The marching Ambassadorial Chancellery, which was mentioned in the previous parts of the cycle, had expanded significantly by 1709 and turned into a "stationary" Ambassadorial Chancellery located in St. Petersburg. The jurisdiction of the new body included encryption work, the analysis of existing schemes and the development of new algorithms, as well as an important chemical direction for new formulations of invisible ink.
The historian Tatyana Soboleva in her work "History of the encryption business in Russia" mentions the introduction of the collegial order in 1716:
“At the beginning of the 18th century, the Ambassadorial Chancellery did not have the right to consider the most important political cases, since this right belonged to the Senate. Members of the Senate: "Messrs. Privy Councilors" usually at their meetings listened to the rescripts made in the Ambassadorial Chancellery to Russian ministers abroad. Privy councilors sometimes gathered in the presence of the tsar in the house of the chancellor "for a conference" on the most serious issues of foreign policy."
Golovkin Gavrila Ivanovich, First State Chancellor of Russia
The most important work on the new codes was carried out under the personal leadership of Peter I, State Chancellor Count Gabriel Golovkin and Vice-Chancellor Baron Pyotr Shafirov. A major milestone in history was the introduction into circulation by Peter I in 1710 of a new civil typeface instead of the classic Church Slavonic. For this reason, ciphers have now begun to be written on the basis of a new script.
The letters of the new civil type chosen by Peter I. The letters crossed out by the tsar are not accepted
In 1712, Peter I issued a decree on the creation of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, in which, in particular, the 1st expedition (in the modern way, a department) was organized, which specialized in cryptographic work. Now the monopoly of the Ambassador's decree on encryption issues has been lost. In the new Collegium, they were mainly engaged in paperwork - they processed the correspondence coming from the mail, deciphered, registered and sent to the addressees. And since 1718, among the duties of the Collegium employees, perlustration appeared - the secret reading of all letters both abroad and coming from there. The final legislative approval of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs took place on February 13, 1720, when Peter I “sent the chancellor Count Golovkin, signed and sealed with a resolution“be this way”,“Determination of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs”.
Florio Beneveni, who played a special role in the history of the Empire's foreign policy, was among the secretaries of this body. Florio, an Italian by birth, was a diplomat under Peter I, to whom the tsar, naturally, entrusted responsible intelligence missions. Florio began his work abroad for the good of Russia with the Russian embassy in Persia, where for a year and a half he was active and supplied the tsar with valuable information. This was very useful in the summer of 1722, when Peter sent an army to the Persian campaign, which resulted in the annexation of new lands near the Caspian. Beneveni, it is worth noting, a year earlier managed to return from Tehran to Bukhara. And here the Italian continued to work for the benefit of Tsar Peter I. He became an important informant of St. Petersburg about the large deposits of precious metals in the Bukhara Khanate, which were carefully hidden by the khan. Dmitry Alexandrovich Larin, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Intelligent Technologies and Systems, MSTU MIREA, in one of his historical excursions writes about the further fate of Beneveni:
“Only in 1725 did the mission return to Russia, thus the work of Beneveni and his companions in Asia lasted for about 6 years. The information they collected played an important role in the further development of relations with Bukhara and Khiva (after all, in the second half of the 19th century, both khanates became part of the Russian Empire). After returning from a trip, F. Beneveni was accepted into the service of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, where soon, thanks to his good knowledge of the countries of the East, he headed the department of "Turkish and other languages", which carried out diplomatic activities in the eastern direction."
Persian campaign of Peter I
All correspondence with the "center" was conducted by the Italian using a specially made cipher of a simple replacement, which later received his name. In general, it was its uniqueness that ensured the strength of such a cipher - in technical terms, there was nothing special about it. The cipher had no blanks, and the dots in it were encrypted with ten two-digit numbers.
Russia expanded its missions abroad to organize encrypted communications for all missions, and by 1719 they were in seven countries and had to have their own ransomware staff. Moreover, the differentiation of the foreign diplomatic corps begins. In addition to diplomatic missions, there are also Russian consulates. By the beginning of the 20s of the 18th century, three such institutions were opened in Holland at once, and one each in Paris, Vienna, Antwerp and Luttich. Naturally, this entire diplomatic staff had to be provided with encryption communication with the College of Foreign Affairs and the king.
A special approach to work with personnel in the prototype of the modern Foreign Ministry is described in the book by N. N. Molchanov "The Diplomacy of Peter the Great":
“For foreign ministers of the collegium, to have faithful and kind ones, so that there is no hole, and in that it is hard to look, and not at all to identify unworthy people or their relatives, especially their creatures, there. And if someone who is obscene in this place, or, knowing who is guilty in this matter, and does not declare, then they will be punished as traitors."
Since the early 1720s, the ciphering technique of Russian diplomats has been changing. It is planned to move away from simple replacement with more complex perfect proportional replacement codes. In this scheme, the characters that are most often found in the original text receive several designations in the cipher at once. This complicates somewhat the frequency analysis, which is actively used to break simple replacement ciphers. Historians cite as an example the code of the Russian diplomat Alexander Gavrilovich Golovkin, who worked in Prussia. He was the son of Chancellor Gabriel Golovkin and worked abroad until the end of his days.
Russian proportional substitution cipher used by the Ambassador to Prussia Alexander Golovkin
In the cipher, each consonant letter of the Russian alphabet of the original text corresponds to one cipher sign, and two vowels, one from the Latin alphabet, and the other sign is a one- or two-digit number. The cipher used by Golovkin had 13 blanks and 5 special designations for periods and commas. But such complex ciphers were not universally applicable to diplomats. For a long time, the old codes of simple replacement were used, and even in direct correspondence with Tsar Peter I.
