Its keyboard resembled a typewriter, but its body looked more like a very advanced adding machine, equipped with a series of rotors that swapped in letters for other letters as the typist hit keys. Like the Enigma, it was an electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine. The Fialka’s encryption methods were advanced, but the basic technology was old. The model is among the first of the machines ever to be shown anywhere. But the average American was finally see one in person when a specimen went on display at the KGB Espionage Museum in New York City in 2019. To this day, gathering details on the device remains a challenge. Russia did not declassify information about the machine until 2005. Yet the Fialka’s existence remained a well-kept secret. By the 1970s, Fialka encryption machines had been widely adopted by Warsaw Pact and other communist nations, and they remained in use until the early 1990s. Enter the Fialka-Russian for “violet.” Created at the end of World War II and introduced in 1956, the Fialka replaced the Albatross, a Soviet cipher machine that was itself more complex than the Enigma. The Soviet Union needed a technological wonder. And not only would any new communications system have to be unbreakable, but it would also have to work across languages as diverse as Polish, Hungarian, German, Romanian, Spanish, and, of course, Russian. This was a daunting task: The previous pinnacle in cryptography, the German Enigma machine, had been cracked. In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union needed a foolproof way to encrypt the messages it sent to its allies.
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