“The Man Who Reads the World as a Cipher”: The Archive of Anatoly Klepov (1,927 Works, 2.3 Million Words). Freedom, Ciphers, and Secret History

The Man Who Reads the World as a Cipher
Introduction. A Library Grown from a Single Page
There are authors whom one reads, and there are authors in whom one lives, as in a large old house: you move from room to room, and the corridors never end. Anatoly Klepov’s page on Proza.ru is such a house. One thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven works. Nearly two million three hundred thousand words. Almost seventeen million characters—that is about nine and a quarter thousand standard typewritten pages, or fifty dense volumes of two hundred A4 pages each. And more than three hundred and twenty thousand readers who came here “organically,” without advertising or publishing support.
The numbers here are important not in themselves. They are the first clue to the solution. A man who writes in one place for twenty years, stacking text upon text, is building not a collected works, but an archive. And every archive, as any cryptographer knows, is a message that must be read. The first impression of this archive is its diversity: espionage and Byzantium, Michelangelo and chocolate, Pushkin and artificial intelligence. But an experienced cryptographer knows: the more motley the open text, the more surely a single message is hidden within it. For Klepov, this message is `Freedom.
I. The Key Left on the Threshold
Klepov doesn’t hide the key under the mat: he lays it right on the threshold. His author’s preface begins with a confession that could serve as an epigraph for all twenty years of work: his entire literature is built on one principle—information is always hidden, always transmitted through codes, and reality can only be understood by deciphering them.
This is not a borrowed metaphor. Klepov created encryption systems for sixty-four states, worked with presidents and kings, and went through many military conflicts. He consciously places himself alongside famous names—and immediately assigns himself a special place. Suvorov and Kalugin wrote about intelligence through the eyes of executive officers; he looks at the same era through the eyes of the architect of the technical system that intelligence used. Dan Brown creates the illusion of decoding; he offers real decoding. Umberto Eco asked what a symbol means; Klepov asks differently—who encoded the message, from whom was it hidden, what was the key, and what will happen if the key is found.
This shift in the question is where his entire optics lie. For a semiotician, a sign is a riddle of meaning. For a cryptographer, a sign is the trace of someone’s will, someone’s fear, and someone’s calculation.
II. The Architecture of the Corpus
If one lays out the one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven texts on shelves, it becomes clear that this house was not built chaotically. The author himself divided it into eighteen sections, and their ratio reveals the hierarchy of his interests.
The most populated hall is “Painting. Architecture. Secrets of Art”: six hundred and seventy-one works, about five hundred and eighty thousand words. Next to it is “Literary Reflections”: only two hundred and thirteen texts, but in volume they almost equal the art history section, because here are collected the longest, multi-part studies. Then “Intuition”—two hundred and seventy-one pieces; “Historical Paradoxes”—one hundred and forty-four; “Reflections on the Fate of Russia”—seventy-seven. Behind them stretch small but significant rooms: “Scandals and Sensations,” “Travel Notes,” “Reviews of Books and Articles,” “Satirical Prose,” chapters of the books “The Code of God,” “The Empress’s Cipher,” “From Emperor to President,” “The Golden Ticket to the President’s Bedroom,” “The Digital Leviathan,” a presentation of the book “Espionage. Encryptors and Chocolate.” And one room is quite small; it contains only one poem. It is called “Poems of My Mom.”
Another four hundred and eighteen texts live outside the sections—these are mainly publicism from recent years, responses to events, technology, and world politics.
By genre labels, the picture is equally definite: publicism (six hundred and twenty), history and politics (four hundred and seventy-four), philosophy (three hundred and seventy-one), natural science (one hundred and ninety-five).
Fiction—detectives, novellas, short stories, miniatures, ironic and satirical prose—occupies about one hundred and eighty positions in the corpus. Klepov is primarily a thinker and researcher, and the fiction writer in him awakens when thought becomes too cramped in proofs and needs a plot.
III. Secret History: The Cipher as the Engine of Events
The early Klepov, Klepov of 2008–2010, is a historian of special services. It was then that his most ambitious works were written: “The List of American Intelligence Residency” (almost twenty-one thousand words), “Lessons of Byzantium. The Path of Betrayal of Emperors,” “Hitler’s Information Weapon,” “Hitler and Goering: The Struggle for Power,” a two-part study “Alexander I and the Fire of Moscow 1812,” the cycle “Witte and German Orders” in twelve parts, “The Battle of Cryptographers—Stalingrad,” “A. Pushkin’s Service in the Russian Foreign Ministry.”
The method in all these works is the same, and it is recognizable from the first lines. Here is how the second part of “Hitler’s Information Weapon” begins: while Hitler was rapidly modernizing Germany’s cryptographic services and radio interception, Stalin was taking steps that hindered the development of Soviet cryptography. The familiar history of armies and commanders recedes, and the invisible history of communication comes to the fore: who heard whom, who read whom, whose dispatches remained a secret, and whose lay on the enemy’s desk before they reached the addressee.
Thus Klepov rereads entire epochs. Pushkin for him is not only a poet but an official of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, who, according to the author, was involved in diplomatic ciphers; Klepov returned to this theme in 2026, in the extensive essay “Pushkin and the Secrets of Diplomatic Ciphers.”
Byzantium is not only mosaics and cathedrals but a textbook of betrayal. The year 1812 is not only Borodino but the question of who and why burned Moscow. History in these texts resembles an intercepted cipher: the open text is known to all, but the meaning of the message lies in the key.
The names most frequently encountered on these pages form a characteristic map: Russia, Germany, England, France; Alexander, Nicholas, Peter; Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin; Byzantium and the Vatican. This is a map of a world where history is made in offices, not in squares.
But this secret history has a flip side. If all history can be told as a history of interception, then its main question is not who won, but who was deprived of the right to secrecy. Thus the researcher of special services arrives at the theme that will become the main one in his later prose.
IV. The Main Cipher: The Gift to Think Freely
The word “freedom” and its derivatives appear in the corpus almost fifteen hundred times. More important is another thing: pull this thread, and disparate themes tie into a single knot. A cipher is needed so that a person is not overheard. Intelligence is the history of how people were deprived of secrecy.
Intuition is the last domain that no machine can reach. Even the book with the almost playful title “Espionage. Encryptors and Chocolate” turns out, if read carefully, to be a book about freedom. The author himself admits that he wanted to name its first chapter exactly that—”Freedom.”
For most writers, their worldview must be reconstructed from indirect evidence. Klepov formulates his directly, almost as a creed. In the ninth part of the book’s “Presentation,” he writes: “The Lord God created Man and endowed him with the priceless Gift to think Freely. No one—neither Archangels, nor Angels, nor even the devil—can read people’s thoughts.”
From this premise he builds a chain that can be called the theology of encryption. Words, written and spoken, are derivatives of our thoughts. Therefore, the one who protects words protects God’s gift. “If I, with my encryptors, protect people’s Words, then I am doing a deed pleasing to the Lord God. This is my philosophy of life.”
The craft of the encryptor, which is usually considered purely technical and even slightly sinister, is here understood as a service. In the report “Freedom in the Modern Information World,” Klepov names three paths open to man. The first is indifference, “the main thing is personal well-being.” The second is to use another’s freedom for absolute power over the behavior and consciousness of people; this is “the Devil’s path,” which the author, twenty years ago, called the Information Apocalypse.
The third is the thorny path to freedom, which, as Christ’s way of the cross showed, “always ends in Victory and Resurrection.”
The enemy is named precisely: “Information Hitler,” that is, information dictatorship, in which almost all information on the planet will be in the hands of one person or group. Klepov draws an unexpected professional conclusion: any control destroys a reliable defense system. A “hole” left for the state inevitably becomes a hole for the criminal. Surveillance does not protect; it weakens protection. This is the judgment of an engineer, not a moralist. That is why it is valuable: Klepov transfers the debate about freedom from the realm of declarations to the realm of construction. The question for him is not whether eavesdropping is good or bad. His question is whether a system can be reliable at all if someone else’s hand is built into it in advance.
V. “Sergei and Raymonda”: Freedom as Refusal
The first chapter of the book, the novella “Sergei and Raymonda,” is, by the author’s admission, autobiographical, though the names are changed. At first glance, it is an elegant spy story. A Moscow apartment by the Yelokhovskaya Church, a call from Cuba on a closed line, a flight to Paris, the Hotel Intercontinental, where Nicholas II and Victor Hugo once stayed.
Finally, a closed nightclub and a young marquise from an ancient family who needs encryption equipment for a Latin American country engulfed in civil war.
An attentive reader will notice that the theme of freedom is set from the first paragraph, and not by a word, but by music. Sergei listens to Mozart, and the melody “flowed freely through the room,” and then “the walls of the living room did not hold it,” and it burst through the window onto the old Moscow street. This is the tuning fork of the entire novella: a sound that cannot be locked up, just as a thought cannot be locked up.
Then the same thought is expressed in the language of the craft. Sergei’s encryptors belong to the Stealth class—”invisible.” No intelligence service can not only read the message but even understand that it is being transmitted at all. Such absolute security, Klepov writes, “was the pinnacle of real, not declared, freedom.” Here is the main opposition of the book: freedom promised in words, and freedom ensured technically.
But the culmination of the novella is not a chase or a kiss, but a quiet scene of refusal. On the list that Raymonda takes out of her crocodile-skin handbag are systems for interception and telephone tapping. “Sergei immediately refused to supply such equipment because it contradicted his convictions.” One phrase, and in it is the entire moral core of the hero. He is ready to protect others’ secrets and is not ready to steal them. A shield, not a picklock. Then Sergei asks the main professional question: from whom does the information need to be protected? By the answer of the interlocutor, an experienced person recognizes whether the client or a provocateur is before him.
The novella is not without weaknesses. Its world is too smooth: obedient stewardesses, a silent Maybach driver, clients from among the “powers that be.” Sometimes it seems that the author admires the hero more than he tests him. The political optics are unambiguous: Cuba is an “island of freedom,” and the threat comes only from across the ocean. The freedom the book speaks of turns out to be freedom from one, quite definite, surveillance. But the ethical core does not dim from this. In the ninth part of the “Presentation,” the author reduces the plot to a question worthy of a parable. One heroine, the daughter of an Aztec priest, betrayed her country for a life in Europe. Another, a descendant of the Marquis Cortes, returned to free that country. “Why do people need wealth? To betray the country or to free it?”
VI. “Presentation”: Pushkin, the Empress, and the General
If the novella speaks of freedom in the language of plot, then the cycle “Presentation. Espionage. Encryptors and Chocolate” speaks of it in the language of testimony. These seventeen short parts are an almost unprecedented genre: an alloy of memoir, historical essay, sermon, and, let’s be honest, advertising. In them, the author provides three testimonies, arranged with the precision of an indictment.
The first testimony is Pushkin. Klepov returns to him again and again, to the phrase from a letter to his wife dated June 1834, written after the poet learned that his mail was being opened: “One can live very well without political freedom; without family inviolability it is impossible: penal servitude is incomparably better.” For the author, this is the key to the entire twenty-first century. The protection of a person’s private information must stand above all political freedoms, and no government in the world should control a person’s private information. “That is what real Freedom is, about which A. S. Pushkin wrote!” And what information penal servitude is, he adds, was perfectly shown by Orwell in “1984.”
The second testimony is a letter from Empress Alexandra Feodorovna to Nicholas II dated September 4, 1915: “Why don’t we have a telephone from your room to mine… It would be an exclusively private wire, and we could speak without fear that someone is eavesdropping.” In lines about a domestic request, Klepov sees a prophecy. When in March 1917, according to his version, the conspirators cut off the radio communication of the tsar’s train with Tsarskoye Selo, the empress could not warn her husband. The act of abdication was signed, and it cost the entire family their lives. Communication that no one protected becomes an instrument of fate here.
The third testimony is the bitter phrase of General Gennady Troshev from “The Chechen Diary of a Trench General”: “The miser pays twice. We paid in blood for the lack of encryptors.” Here abstract freedom acquires the weight of human life. The author tells how he gave the army three thousand encryptors. Combat commanders came to him with cognac and vodka, commemorated the dead, and said that “protection from everyone” was needed, because no one trusted anyone anymore. These are perhaps the strongest lines of the cycle: without pathos, almost protocol-like, and therefore terrifying.
Next to them is a passage that can easily be reproached to the author. A crypto-smartphone adorned with blue De Beers diamonds is declared a “symbol of Freedom,” and immediately after it follows the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire for people. The juxtaposition of a luxury item with a titan-martyr sounds awkward, and the reader has the right to smile. But the thought behind it is serious. Fire is “not a metaphor,” but warmth, food, tools, shelter. So for Klepov, a cipher is not a toy for the elite, but that which separates human life from life under surveillance.
VII. “Pushkin and Ilyin”: Freedom That Can Be Objected To
The most mature work of Klepov about freedom is “Pushkin and Ilyin. A Dialogue about Freedom and the Secret of Writing,” published in October 2026. Here the author for the first time does what the presentation cycle so lacked: he gives his favorite thought over to the judgment of a strong opponent.
Already the first line betrays literary honesty: this is an “imaginary dialogue,” the replicas, except for the highlighted quotes, are written by the author and “do not claim documentary reproduction of views.” The action takes place “outside of time,” in an office with goose quills. On the table lies a folder with someone else’s letters, rewritten by someone else’s hand.
Pushkin places the very letter to his wife before Ilyin and asks him to read it not from the phrase that “everyone copies out,” but from the beginning: “I didn’t write to you because the swinishness of the post office chilled me so much that I couldn’t take a pen in my hand.” And he immediately notes that inside the letter to Natasha is hidden an address to an outsider: “This is written not for you.” The perlustrator has intruded into the conversation, and the poet is forced to take part of the letter away from his wife in order to answer him.
Ilyin, a philosopher of law, does not argue with evil—he names it even more precisely than Pushkin. The public norm says one thing, the secret order does another, and “by this they destroy legal consciousness.” But he disputes the hierarchy of freedoms. How to preserve family inviolability if a person has no political means to limit power? Pushkin answers with a formula worth many treatises: “I do not live with my wife in order to exercise political rights. But political rights might have been needed by me so that no power would stand between me and my wife.”
Then sound the replicas for which this text is worth rereading. “The post office took my pen. It didn’t cut off my hand. It didn’t forbid paper. I myself could not write.” And another: “From this back room grows a man who is afraid of his own writing.” In two phrases, the mechanism that is today called the chilling effect of surveillance is described. Censorship does not have to forbid the word: it is enough that a person knows he is being read, and he will fall silent himself.
Most important is that Pushkin in Klepov does not win the argument, and Ilyin does not leave shamed. The philosopher’s last word sounds like a general conclusion: private inviolability must be a right, “and not a stroke of luck for a person who has not yet been of interest.” Here a thought that the author has repeatedly declared for the first time withstands a real objection. Therefore, it sounds more convincing than in all the declarations. Of the entire corpus, this is probably the best text for a first acquaintance with Klepov.
VIII. Intuition and Courage: Freedom That Cannot Be Computed
The most unexpected thing for a reader who comes for spy secrets is the insistence with which Klepov returns to intuition. This word and its derivatives appear in the corpus about three and a half thousand times, and the section devoted to it is one of the largest.
The logic here is deeper than it seems. A man who has spent his whole life building systems that cannot be cracked by computation knows better than others the limit of computation. One of the essays begins with the words: there are two unique professions in the world—illegal intelligence officers and test pilots of new military aircraft; their lives depend entirely on professional intuition, because sometimes the right decision must be made in an instant, when there is no time for reflection.
For Klepov, intuition is a mode of knowing that works where logic lacks time.
Hence the title of one of the longest texts of the last year: “Ulam’s Intuition. Not Becoming Slaves of Computation.” The mathematician who stood at the origins of the hydrogen bomb and the Monte Carlo method becomes here a symbol of the man who uses the machine but does not concede to it the right to think. Freedom here is threatened no longer by the secret police, but by one’s own laziness of thought: man risks voluntarily becoming a slave of computation. In the era of artificial intelligence, this thought sounds like a warning.
But intuition is not enough without courage. The essay “The Courage of Freedom” opens with the words of Hilaire Belloc about “timid rulers”: those who seem to govern are in fact limited by forces they do not name, and therefore fear exposure more than injustice. “In such a state, courage disappears first, and freedom follows it.” Klepov values Belloc because he, before becoming a thinker, served in a gun crew and knew the price of his words. Freedom for Klepov rests not on laws, but on people who are not afraid.
And in the polemical essay “Klepov and Prilepin—Two Types of Literary Freedom,” the author translates the debate about freedom into the language of the front: did a soldier in Donbass have secure communication? Could an officer give a command knowing that it would not be intercepted? In this question is the whole Klepov. Freedom for him begins not with a slogan, but with a communication channel that no one can tap.
IX. Art as Secret Writing
Why is the largest section devoted to painting and architecture? The answer is suggested by the frequency of names: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Dante, Dali, the Renaissance. For Klepov, a work of art is the same encrypted document, only the key to it is kept not in a safe, but in the centuries.
He writes about Michelangelo as “the secret of human intellect”; about “what is important about human laughter”; about the interaction of the energies of the Cosmos, the Earth, and the Brain; about the secrets of intelligence in the Arab East. At first glance, this is a strange neighborhood, but there is unity in it: a cathedral, a fresco, a resident’s dispatch, and a human smile obey one law—external form hides an internal code, and the one who can read it sees more than others.
Here Klepov is closest to classical essayism: he leads the reader through museum halls and temples like a guide who knows something about each canvas that the plaque by the frame is silent about. And here the theme of freedom sounds most quietly, but does not disappear: the great artist for Klepov is the one who managed to say his own thing while remaining under the supervision of the customer, the church, or the court.
X. Russia: A Reflection of a Lifetime
Russia is the most frequent of names and titles in the corpus: in the genitive case alone it is mentioned more than two thousand seven hundred times. The section “Reflections on the Fate of Russia” is comparatively small, but the Russian theme runs through all the others. “The Historical Path of Russia,” one of the early large texts, sets the tone: it is not a textbook and not a pamphlet, but an attempt to understand the country as a system that has its own vulnerabilities, its own keys, and its eternal encryption errors.
The through-line of Klepov’s Russian texts is power and its invisible mechanisms, and above all communication. The radio station of the tsar’s train, which was cut off at the decisive hour. Encryptors that were not enough in Chechnya. The post office that opened Pushkin’s letters. Russian history for Klepov is a series of unprotected channels, and for each of them the country paid dearly. For a former encryptor, this thought is natural: he saw how the channels through which decisions actually flow are constructed.
XI. Chocolate: The Sweet Code
In every large corpus there is a motif that no one expects. For Klepov, it is chocolate. The word appears in his texts more than six thousand times, more often than “cipher.” Chocolate is in the title of the book—”Espionage. Encryptors and Chocolate”; an extensive study is devoted to it: “Chocolate—a Powerful Remedy for Treating People”; there is “Mozart and the Emperor. Chocolate that Created Music”; and the most recent work, published on the day this essay was written, is called “Chocolate Biohacking in the White House.”
This can seem absurd only at first glance. Chocolate for Klepov is the third element of the triad that makes his prose recognizable: espionage is the secret, the encryptor is the tool, and chocolate is the human—his body, pleasure, weakness, that which does not lend itself to any cipher. When the author shows emperors, composers, and presidents through their passion for cocoa, history loses its marble coldness and becomes alive. It is no coincidence that Mozart also sounds in the first chapter of the book: freedom for Klepov is always a little sweet to the taste and musical to the ear.
XII. Transformation into a Storyteller
The late Klepov increasingly takes up artistic form. The cycle “The Code of God” opens with a scene that would not be shameful to place at the beginning of a good novel: evening Moscow of 1920 drowns in blue twilight, actress Olga Chekhova sits in a stuffy office on Kuznetsky Most, and before her is a man from Bokiy’s circle, dry, “with the thin fingers of a watchmaker and eyes that seemed to see the world through a five-power magnifying glass.” The researcher, accustomed to the document, has learned to write the light of a desk lamp. The document, however, does not disappear anywhere: it only retreats into the shadows, like a prompter, and suggests lines to the characters. Thus is born Klepov’s special genre—the historical novella, where every detail could have a footnote, but the author magnanimously spares the reader footnotes, leaving him the pleasure of guessing.
The range of themes also expands: “Hacking Linux and the Curse of von Neumann,” “A Cold Shower for the AI Agent Market,” articles about TSMC and the technological race. The twentieth-century encryptor continues the conversation begun twenty years ago—now about the digital Leviathan, which hides information with the same ancient passion, only in new codes.
XIII. How to Bind the Archive into Volumes
If this archive ever turns into a collected works, it will demand from the compiler the same discipline that an encryption table demands. The corpus, measured by a standard page of one thousand eight hundred characters, fits into approximately fifty volumes of two hundred A4 pages, and the logic of the sections itself suggests their order.
The first seventeen volumes are “Secret History”: ciphers, intelligence, power, from Byzantium to Stalingrad, from Pushkin in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs to the novel “The Code of God.” Volumes eighteen and nineteen are “Russia: Fate and Path.” From the twentieth to the twenty-fifth—”Intuition,” the philosophical heart of the collection. From the twenty-sixth to the thirty-seventh—the most extensive part, “Art”: painting, architecture, and the secrets of the great masters. Volumes thirty-eight and thirty-nine—travel notes, reviews, satire, and small genres. Finally, volumes forty through fifty—publicism, the author’s responses to the times, from the first notes of 2008 to the present day.
Within each volume, the texts follow by section and chronology: the reader sees how a thought was born, went deeper, and returned years later, already enriched by experience. Such a collection would be not just a sum of articles, but a map of one mind, on which both the highways and the paths are clearly visible. And the main highway on this map would turn out to be freedom.
XIV. An Honest Account
The author’s political sympathies are unambiguous: he sees the threat to freedom primarily in the West and speaks much less often about surveillance at home.
And yet there is something in this prose that many smoother authors lack. In it there is one hard-won thought, carried through twenty years and almost two thousand texts. Freedom is not an abstraction and not a slogan. It is the opportunity to say a word to one person so that a third does not hear it.
Conclusion. The Key to the Key
So what, in the end, does this house with one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven rooms store? At first glance, an encyclopedia of secrets: Pushkin’s ciphers, the betrayals of Byzantium, the fire of Moscow, intelligence residencies, the riddles of Michelangelo, the chocolate of emperors. If, however, one reads the corpus as a whole, as one reads a long intercepted message, the open text turns out to be surprisingly simple and human.
Klepov has spent his whole life writing about one thing: the world is not what it seems, but it is knowable, and man has the right to secrecy. The secret of another’s power exists in order to be unraveled. The secret of man exists in order to be kept. For the first, one needs knowledge, logic, and intuition that no machine can replace. For the second—a cipher and courage.
In the Pushkin letter that Klepov quotes more often than any other source, there is a phrase usually overlooked: “This is written not for you; but here is what I write for you.” In it lies his entire philosophy. Free is the one who decides for whom his words are. Unfree is the one who is forced to write every line with an eye on the invisible reader over his shoulder. The encryptor, about whom Klepov writes with such passion, ultimately serves one thing: to return to man the right to write “for you.”
And perhaps the most accurate key to the entire corpus lies not in the sections about espionage and not in the multi-part studies, but in the small room with a single poem, which is called “Poems of My Mom.” Any encryption system ultimately protects someone’s life, love, memory. The man who built protection for sixty-four states left in plain sight, without any cipher, the most precious thing. In this, it seems, lies the main lesson of his prose: the real message is always written in plain text; one only needs to learn to see it.