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One summer day in 1926, a thin and short man was brought into Joseph Stalin's Kremlin office. For more than three hours, he expounded to the master of a huge country his theory on how to make prisoners' work useful for the state. These proposals greatly interested the leader, and he ordered them to be put into practice. At the same time, the man with whom, according to legend, he talked in the Kremlin was himself a prisoner in the Solovki camp at the time. But after his visit to Stalin, something incredible happened - the prisoner began to make a dizzying career and soon became one of the leaders of the NKVD and the de facto manager of a huge camp empire in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners worked. His name was Naftaly Frenkel. But how could this have happened? Was Frenkel really the ideological founder of the sinister GULAG? Is it true that he was an agent of Soviet intelligence abroad? Why did he end up in the camp? What happened to the treasure that he allegedly hid in Odessa? And in general, what in his bizarre biography is true and what is myth?