He began by telling Krymov about the extraordinary fate of Frankel, an engineer who had been a successful businessman during the NEP period.1 At the very beginning of NEP, he had built a car-factory in Odessa. In the mid-twenties he had been arrested and sent to Solovki. From there, he had sent Stalin the outlines of a project that, in the words of the old Chekist, ‘bore the mark of true genius’. In considerable detail, with full economic and scientific substantiation, he had laid out the most efficient manner of exploiting the vast mass of prisoners in order to construct roads, dams,
...more
