Naftaly Frenkel
Encyclopedia
Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel ; (1883 Haifa
– 1960 Moscow
) was a Soviet
citizen and Chekist (member of the Soviet secret police). Frenkel is best known for his role in the organisation of work in the Gulag
, starting from the forced labor camp of the Solovetsky Islands
, which is recognised as one of the earliest sites of the Gulag.
called him a "Turkish Jew born in Constantinople". Another described him as a "Hungarian manufacturer". Yet another claimed that Frenkel came from Odessa
. Yet more said he was from Austria, or Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford motor plant in the USA. His prisoner registration card states clearly that he was born in Haifa
, then part of the Ottoman Empire
. From Haifa
he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austria-Hungary
) to the Soviet Union where he described himself as a 'merchant'.
. The Solovetsky Islands
, in the White Sea
, came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag
". Together the islands were known as 'northern camps of special purpose': Severnye lagerya osobogo naznacheniya or SLON. In Russian
slon means 'elephant'. "The name was to become a source of humour, of irony and of menace."
the secret police bureaucrat who eventually became leader of the Cheka
; it is said that Yagoda
immediately demanded to meet with the letter's author. Frenkel himself claimed that he was whisked off to Moscow
to discuss his ideas with Joseph Stalin
and Lazar Kaganovich
, one of Stalin's henchmen. Again, the truth is unclear: records show that Frenkel met Stalin in the 1930s and was protected by Stalin during the Party
purge years; however, no record extant has been found of any meeting in the 1920s.
What is clear is that Frenkel was promoted from prisoner to guard in a surprisingly short period, even by the chaotic standards of SLON: by November 1924, having been resident at the camp for less than a year, Frenkel's early release was requested by the SLON administration; the request was finally granted in 1927. Meanwhile, the camp administration submitted regular reports to the OGPU about Frenkel in glowing terms:
claims that Frenkel personally invented the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, also known as the nourishment scale, which destroyed weaker prisoners in weeks and would later cause uncounted casualties; on the other hand, a wide range of Russian and Western historians dismiss the many stories of Frenkel's omnipotence as legend. Anne Applebaum
states,
Frenkel presided over the development of the nourishment scale, or the "you-eat-as-you-work system", from a careless arrangement by which workers were sometimes 'paid' with food into a very precise method of food distribution and prisoner organisation: he divided the SLON prisoners into (1) those deemed capable of heavy work, (2) those capable of light work and (3) invalids; each group received a different set of tasks and quotas to meet and were fed accordingly, with drastic differences between the prisoners' rations and their fate. Those deemed capable of heavy work were allotted 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat; invalids received half those amounts. In practice the system divided prisoners very rapidly into those who would survive and those who would perish.
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.
Frenkel ensured that everything that did not contribute to the camp's economic productivity was discarded: all pretence of re-education was dropped; the camp's journals and newspapers were closed; the distinction between those with criminal convictions and those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes was dropped as both groups were set to work alongside one another simply as labourers; and the meetings of the camp's Solovetsky Society for Local Lore were stopped although, to impress visiting dignitaries, the Solovetsky museum and theatre continued to exist. At the same time random cruelty inflicted by the captors on the captives decreased: such behaviour was now considered inappropriate in an institution which valued trudosposobnost - 'the capacity to work' - above all.
Some remembered him as a dandy who had a good head for figures and, according to Maxim Gorky
(who visited and approved Solovetsky Islands
in June 1929) and others, a perfect memory.
Others hated and feared him: in 1927 the year of his early release, in one of the first foreign publications about the Solovetsky Islands, it was written by the French
anti-communist Raymond Duguet that,
. SLON had also become a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and was tendering for the construction of a road from Kem to the far northern city of Ukhta
.
From the outset the Karelian local authorities had been unnerved by all of this activity, not least as they had initially opposed the creation of the camp altogether. The authorities' complaints grew louder as time went by: at a meeting to discuss SLON's expansion, local authorities complained about the unfair access which SLON had to cheap labour which would put ordinary forresters out of work; at a subsequent meeting of the Karelian Council of People's Commissars (being the government of the Karelian Republic) in February 1926 SLON was attacked for overcharging for the Kem to Ukhta road with the following summing up by an indignant Comrade Yuzhnev:
The authorities also complained about SLON's special links with the OGPU which allowed SLON to disregard local laws and avoid paying money into the regional budget. Within the camp itself, few doubted that Frenkel was the architect of this alleged success: he was firmly identified with the commercialisation of the camp and hated for it; at an acrimonious meeting of the Solovetsky Communist Party in 1928 - so acrimonious that part of the meeting's conclusions were deemed too secret to be kept in the archive - one camp commander Yashenko complained about the extent of the Economic-Commercial Department's influence and went on to attack Frenkel, admitting that he hated Frenkel so much that he had contemplated murdering him:
Others asked why Frenkel received priority service and cheap prices at SLON shops (one of which had been opened in Kem as if he were the owner; yet more queried why SLON had become so commercialised that it neglected its other tasks: all re-educational work in the camp had ceased; prisoners were being held to unfair work standards; and when prisoners mutilated themselves in protest at the work norms their cases were not investigated.
Anne Applebaum
wrote:
The perception that the Solovetsky camps under Frenkel were profitable was shared by Stalin: Stalin's preference for prison labour over ordinary labor can be found in Stalin's continuing interest throughout his life in the intimate details of camp administration. 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.
and its aftermath: it is noteworthy that despite the deaths of nearly all of his former colleagues, Frenkel managed to remain alive. By 1937 Frenkel was head of BAMlag
, the Baikal Amur Mainline railway camp, one of the most chaotic and lethal camps in the [Soviet] Far East, yet when 48 Trotskyites were arrested in BAMlag in 1938 he was not among them, although the camp newspaper openly accused him of sabotage. Frenkel's case was mysteriously delayed in Moscow, seemingly by Stalin, leading the local BAMlag prosecutor to write to Soviet chief prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, I don't understand why this investigation [into Frenkel] was placed under 'special decree', or from whom this 'special decree' has come. If we don't arrest Trotskyite-diversionist-spies, then whom should we be arresting?
During 1937-1945 Frenkel was the head of Chief Directorate of Railroad Construction (ГУЖДС).
He was awarded the Order of Lenin
three times and the title Hero of Socialist Labor
.
On April 28, 1947, Frenkel was discharged from his duties for reasons of health, and was awarded a service pension.
Haifa
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...
– 1960 Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
) was a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
citizen and Chekist (member of the Soviet secret police). Frenkel is best known for his role in the organisation of work in the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
, starting from the forced labor camp of the Solovetsky Islands
Solovetsky Islands
The Solovetsky Islands , or Solovki , are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. The islands are served by the Solovki Airport. Area: ....
, which is recognised as one of the earliest sites of the Gulag.
Origins
Naftaly Frenkel's origins are uncertain. Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
called him a "Turkish Jew born in Constantinople". Another described him as a "Hungarian manufacturer". Yet another claimed that Frenkel came from Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. Yet more said he was from Austria, or Palestine, or that he had worked in the Ford motor plant in the USA. His prisoner registration card states clearly that he was born in Haifa
Haifa
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...
, then part of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
. From Haifa
Haifa
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...
he made his way (perhaps via Odessa, perhaps via Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
) to the Soviet Union where he described himself as a 'merchant'.
Arrest
In 1923 he was arrested for "illegally crossing borders", a label which covered smuggling as well as being a merchant who was too successful for the Soviet Union to tolerate. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour on SolovetskySolovetsky Islands
The Solovetsky Islands , or Solovki , are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. The islands are served by the Solovki Airport. Area: ....
. The Solovetsky Islands
Solovetsky Islands
The Solovetsky Islands , or Solovki , are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. The islands are served by the Solovki Airport. Area: ....
, in the White Sea
White Sea
The White Sea is a southern inlet of the Barents Sea located on the northwest coast of Russia. It is surrounded by Karelia to the west, the Kola Peninsula to the north, and the Kanin Peninsula to the northeast. The whole of the White Sea is under Russian sovereignty and considered to be part of...
, came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
". Together the islands were known as 'northern camps of special purpose': Severnye lagerya osobogo naznacheniya or SLON. In Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
slon means 'elephant'. "The name was to become a source of humour, of irony and of menace."
Prisoner
He rose rapidly from prisoner to staff member on the strength of his proposal to the camp administration that they link inmates' food rations to their rate of production, the proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). How exactly Frenkel transformed himself from prisoner to camp commander is also mysterious. The story goes that when he arrived at the camp he found shocking disorganisation and waste of resources (both human and material): he promptly wrote a precise description of what exactly was wrong with every one of the camp's industries (including forestry, farming and brick-making). He placed the letter in the prisoners' 'complaints box' whence it was sent, as a curiosity, to Genrikh YagodaGenrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...
the secret police bureaucrat who eventually became leader of the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
; it is said that Yagoda
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...
immediately demanded to meet with the letter's author. Frenkel himself claimed that he was whisked off to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
to discuss his ideas with Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
and Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin.-Early life:Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire...
, one of Stalin's henchmen. Again, the truth is unclear: records show that Frenkel met Stalin in the 1930s and was protected by Stalin during the Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
purge years; however, no record extant has been found of any meeting in the 1920s.
What is clear is that Frenkel was promoted from prisoner to guard in a surprisingly short period, even by the chaotic standards of SLON: by November 1924, having been resident at the camp for less than a year, Frenkel's early release was requested by the SLON administration; the request was finally granted in 1927. Meanwhile, the camp administration submitted regular reports to the OGPU about 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."
Commandant
Frenkel emerged as one of the most influential Solovetsky commanders. His reputation is, however, controversial: Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
claims that Frenkel personally invented the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, also known as the nourishment scale, which destroyed weaker prisoners in weeks and would later cause uncounted casualties; on the other hand, a wide range of Russian and Western historians dismiss the many stories of Frenkel's omnipotence as legend. Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post...
states,
"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."
Frenkel presided over the development of the nourishment scale, or the "you-eat-as-you-work system", from a careless arrangement by which workers were sometimes 'paid' with food into a very precise method of food distribution and prisoner organisation: he divided the SLON prisoners into (1) those deemed capable of heavy work, (2) those capable of light work and (3) invalids; each group received a different set of tasks and quotas to meet and were fed accordingly, with drastic differences between the prisoners' rations and their fate. Those deemed capable of heavy work were allotted 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat; invalids received half those amounts. In practice the system divided prisoners very rapidly into those who would survive and those who would perish.
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.
Frenkel ensured that everything that did not contribute to the camp's economic productivity was discarded: all pretence of re-education was dropped; the camp's journals and newspapers were closed; the distinction between those with criminal convictions and those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes was dropped as both groups were set to work alongside one another simply as labourers; and the meetings of the camp's Solovetsky Society for Local Lore were stopped although, to impress visiting dignitaries, the Solovetsky museum and theatre continued to exist. At the same time random cruelty inflicted by the captors on the captives decreased: such behaviour was now considered inappropriate in an institution which valued trudosposobnost - 'the capacity to work' - above all.
Some remembered him as a dandy who had a good head for figures and, according to Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
(who visited and approved Solovetsky Islands
Solovetsky Islands
The Solovetsky Islands , or Solovki , are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. The islands are served by the Solovki Airport. Area: ....
in June 1929) and others, a perfect memory.
Others hated and feared him: in 1927 the year of his early release, in one of the first foreign publications about the Solovetsky Islands, it was written by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
anti-communist Raymond Duguet that,
"thanks to his horribly insensitive initiatives, millions of unhappy people are overwhelmed by terrible labour, by atrocious suffering."He was accused in 1928 by his comrades in the Solovetsky Islands Communist Party cell of organising a personal network of spies "so he knows everything about everybody earlier than everyone else."
Kommersant
Before his early release was granted, Frenkel had organised and then managed the Ekonomicheskaya kommercheskaya chast, the Economic-Commercial Department of SLON, through which he tried to make the Solovetsky camps not merely self-supporting in accordance with the concentration camp decrees but profitable with the result that they began to take work away from other state undertakings: an element of competition remained in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and Frenkel took advantage of this. With Frenkel running its Economic-Commercial Department, SLON had already outbid a civilian forestry undertaking and had won the right to fell 130,000 cubic metres of wood in KareliaKarelia
Karelia , the land of the Karelian peoples, is an area in Northern Europe of historical significance for Finland, Russia, and Sweden...
. SLON had also become a shareholder in the Karelian Communal Bank, and was tendering for the construction of a road from Kem to the far northern city of Ukhta
Ukhta
Ukhta is an important industrial town in the Komi Republic of Russia. Population: Oil springs along the Ukhta River were already known in the 17th century. In the mid-19th century, industrialist M. K. Sidorov started to drill for oil in this area. It was one of the first oil wells in...
.
From the outset the Karelian local authorities had been unnerved by all of this activity, not least as they had initially opposed the creation of the camp altogether. The authorities' complaints grew louder as time went by: at a meeting to discuss SLON's expansion, local authorities complained about the unfair access which SLON had to cheap labour which would put ordinary forresters out of work; at a subsequent meeting of the Karelian Council of People's Commissars (being the government of the Karelian Republic) in February 1926 SLON was attacked for overcharging for the Kem to Ukhta road with the following summing up by an indignant Comrade Yuzhnev:
"It has become clear [that] SLON is a kommersant, a merchant with large, grabbing hands, and that its basic goal is to make profits."
The authorities also complained about SLON's special links with the OGPU which allowed SLON to disregard local laws and avoid paying money into the regional budget. Within the camp itself, few doubted that Frenkel was the architect of this alleged success: he was firmly identified with the commercialisation of the camp and hated for it; at an acrimonious meeting of the Solovetsky Communist Party in 1928 - so acrimonious that part of the meeting's conclusions were deemed too secret to be kept in the archive - one camp commander Yashenko complained about the extent of the Economic-Commercial Department's influence and went on to attack Frenkel, admitting that he hated Frenkel so much that he had contemplated murdering him:
"a former prisoner who was freed after three years' work because at that time there were not enough people [guards] to work at the camp [...] when a rumour came round that he might leave, people were saying, 'We can't work without him.'"
Others asked why Frenkel received priority service and cheap prices at SLON shops (one of which had been opened in Kem as if he were the owner; yet more queried why SLON had become so commercialised that it neglected its other tasks: all re-educational work in the camp had ceased; prisoners were being held to unfair work standards; and when prisoners mutilated themselves in protest at the work norms their cases were not investigated.
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post...
wrote:
"The argument over the profitability, efficiency and fairness of prison labour was to continue for the next quarter-century [...] in the mid 1920s the Karelian local authorities were not winning [the argument] [... and] although as late as 1929, the camp was in fact running a deficit of 1.6 million roubles - quite possibly because OGPU stole from the till - Solovetsky's supposed economic success was still trumpeted far and wide."
White Sea-Baltic Canal
The White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal , often abbreviated to White Sea Canal is a ship canal in Russia opened on 2 August 1933. It connects the White Sea with Lake Onega, which is further connected to the Baltic Sea. Until 1961, its original name was the Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea 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
White Sea-Baltic Canal
The White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal , often abbreviated to White Sea Canal is a ship canal in Russia opened on 2 August 1933. It connects the White Sea with Lake Onega, which is further connected to the Baltic Sea. Until 1961, its original name was the Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal...
from November 1931 until its completion.
Later career
In his later career, Frenkel was protected from arrest and possible execution by intervention at the very highest level. Stalin had control over who was and who was not arrested during the Great TerrorGreat Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
and its aftermath: it is noteworthy that despite the deaths of nearly all of his former colleagues, Frenkel managed to remain alive. By 1937 Frenkel was head of BAMlag
Bamlag
Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp was a subdivision of GULAG which existed during 1932-1948. Its administration, headed by Naftaly Frenkel , was headquartered in the settlement of Svobodny, Amur Oblast. Its main activity was construction of the Baikal Amur Mainline and secondary railroad...
, the Baikal Amur Mainline railway camp, one of the most chaotic and lethal camps in the [Soviet] Far East, yet when 48 Trotskyites were arrested in BAMlag in 1938 he was not among them, although the camp newspaper openly accused him of sabotage. Frenkel's case was mysteriously delayed in Moscow, seemingly by Stalin, leading the local BAMlag prosecutor to write to Soviet chief prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, I don't understand why this investigation [into Frenkel] was placed under 'special decree', or from whom this 'special decree' has come. If we don't arrest Trotskyite-diversionist-spies, then whom should we be arresting?
During 1937-1945 Frenkel was the head of Chief Directorate of Railroad Construction (ГУЖДС).
He was awarded the Order of Lenin
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin , named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union...
three times and the title Hero of Socialist Labor
Hero of Socialist Labor
Hero of Socialist Labour was an honorary title in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. It was the highest degree of distinction for exceptional achievements in national economy and culture...
.
On April 28, 1947, Frenkel was discharged from his duties for reasons of health, and was awarded a service pension.
External links
- Frenkel's biography at peoples.ru
- Russian Jewish Encyclopedia