's Jewish lieutenant. Naftaly Frenkel quickly instituted "food for work" program thus transforming wasteful prisons into somewhat economically viable yet atrocious Gulag.

Work camps were a Marxist idea. Marx believed that work gave people meaning in life, so he believed prisoners should be subject to labor camps.

There was a game prison guards would play to see who could kill the prisoners with work, so they came up with schemes of work to get that job done. They made the prisoners go out in the snow and cold, without coats and sometimes without shoes, hike miles to the site, where they would be instructed to cut down trees with dull axes. If you made it back alive, you got a bowl of broth containing whatever scraps they could find, which was usually rotten potatoes and bones and unidentifiable bits. Can’t remember some of the details, but to hear the prisoners describe the food and how they rationed was enough to make you gag.

Frenkel wasn’t the architect of the GULAG system. He simply found a system to disperse food and other resources to prisoners based on productivity levels. The main founders outside of Stalin who commanded their formation would probably include Menzhinsky and Yagoda.

Work of Naftaly Frenkel

Under Frenkel the nature of the work undertaken by SLON prisoners changed from such trifles as fur farming and the cultivation of exotic Arctic plants to road building and tree felling: the change in the nature of the work changed the nature of the camp and the regimes which SLON developed beyond the Solovetsky archipelago such as in the Arkhangelsk region of the Russian mainland, thousand of kilometres away from Solovetsky, to which Frenkel despatched prison labourers.

Which one is Jewish?

J0000000z!

Slave Labor Entrepreneur

High-level approval of Frenkel's methods quickly led to the duplication of his system around the country and then Frenkel was named chief of construction on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, the first major project of the Stalin-era Gulag and an extremely high post for a former prisoner. Frenkel managed the daily work on the White Sea–Baltic Canal from November 1931 until its completion. He used the same methods as he had in SLON as well as many of the same prisoner-slaves who were brought to the canal works from the Solovetsky camp.

The canal was constructed by forced labor of gulag inmates. Beginning and ending with a labor force of 126,000, between 12,000 and 25,000 laborers died according to official records, while Anne Applebaum's estimate is 25,000 deaths.