[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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {AFJ}{kgbvax}{Shub-Internet}]