kremvax

/krem-vaks/ Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the

Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen

with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was 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 truth and

demonstrating that the hackish sense of humour transcends

cultural barriers. Mr. Antonov also contributed 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

bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three

days the Soviet UUCP network centreed 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.

[Jargon File]