The management of the army and navy became a paramount task in organizing combat work during the war with Sweden. The high command had their own codes for communication with the king and correspondence with each other. Moreover, in most cases, it was not specially trained people who were engaged in encryption, but directly the sovereign and generals of various ranks. The archives contain coded letters from Peter I to Admiral Apraksin, princes Sheremetyev, Menshikov, Repnin, as well as generals, brigadiers and other military officials. It is worth recalling that the king developed most of the ciphers on his own, while giving preference to ciphers in French. In general, in those days, war correspondence was protected with ciphers in different languages - Russian, German and the mentioned French. Sometimes this multilingualism led to funny events. “They can't read French digital letters, so I don’t know what to answer to them … Please… if you please, please give me the answer to all my letters with German figures, for no one understands that Frenchwoman”: GI Golovkin received such a dispatch somehow from the Austrian Field Marshal-Lieutenant General Baron Georg Benedict von Ogilvy, who served in Russia.
Baron Georg Benedict von Ogilvy
Later, Ogilvy wrote to Peter I in a rather categorical manner: "… there is no one here who could understand your French, since Ren lost the key because of this … Please write to me through my numbers so that I can understand." Peter, in response to such criticism, replies to his subordinates: “They wrote to you in the French alphabet for the fact that there was no other. And the one you sent first, and that one is not good, it is not as good as a simple letter, honor is possible. And when he sent another, then from then on we write to you with it, and not in French. And the French key has also been sent. " An attentive reader must have noticed that Peter I for the first time in Russian history mentioned a cryptanalytic assessment of the strength of ciphers. Actually, at this time the Russian school of cryptanalysis was born, which will have a long and glorious history.
In addition to incidents with translations of ciphers, there were also more complex situations when decoding was impossible due to the elementary lack of keys. Once Peter I, in his usual manner, wrote and encrypted a letter with his own hand to Prince Repnin, who was at the front at that time. But Repin either lost the keys to the royal cipher, or he did not have them at all initially. General Renne, the prince's ally on the battlefield, made excuses on this matter before the tsar: “Most Serene, Most Reigning Tsar, Most Merciful Sovereign. In all obedience to Your Most Holy Majesty, I inform you: yesterday I received a lich in figures through a warrant officer sent from Your Most Holy Majesty of Smolensk regiments, according to which we will enlighten with General Prince Nikita Ivanovich Repnin. Only my misfortune is that the keys were sent to that Lichba in the wagon train. Please, Your Blessed Majesty, to order to send the keys, and we, even without the keys, as long as we can think and according to the decree of Your Most Holy Majesty, we will act, we will not leave each other either …"
All of the above is rather an exception, which only confirms the rule - under Tsar Peter I, encryption of messages for the army and navy was properly installed. In particular, strict security measures were developed and followed. So, the keys to the ciphers were passed only from hand to hand. For example, the keys for correspondence with the tsar could only be obtained from Peter I personally. In exceptional cases, the key itself, or parts of it, could be obtained by courier. They were pre-packed in special envelopes, sealed with several wax seals and the name of the courier must be indicated. Upon receipt of such a top-secret letter, the correspondent had to inform about the safe receipt of the keys, and only after that the communication channel began to work.
In the midst of the war with Sweden, in 1709, a certain Polonsky was tasked with closely monitoring the movements of the units of the Bobruisk headman and preventing his connection with the Swedish corps Crassau. And he had to report to Peter I by means of ciphers. The tsar wrote about this: "At the same time, we are sending a key to you, and if this sent one goes well with him, and write about it to us, so that we could write and send the necessary letters with that key in the future." Such is the double control on the part of the sovereign over the newcomer patriots. But here some naivety of Peter I is hidden - in those days, faceless perlustration of postal messages was already at a fairly high level. And if some forces really wanted to read the messages with cipher keys, they would do it. Of course, it was not easy and it was fraught with great difficulties. Interestingly, the same unit could have different ciphers for different people and different purposes. It is known that Peter I did not particularly trust Lieutenant General Ogilvy from Austria and even equipped A. I. Repnin for him, who was supposed to monitor the level of loyalty of the hired commander. For such an important task, the tsar provided the "observer" with a special cipher and punished: "With this, the alphabet is sent to you in special letters and signs of names depicted, against which you will at the right time, for the sake of condescension, write it to us in alphabetical order." Sergeant Kikin from the Preobrazhensky regiment was engaged in a similar work under General Georg-Gustav Rosen in 1706.
The real achievement of the Northern War era was the Russian ambiguous replacement cipher, which is shown in the illustrations. In this cipher, letters and two-letter digrams of the Russian alphabet are used as signs.
Russian cipher of different-valued substitution and its adaptation to the modern alphabet
In 1708, special rules of use were developed (obviously by the king himself), which mentioned: "These words should be written without separation and without periods and commas, and instead of periods and commas and separating speeches, write from the letters below." The supplement was a dictionary containing the names of statesmen and famous geographic objects. An important clarification - the names and geographical objects were from the territory in which the hostilities were conducted. About the supplement it was separately discussed in the rules: "If it happens to write the below-mentioned persons of the name and so on, then they write such signs as against each one marked, however, write everything completely, leaving nowhere, and put the mentioned letters between them, which mean nothing ".
Researcher-cryptanalyst, candidate of technical sciences Larin in his articles gives an example of encryption of the word "Poltava", when the result is "Otkhisushemekom". In a continuous ciphertext, most consonants are encrypted as a syllable, with each consonant involved exclusively in one syllable. But there are subtleties here too - the exceptions are the letter "F" without a syllable and the consonant "Z", which is used both in the syllable "ZE" and in a single performance. All vowels are mostly without syllables, the only exceptions are "A" and "I", which can also be included in the syllables "AM" and "IN", respectively. Naturally, such ciphers are more secure than the "classic" simple replacement, but they are sensitive to coding errors - both to the replacement of the required letter with another letter, and to the omission or insertion of an extra letter.
