Secret correspondence of state importance existed even before the era of Peter: after the death of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the Order of Secret Affairs, which had existed for a long time, was abolished. Some boyars were eager to destroy many archival documents stored in the order, but the clerk Dementiy Minich Bashmakov intervened in the matter. It was one of the former leaders of the order, who managed to take out and keep a whole bag of "secret alphabets", that is, ciphers. Later, Peter I was very attentive to the relics and ordered his "privy councilor and general of the close office" Nikita Zotov to carefully rewrite and save everything. So in the early 80s of the 17th century, the Sovereign of All Russia first became acquainted with cryptography.
Emperor Peter I the Great
The approach of Peter I to encryption was quite tough: for the use of encryption, in addition to state interests, there was a serious punishment. But certain indulgences were still allowed for the blue-blooded persons. Thus, Tsarevna Sofya Alekseevna, in her correspondence with her favorite V. V. Golitsyn, used “non-state figures”.
If we talk about the methods of protecting information in the time of Peter I, then at first the main thing was physical protection, which was entirely entrusted to the postmen. By the end of the 17th century, Russia had become the largest European power with administrative centers scattered over the entire vast territory. Therefore, the duty of the postman to deliver packages with valuable documents and intact seals seems to be not the easiest one. There are plenty of examples when unfortunate people got into trouble. So, in the summer of 1684, the postman Aleksey Vakhurov in the vicinity of Klin was ambushed by forest robbers. The bandits took the horses, shook up the whole bag, but, not finding any valuables, they got away. Vakhurov had to walk ten hours to Klin, where he handed the mail bag to the governor Alfimov. It turned out that the press was not touched, the correspondence was not discredited, which saved the postman Vakhurov from punishment. The story of the coachman Kotka, who walked 68 versts through the spring mud from Klin to Moscow, did not end so well. There was an envelope in his bag with a broken seal, which was quite a serious violation. Perhaps it was for this reason that he did not receive any help at any point on his journey - he had to walk all the time. The culprit was Ivashka Ankudinov, a krestetsky coachman, who at one time accepted the package intact, and handed it over to Kotka with a broken seal. An investigation was initiated, the results of which showed that the irresponsible Ankudinov unsuccessfully jumped on a horse onto the bridge, the animal slipped and the rider fell right on the mail bag. Actually, for this reason, the press burst, and Ankudinov was later "beaten with rods" for such carelessness.
Also, censorship was introduced in Russia to protect valuable information. This became especially important in the penultimate decade of the 17th century, when it was not really clear who would be the king. There was a fuss around the throne, about which foreign "friends" were better off not knowing, and even not far from the intervention. In this regard, a vowel postal censorship of letters sent to the west was introduced. By the way, it is worth mentioning that in Europe, in contrast to Russia, at that time there was an institution of secret perlustration. Very well illustrates the mechanics of the process of public censorship of that time, the instruction of the Duma clerk of the Ambassadorial order Yemelyan Ukraintsev to the Smolensk voivode okolnich F. Shakhovsky in 1690:
“And if what business the gentry or the bourgeoisie will happen to write about their business, and they would bring those letters unsealed, and send those letters to him, Ivan Kulbatsky with the knowledge of the governor … And without his governor, the gentry and the townspeople know nothing about Do not write news with riders and mail. And those people, as well as the translator I. Kublatsky, from the great sovereigns to be in disgrace and, depending on the case that appears in the letters, to be severely punished."
Over time, laws and regulations have become stricter. Peter I issued a law "on reporting on those who are locked in writing, except for church teachers, and on punishing those who knew who were locked in writing and were not informed about it." Those who wrote "locked up" were now considered state criminals with all the ensuing consequences for them.
Ambassadorial Prikaz - the center of cryptography of Peter the Great's Rus
Vice-Chancellor Petr Pavlovich Shafirov
The extensive reform of the army set before Peter I the task of developing command and control systems both during maneuvers and short periods of peacetime. In 1695 and 1696, during a campaign against the Turks, the first military field post was organized under the leadership of the postmaster A. A. Vinius. All items of this mail had an emergency status. At the beginning of the 18th century, the simple physical protection of the postman from encroachments on valuable correspondence was not enough, and Peter turned his attention to cryptography. The reason was the emergence of numerous diplomatic missions of the Russian Empire abroad, as well as the Northern War with Sweden, during which it was necessary to control troops over a large territory. In both cases, there was a great danger of strategic information falling into the hands of the enemy. At that time, the Ambassadorial Order became the cryptographic brain of Russia, in which ciphers were created, and correspondence of state importance was encrypted and decrypted. The positions of cryptographers and ransomware were "translators" who simultaneously translated from foreign letters and carried out encryption and decryption of documents. A well-known specialist in Polish dispatches was the translator Golembowski. His status as a cipher is confirmed by "Deputy Foreign Minister" Vice-Chancellor Pyotr Pavlovich Shafirov, who writes in a letter to Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin: "And Golembovsky has such a figure (code) for tea." The encryption of Peter the Great's correspondence was carried out by the Campaign Embassy Chancellery, which followed the emperor everywhere.
Encrypted text of the letter of Peter I (left) and its decryption (right)
Keys to Easy Replacement Cipher
What encryption systems were in use at the time of Peter I? As before, the main cipher in Russia was a simple replacement, in which the characters of the plain text were replaced by letters (while the letters could belong to both the plain text alphabet and another alphabet), numbers or specially invented characters. It is noteworthy that in the ciphers of Peter the Great, only the familiar Arabic numerals were used, since at the beginning of the 18th century, the sovereign removed the obsolete Cyrillic alphabetic numbering, borrowed from the Greeks, from use. In addition, letter combinations were also used as cipher text characters.
Peter's ciphers had to work not only with Russian texts, but also with materials written in Greek, German and French. This was due to the fact that the emperor was fluent in several languages, and there were many foreigners under his command. At the same time, encrypted Russian-language messages that went to Europe were practically unbreakable. Abroad, very few people knew the Russian language, and without knowledge of the linguistic features of the cipher text, it is very difficult to open it. Peter's cryptographers had their own know-how - the presence of many "dummies" in the text, that is, cipher text characters that do not correspond to any plain text character. These meaningless inclusions 5-6 characters long increased the strength of the ciphers, giving the enemy the wrong impression of the number of characters in the plaintext alphabet. "Dummies" broke the structural linguistic connections of the plaintext and changed statistical patterns, that is, precisely those properties of the text that were used to decipher the simple replacement cipher. Senseless insertions increased the length of the encoded text compared to the open text, and this significantly complicated their mutual comparison. Peter's cipher clerks finally confused the enemy by the fact that in certain cases some characters were used to encode periods and commas contained in the plain text, for which they could also use "dummies". These tricks were specially mentioned in the brief rules for using ciphers.
