Krovatka.Ru

» see krovatka.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1999 I was on a 33.6k modem in Ankara, in Turkish, mostly on ICQ. About two thousand kilometers north of me there was a chat with twenty-five rooms that a very large share of the Russian-speaking internet passed through at some point in its life, and I never read a line of it. Krovatka was Cyrillic all the way down. That was enough of a wall, and it is the honest reason this grave is research rather than memory.

The code came first. Artyom Podstreshny wrote the chat in 1996 and ran it on servers belonging to Radio Moscow State University, at chat.radio-msu.net, before it had a name anybody would remember. On 29 september 1997 it went up as Кроватка.Ru on its own domain, with Sergei Kirichenko and Yuri Mednitsky working on it alongside him. The Russian press counted twenty-four years when it closed, dating from the code rather than the domain, and both counts are defensible.

The name means small bed, or cot. It was chosen for the joke and it stuck for a quarter of a century, long enough that a generation of people who met their spouses there had to explain it to their children.

~ the record ~

~ what it was like inside ~

Twenty-five channels, and the names tell you most of what you need: Основная for the main room, Флирт for flirting, Кому за 30 for people over thirty who did not want to be in the first two. There was a profanity filter called the матотестер, and a rating system so users could mark each other up or down. Moderation was collective and elected, which meant the room decided who policed it. In 1998 that was an unusual amount of governance to hand to a chat room and it is roughly the model every large online community arrived at twenty years later.

The person who held it together for most of that time went by Sodom, then Admin, then Larin. Andrey Kulya was not the original programmer but he became the site's ideologist and, once Hit.ru took the project over in 2005, the reason it kept getting servers. By then the traffic was well past its high point but still substantial, around 170,000 visitors a month by Openstat's count, which for a text chat with no app and no feed in the 2010s is a strange and rather moving number.

~ the day it died ~

It stopped on 31 august 2020. There was no acquisition and no lawsuit and no press release, just the front page replaced with the years of its life and one sentence underneath: это было лучшее время. It was the best time. Russian outlets ran it as the end of an era, which is usually a lazy headline and in this case was simply the news.

A fan rebuild appeared at koika.su in september 2020, same layout and same feel, no branding, entirely new code underneath. Then in late 2024 a line appeared on the original front page reading Larin 1975-2024. The chat had already been dark for four years and somebody still had the keys, and used them once, to say that the man who kept it alive had died.

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