kremvax

kremvax /krem-vaks/ n.  [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.