[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.
