Who is Sukhotin?

In 1973 the French journal "T.A. Informations" published a 40-page translation from the Russian of a monograph by a B.V. Sukhotin, apparently a scientist with the Russian Language Institute in Moscow, entitled "Méthode de déchiffrage, outil de recherche en linguistique" ("Deciphement Method[s], A Linguistic Research Tool"). The translator and the editors, however, say neither when nor where the original was published. Footnotes refer to publications by Sukhotin in 1962, 1963, and 1966, and one forthcoming publication, undated.

University library on-line catalogues I consulted list no work by him, and articles of his that could be obtained in the original Russian give no further references to his own works.

In 1977 Joachim Boy did a Ph.D. at Bochum University on Sukhotin's vowel-recognition algorithm, but his bibliography mentions only works by Sukhotin already referenced in T.A. Informations.

"Papers in Computational Linguistics" published in 1976 by Mouton, edited by Ferencz Papp and Gyorgy Szépe, two Hungarian specialists in the field, contains a paper by an A.Tretiakoff, which presents an alternative implementation of another of Sukhotin's algorithms, but makes no mention of him whatsoever. Tretiakoff (who is French) does not seem to have been aware of Sukhotin's work at all. Nor is Sukhotin's name found anywhere in the bibliographies of those "Papers in Computational Linguistics".

However, a 1973 German translation of a book by A.V. Gladkij and I.A. Mel'cuk gives a reference to a 130-page article by Sukhotin entitled "Metody deshifrovki soobshchennij" (Methods for the Decipherment of Information) in "Problemy mezhzvezdnoj svjazi" (Problems of Interstellar Contact) published in 1969 in Moscow. The 1983 English translation of the same book gives no reference to that article, but to a later paper, very short (six pages): "Optimizacjonnye algoritmy lingvisticheskoj deshifrovky" (Optimization Algorithms for Linguistic Decipherment) published in 1975 in the journal "Nauchno-tekhnicheskaja informacija" (Scientific and Technical Information).

Sukhotin is no linguist. He uses Latin to demonstrate most algorithms but makes very wrong statements about Latin. For instance, he claims that "the personal form of a verb indicates without fail that the clause contains a substantive in the nominative" and that "an adjective in the dative indicates a substantive in the dative" (T.A. Informations, 1973/2, p.25).

He is very probably not a computer scientist either. The algorithm for identifying vowel from consonant symbols in an unknown language transcribed in an unknown phonetic system is extremely inefficient as he describes it and is very easily simplified and speeded up.

Who is he? Who was he? Even his first name appears nowhere in articles and references. Whoever he was his works were ignored.