sent, as a curiosity, to Genrikh Yagoda, 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 closest associates. Again, the truth is unclear: records show that Frenkel met Stalin in the 1930s and was protected by Stalin during the Party Great 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 Solzhenitsyn 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. Journalist Anne Applebaum 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