/krem-vaks/ Originally, a fictitious
Usenet site at the Kremlin, nam
ed like the then large number of
Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announc
ed on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originat
ed there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forg
ed by Piet Beertema as an April Fool' s joke. Other fictitious sites mention
ed in the hoax were moskvax and
kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool' s forgeries perpetrat
ed on
Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that
Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seem
ed so totally absurd at the time. In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, join
ed Usenet. Some readers ne
eded 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, referr
ed to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitt
ed some cr
edulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arrang
ed to have the domain' s gateway site *nam
ed* kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into truth and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humour transcends cultural barriers. Mr. Antonov also contribut
ed some Russian-language material for the
Jargon File. In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic centre of the anti-communist resistance during the bungl
ed hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centre
ed 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 includ
ed imm
ediate 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-load
ed information in the age of computer networking were prov
ed 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. [
Jargon File]
In addition suitable contents:
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