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 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."Khlevnyuk, Oleg, Prinuditelnyi trud v ekonomike SSSR: 1929-1941 gody, Svobadnaya Mysl, no 13, 1992, pp. 73-84 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. White Sea–Baltic Canal 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. He used the same methods as he had in SLON as well as many of the same prisoner-slaves who were brought to the canal works from the Solovetsky camp. Later career In his later career, Frenkel was protected from arrest and possible execution by intervention at the very highest level. 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