TheCodeBreakers
cryptanalytic section were elderly former Russian aristocrats, including
counts and barons. This shocking breach of Bolshevik polity resulted
from a serious shortage of linguists, who were needed in codebreaking.
Cryptanalysts themselves were so excessively scarce that even when they
were jailed they continued to work. Vladimir Krivosh, the father of
Doosia's first love and de facto
*In 1933, it also had a military intelligence group, headed by a
Colonel Kharkevich, a solid, impressive man who reported to both Boki
and the general staff. This group appears to have later been abolished or
transferred to the Army; Kharkevich himself was Purged in 1938. The
head—under Boki—of the O.G.P.U. group of wyptanalysts was one
Gusev, possibly Sergei I. Gusev, an old revolutionary, active in secret
printing, a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist
party since 1922, and on the Praesidium of the Comintern from 1930. He
too was purged in 1938.