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.
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kyrka /chur'ka/ n.
[Swedish] See feature
key.