[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.
