2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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kremvax
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/kremvaks/ , n. [from the then-large number of Usenet VAXen with names of
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the form foovax ] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin,
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announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by
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Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet
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Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the
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hoax were moskvax and kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many
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April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security
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against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron
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Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time. In fact, it was only six years
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later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su , joined Usenet. Some
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readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another
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prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from
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there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently
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in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by
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blandly asserting that he was a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have
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the domain's gateway site named kremvax , thus neatly turning fiction into
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fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural
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barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for
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this lexicon. ESR] In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax
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became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the
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bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet
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UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for
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many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on
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internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate
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transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and
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eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those
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hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to
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maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer
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networking were proved devastatingly accurate and the original kremvax joke
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became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of glasnost
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and perestroika made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to
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the West.
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