Everyone has secrets and secrets. People and organizations. But the most ambitious and serious are the secrets of countries or state secrets.
In films about spies and scouts, you can often see how the main character, returning from a mission in enemy territory, delivers to his superiors a folder with a large red stamp “Top Secret” across the cover. Such shots cannot but cause a smile from people who really have access to state secrets - it is depicted in a very ostentatious and grotesque way, but when asked why it does not look like real documents, they fall silent - a secret, moreover, a state secret.
From ancient times
In Russia, from time immemorial, the tsars, during correspondence, diplomatic or within the country, tried in various ways to keep the contents of their messages secret. One of the oldest methods was sealing wax, which was used to seal the envelope and the monarch applied his personal seal, which he wore on his finger in the form of a ring. From here, by the way, came the name "seal" for such rings.
In addition to seals on sealing wax, messages could be protected from prying eyes with the help of a conditional cipher, the key to which only the monarchs knew by his confidant. Another common method was the use of special ink, which manifested itself if the dispatch was heated or processed with a special composition.
Secrets of the Land of Soviets
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Time passed, the old ways of classifying information became outdated. States grew, more secret information appeared, which could no longer be written in a letter, and for normal functioning it was required to divide and systematize secret information.
The times of the Soviet Union should be considered perhaps the most bureaucratic in terms of information secrecy. In that era, there were as many as five degrees of information secrecy.
Each of them had its own corresponding neck. The weakest degree of secrecy was classified as "For Official Use" (DSP). Then there were the stamps “Secret” “Top secret”, “Special importance” and “Special folder”. The latter was the highest in the hierarchy, such a stamp denoted information from the Politburo, the Council of Ministers and directly the President of the USSR.
It is reliably known that now the KGB archives contain 33 sets of documents with such a degree of secrecy. It is known for certain that Stalin, Beria, Voroshilov, Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev had personalized special folders. They, too, are still kept in the archives.
Secrets of the RF
In modern Russia, we went by way of simplification and now there are only three types of secrecy “Secret”, “Top secret” and “Special importance”. State secrets are distributed depending on the degree and scale of importance.
To make it clear, let us explain using the example of military secrets.
Defense schemes of individual military units will be kept under the heading "Secret". Location, distribution of forces at rifle lines, firing sectors, etc.
"Top secret" is already a larger-scale mystery. This could be a plan for the deployment of military units of an entire district, with all that it implies. Communication schemes, interaction between the branches of the armed forces. To make it clearer, a military district is a military-administrative unit of a territory. It can be compared with federal districts, but it cannot be equalized - they have different borders. For example, the Western Military District includes parts of the territories of the Central Federal and Northwestern Federal Districts.
And under the heading "Top Secret" were even more secret documents. This is already a correspondence between the command of military districts and the General Staff, and maybe even of real military operations.
In the civilian sphere, the division of secrecy follows the same principle, only issues are resolved of a peaceful nature. "Secret" may be some scientific information from a department of a research institute where a separate part or assembly is being developed. “Top Secret” will concern entire units, and “Special Importance” will affect the entire research project.
It cannot be ruled out that there are even higher degrees of secrecy, however, in all likelihood, even their presence and classification is a state secret. Reasoning on this score will already be from the field of conjectures and assumptions.