The Fialka Lives!

I got the Fialka running around 1am last night. I spent a fair amount of time with a volt-meter making sure I got the voltage and polarity right. Unlike the Enigma, the Fialka has some electronic parts, which means a smokey death was quite possible. Although the power converter is well labeled, my Russian is a bit rusty so lots of double-checking felt like a worthwhile expense.

It's not as loud as I thought it was going to be, but it's not quiet either. It sounds like one of the old IBM selectric typewriters when I fired it up, and also when I typed on it.

I was able to encrypt a message, and then to decrypt it. The best part was that it spits out paper tape with text and holes punched. Why would you need to have the encoded messages punched into the paper if the text was also there? To be able to feed it into another machine and automatically decrypted, of course! The machine has a paper tape reader on the front. I was able to feed the encrypted message back into the machine, and it spit out the original text. It's quite sophisticated, actually. You can see pictures of the paper tape here at the bottom: http://www.ilord.com/fialka.html

I was also able to find several old spools of teletype paper tape on Ebay which I was able to get mounted onto the Fialka paper tape feeder. Now all I need is some old teletype-style print ribbons and I'll be in Russian encryption heaven for at least another few months.

Russian Fialka

The Russian Fialka (which means "violet" like the color or the flower) was an encryption machine used by the Soviet Union and Russia up until about 1990. Very little is known about them, but a few are making their way out of Eastern Block countries. They are similar to the more famous Enigma machines, but have better security, paper tape output, and a number of other improvements. On the downside, they are heavy (around 50lbs) and the power supply is in another box (which is also heavy).

The Fialka uses 11/16" paper tape rolls, which I just found on an Ebay store (one man's junk...), and should have in a week or two. Now I just need to get some custom power cables to connect the power supply to the Fialka. The plugs are completely foreign to me, but I'm hoping they're a European standard size.

I posted some pictures on my web site (http://www.ilord.com/fialka.html ) and will post more information as I have time.