During the Battle of Poltava, the Russian army used a rather unusual method of transmitting information. The garrison of Poltava besieged by the Swedes in 1709 was forced to communicate with its comrades in arms with the help of cannons into which hollow cannonballs filled with cipher letters were charged. At the same time, a special light and sound alarm was developed, with the help of which the successful receipt of the "parcel" was confirmed. Such artillery mail was used by Russian troops near Poltava, obviously in both directions.
“When you receive these letters, give a sign to our trenches today, without hesitation, with one great fire and five cannon shots nearby … that you have received those letters,” wrote Peter I to the commandant of Poltava I. S. Kellin on June 19, 1709, when immediately for reliability with six cores sent an encrypted message. Two days later, the commandant wrote to Menshikov about "an alarm in the Swedish camp and the regrouping of enemy troops in connection with the transition of the Russian army to the right bank of the Voksla." The message was delivered, naturally, along a ballistic trajectory in a steel blank.
Battle of Poltava
Used in the army of Peter and dogs to transmit secret messages. The emperor himself had a specially trained dog delivering encrypted orders to the command of the units. The dog also provided command feedback to the supreme commander. Actually, post dogs first appeared in the Russian army under Peter I, and since then they have been widely used.
Security code for correspondence between A. D. Menshikov and V. L. Dolgoruky
In 1716, the Military Charter was adopted, the first document of this kind in the history of Russia. What is the connection here with the main theme of this cycle? The fact is that, in accordance with the Charter, the positions of "adjutants, orderlies, couriers for the transmission and delivery of secret reports" were first established, and the "Rules of action of military field mail" were updated. Moreover, the editing was made personally by Peter I. Now the military postmen were responsible for the prompt delivery of encrypted correspondence between units of the army, navy and the Military Collegium with the Admiralty Collegium.
Over time, Peter I introduced another innovation - a surveillance and communications service appeared in the fleet. As messengers there were high-speed vessels, which were also entrusted with the intelligence functions of observing the enemy. Shooting, light indication and flags in the hands of the signalman were used for remote transmission of data, usually consisting of several sentences. Often, to speed up the transfer, two or three flags could be used at once, with each flag (combination of flags) encrypting a phrase. At the reception points, code books with sets of signals for decryption were provided. These innovations were very successfully used in the summer of 1720, when Russia faced the combined naval forces of the British and Swedes in the Baltic. Timely detection of enemy forces and prompt notification allowed our ships to effectively defend the coast. And on June 28 of the same year, about 60 Russian galleys attacked the Swedes at Cape Grengam, so dashingly that the British were afraid to poke themselves into this mess. As a result, most of the Swedes went home beaten, and the Russian fleet was replenished with four captured frigates. It was just one of the glorious pages of the Russian galley fleet - our sailors regularly landed in the rear of the Swedes, destroying the enemy's material base. All this was possible thanks to a developed and efficient maritime surveillance and communications service.
Victory at Grengam
Galleys of Peter I
The significantly expanded range of state affairs of Peter I somewhat limited his encryption work. The Emperor and his associates began to spend less time on the production of new ciphers. Therefore, ciphers had to be used for a long time and on different communication channels, which could potentially lead to their discrediting. There were examples of the use of a cipher machine not in the interests of Peter I. Thus, during the peace negotiations between Russia and Sweden in 1718-1719, the communication between the emperor and the negotiators J. Bruce and A. I. Osterman was conducted by means of a special cipher. But Osterman at the same time played a double game and corresponded with a special German code with P. P. Shafirov. The key topic of his "left" correspondence was the possible conclusion, after the armistice with Sweden, a military alliance for an attack on other European countries. Peter I was against such an initiative, since he was aware of the degree of exhaustion of the country from a long-term war. For this reason, traitors used special codes in clandestine negotiations, which in itself could cause the monarch's fury. But the idea of Osterman - Shafirov did not burn out, Karl XII was killed by a stray bullet, and the peace treaty was not signed at all. The Russians fought with the Swedes for another two years, and the history of the Northern War ended with the Nystadt Peace Treaty, in which Russia was again represented by the controversial Osterman and Bruce.
“These numbers are very easy to disassemble,” - roughly how Tsar Peter I rejected new ciphers for their cryptographic strength. And this can also be recorded in the track record of the innovative emperor of Russia. The first cryptanalytic work dates back to the era of Peter and many of them were associated with the deciphering of Western secret documents. In this regard, directives were sent to all foreign missions of Russia with the requirement to work on collecting any information about new encryption algorithms of neighbors. At the same time, special attention was paid to the extraction of plain text cipher messages, since the simplest method "plain text - cipher text" in 99% split any cipher of that era. This was greatly helped by the numerous trophies that the Russian army conquered on the fields of the Northern War. The "secret carriers" from Sweden also went over to the enemy's camp. So, after the defeat near Poltava, "the first Swedish minister, Count Piper, seeing that it was impossible for him to escape, he himself drove to Poltava with the royal secretaries Tsedergolm and Diben." That is, the keys to many Swedish ciphers could well have fallen into the hands of the Russians.
At the same time, there is no reliable data on the decryption of the Russian reports by the Swedes, but the enemy's agents worked well. An example is the case in the place of Stock Exchange, where in 1701 Peter met with August II. Charles XII learned of this meeting in advance and sent an agent, an officer of Scottish descent, to the Saxons. This agent managed to obtain the rank of lieutenant of the Saxon cuirassier regiment and establish good relations with the secretaries of both sovereigns. Thanks to this, the Swedish agent received information about all the decisions taken at the Stock Exchange and the content of the correspondence between the delegations and their capitals.
And in 1719, the Russian cipher was nevertheless opened … And our centuries-old sworn friends, the British, did it in one of their "black offices". One of the simple replacement ciphers was revealed, which, however, did not become a tragedy - at the beginning of the 1920s, proportional replacement ciphers had already come into use in Russia. And the British did not have enough teeth for this algorithm.
The era of Peter I was the time of Russia's breakthrough in encryption and cryptanalytic work. The empire became the world leader in this area, and positive results were not long in coming.
