kremvax

/kremvaks/ , n. [from the then-large number of Usenet VAXen with names of
the form foovax ] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin,
announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by
Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet
Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the
hoax were moskvax and kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many
April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security
against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron
Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time. In fact, it was only six years
later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su , joined Usenet. Some
readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another
prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from
there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently
in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by
blandly asserting that he was a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have
the domain's gateway site named kremvax , thus neatly turning fiction into
fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural
barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for
this lexicon. ESR] In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax
became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the
bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet
UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for
many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on
internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate
transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and
eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those
hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to
maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer
networking were proved devastatingly accurate and the original kremvax joke
became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of glasnost
and perestroika made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to
the West.

