The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

80 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
10. Aron Solts 11. Naftaly Frenkel
12. Yakov Rappoport 13. Matvei Berman
14. Lazar Kogan 15. Genrikh Yagoda
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: ..... tbe 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."10
This last phrase seems to us a keystonC'-to both the character
and biography of Frenkel.
By the start of Belomorstroi Frenkel had been freed. For .construction
of the Belomor Canal he received the Order of Lenin
and was named Chief of Construction of BAMlag ("The Baikal­
AmurMain Line Railroad"-which was a name out of t~e future,
while in the thirties BAMlag was put to work adding a
" second track to the Trans-Siberian main line on those sectors
where there was none). And this was by no means the last item
in the career .of Naftaly Frenkel, but it is more relevant to complete
the account in the next chapter .
•
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 saDie unfortunate happenstance by which camp
watchtowers never got into s.cenes 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 doc~mentary 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.
'
10. Be/omorsko-Ba/tiisky Kanal imeni Stalina, Istoriya' Stroite/slVa (The
White Sea-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin; History of Its Constrllction), Chapter
8. .