Naftaly Frenkel

Naftaly Frenkel
Born	1883 Haifa, Ottoman Empire
Died	1960 Moscow, Soviet Union

Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel Russian: Нафталий Аронович Френкель; (1883 in Haifa – 1960 in Moscow) was a Jewish Russian businessman and 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.

Naftaly Frenkel's origins are uncertain. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 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. 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'.

Finnish communist Arvo Tuominen claimed in his memoirs that Frenkel was related to a prominent Finland-Swedish family named Frenckell and that he spoke Swedish.

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 labor on Solovetsky. 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."

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