Demographic Losses from «Spanish» Flu in Revolutionary Russia

Abstract

The events of the autumn of 1918 and the winter of 1919, associated with the ≪Spanish≫ disease in Russia, are little known not only abroad, but also in Russia itself. Both the clinical community and medical historians did not examine this topic, which is a source of speculation. The citation is clearly strange: while no one cites archival documents from that period, almost all sources (from infectologists to journalists), however, indicate striking demographic losses from the Spanish flu. The author conducted an archival search and analysis of events according to the original Soviet documents for this particular period. It was observed how the events of that pandemic looked like more than a century ago, not how they are seen today from the digital future. It was also concluded that the statistics of mortality and demographic losses from the Spanish flu were sharply overestimated