| Summary: | The paper tries to document the life story of Naftalij Aronowich Frenkel (1883-1960) in the context of Soviet reality and demonstrate the ties of his life with the turning points the Soviet history, i.e. with the development of the Soviet penal system and basic phases of exploiting of the forced labour in the 1920-1940s. Frenkel´s life witnesses to complexity and curiosity. Before the First World War he was a businessman and smuggler in Odessa. He made profit from the revolutionary chaos and the NEP period in his extensive, mostly half-legal commerce activity in the Black Sea area. For the first time he became a client of the Soviet penal system in 1923 when he was arrested and sentenced to ten years imprisonment in Solovki, one of the infamous Soviet concentration camps. Here he started to collaborate with the watch service, was released prematurely and became on of the commandants of the camp´s administration. However, the post of the commandant of the works on first and one of the ill-famed "great constructions of socialism" - the White Sea-Baltic Channel in 1931-1934 - gave him a lot of reputation, so in 1934 he became the chief of the project of the Baykal-Amur railway. In 1940 he had been appointed a commandant of the NKVD´s Main Administration of the Railway Construction and was forced to retire in 1947. Hence in 1940-1947 he was the chief of all railway construction works in the USSR which were built by the prisoners. Reputedly Frenkel was the author of several projects and plans how to increase the productivity of the prisoners´ labour force resulting in deterioration of the situation of prisoners and often in their death. Moreover we should mention the fact that Frenkel almost miraculously escaped death in the years of reprisals, he survived all political cleansings in the 1920 s and 1930s, survived also the Second World War and came to grips with the state power only in the post-war years. The study has avoided the answer how much the Frenkel´s fate was unique and how much it represented one of the ...
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