Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

by Laura Spinney

  After the spike of cases of ispanka in May, the numbers fell back in June and July. Carpe diem was the motto of Odessans that summer, and the universe seemed to conspire with them to help them forget their troubles. In June, finding himself in the occupied city, an Austrian officer commented on their vivacity, carelessness and gusto, and in the same month Vera Kholodnaya arrived in town. The twenty-four-year-old actress was the undisputed queen of the Russian screen, as famous for her grey, hypnotic gaze as for her roles as beautiful, betrayed women. She had come as part of a mass exodus of artists from Moscow and Petrograd, where political and economic chaos were stifling the film industry. Adoring crowds greeted her, and her gaze rested on them all through August as her latest film, The Woman Who Invented Love, played in cinemas. Rumours about the star’s suspected involvement in the underground provided another marvellous distraction. In Kiev, according to the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, it was said that she ‘had recruited her own army like Joan of Arc and, riding a white charger at the head of her victorious troops, had entered the town of Priluki and proclaimed herself Empress of Ukraine’.8

  The illusion of glamour and romance was shattered on 31 August by a series of powerful explosions at a munitions depot in the poor suburb of Bugaevka. The alleged work of White Russians, who wanted to prevent the planned handover of artillery shells to the Germans and Austrians, the explosions destroyed most of the buildings in a seven-kilometre strip that included granaries, a sugar factory and hundreds of homes. Reuters reported that the death toll was ‘limited’, but thousands were left without food or shelter, exposed to the elements, and in the first days of September, cases of ispanka began to trickle and then flood into the Jewish Hospital.

  By now, besides ispanka, the city was also dealing with cholera–which had arrived on an Austrian troopship in August–and the countrywide epidemic of typhus. The German and Austrian occupiers were no more interested in addressing the city’s health issues than they were in addressing its crime problem. Their sole objective was to requisition the region’s grain stores, to send back to their starving compatriots, and they ensured the minimum of security to get that job done. As a result, this city that was so practised in the art of quarantine–and that had tracked the flu since May–had no strategy in place for containing it. Cafés and theatres remained open, crowds filled them seeking oblivion or at least temporary distraction, and Yaponchik’s gangsters raided their homes while they were out–or even while they were in.

  Bardakh did what he could. Chairing a packed meeting of the Society of Odessa Doctors, he told them that their individual efforts to fight flu among the poor and the working class were of little use in the absence of a city-wide containment programme. Echoing Copeland in New York, he said that closing schools was only advisable if there was evidence to show that children were contracting the disease at school, rather than at home, and he pointed out that the expression ‘infection through the air’ had been widely misunderstood. He knew that in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city, homes were dark, damp and overcrowded–havens for germs–and that even the well-off and educated were suspicious of fresh air. It must be hammered home, he told the assembled doctors, that though one should avoid people who were coughing, fresh air was vital for preserving good health.

  Given that there was no ban on public meetings in the city, Bardakh seems to have decided that he might as well continue with his programme of public education, perhaps with the aim of stimulating a ‘bottom-up’ response to the epidemic. That autumn, he and other leading doctors spoke in cinemas, theatres, synagogues, the famous Pryvoz food market–even the city’s opera house, during an interval in Faust. He reassured his listeners that ispanka was not some new and terrifying form of plague, as many feared, but a virulent form of influenza, and that one could protect oneself from it–notably by ventilating one’s home. Some did not want to hear such rational explanations, and on 1 October, Odessa bore witness to a black wedding.

  A shvartze khasene, to give it its Yiddish name, is an ancient Jewish ritual for warding off lethal epidemics, that involves marrying two people in a cemetery. According to tradition, the bride and groom must be chosen from among the most unfortunate in society, ‘from amongst the most frightful cripples, degraded paupers, and lamentable ne’er-do-wells as were in the district’, as the nineteenth-century Odessan writer, Mendele Mocher Sforim, explained in his fictional description of such a wedding.

  Following a wave of black weddings in Kiev and other cities, a group of Odessan merchants had got together in September, when both the cholera and ispanka epidemics were waxing, and decided to organise their own. Some in the Jewish community disapproved strongly of what they considered a pagan and even blasphemous practice, but the city rabbi gave his blessing, and so did the mayor, who deemed it no threat to public order. Scouts were dispatched to the Jewish cemeteries to search for two candidates among the beggars of alms who haunted those places, and a suitably colourful and dishevelled bride and groom were chosen. Once they had agreed to be married in their ‘workplace’, the merchants set about raising funds to pay for the festivities.

  Many thousands gathered to witness the ceremony, which took place at three o’clock in the afternoon in the First Jewish Cemetery. Afterwards, a procession headed for the city centre accompanied by musicians. When it arrived at the hall where the reception was to be held, the sheer number of people pressing in to get a look at the newlyweds prevented them from climbing down from their carriage. Eventually the crowd fell back and the couple were able to enter the hall, where their nuptials were celebrated with a feast and they were showered with expensive gifts.9

  In 1910, the Jewish Hospital had been described as the wealthiest hospital in peripheral Russia; now notices appeared in local newspapers asking for donations to keep it afloat. At the children’s hospital, meanwhile, overcrowding bred tragedies of its own. ‘Is the nurse guilty?’ demanded a headline in the Odesskiy listok (Odessa Sheet), one of the city’s main daily newspapers. A feverish child had died after falling from a second-floor balcony, and a nurse had been blamed. The author of the article felt inclined to pardon her: there were seventy-five sick children on two floors, at the hospital, and only two nurses to look after them. The nurses were working around the clock. They couldn’t possibly keep track of all of the children, all of the time.

  Stefansky monitored the epidemic throughout the autumn. Though most people saw out their illness at home, he judged on the basis of hospitalisations that the autumn wave peaked in the city around the end of September. On 8 October, Bardakh announced that the epidemic had passed its peak, allowing the organisers of the black wedding to claim that their efforts had paid off. He predicted that cholera would die out with the arrival of the cold weather, and that Spanish flu would last only a little longer–and he was right on both counts. When Odessans learned from their newspapers, in the second week of October, that the British prime minister David Lloyd George had been laid low with ispanka, someone suggested organising a black wedding for him. A local rabbi responded that there wasn’t any point, since the ritual only worked in situ, not at a distance.

  In November the armistice was signed and the Germans and Austrians left the city. Nationalist Ukrainian forces took power in Kiev, but for several weeks different factions vied for control of Odessa and Yaponchik’s gangsters continued to exploit the power vacuum. Electricity was intermittent, trams no longer ran and fuel was in short supply, but the hospitals continued to function despite haemorrhaging staff. Doctors thought that ispanka was behind them. On 22 November, Bardakh told the Society of Odessa Doctors that it had been worse than the epidemic of the 1890s, the so-called ‘Russian’ flu. He added that the Spanish variety had distinguished itself by the abundance of nervous and respiratory complications that had accompanied it. In December the French arrived and, with the help of White Russian forces, cleared Odessa of Ukrainian troops. The city was now so swollen with refugees that it was like a ‘packed bus’, and because it was cut off f
rom internal supply lines, food prices rocketed.10 Soup kitchens were opened for the poor. The Zionist Pinhas Rutenberg, who passed through Odessa in early 1919, remembered it as a time of ‘insanely growing expense, hunger, cold, darkness, pestilence, bribery, robbery, raids, killings’.11

  Despite or because of an imminent sense of doom, Odessans continued to pursue their pleasure, and in the midst of all the killing and carousing, the Spanish flu returned. In early February, Vera Kholodnaya lent her star aura to a charity concert at the Club for Literature and Arts, to raise money for unemployed artists.12 With her co-star, Ossip Runitsch, she performed an extract from their film, Last Tango. It was cold in the club, the audience huddled inside their furs, but she wore only a flimsy evening gown. As she was returning to her hotel after the show, the horse pulling her carriage stumbled, and she had to walk the rest of the way. The next day, she was ill. None of the illustrious doctors called to her bedside could save her, and she died eight days after her last performance. Her family requested that she be embalmed, so that her body could be transported back to her home city of Moscow, once–as they believed would happen–the old regime had been restored. The pathologist who ran the morgue at the Old City Hospital, M. M. Tizengausen, performed the honours, entering ispanka as the cause of death on her death certificate.

  On 18 February, two days after Kholodnaya’s death, the traditional Orthodox service of prayers for the departed was held at the city cathedral. The crowd was enormous, and it included a number of Jews. A struggle ensued: neither the presiding priest nor certain members of the actress’s circle wanted them there. They refused to leave, however: they wanted to pay their respects to the beautiful star who had delighted them too. A more senior priest settled the matter when he ordered the service to go ahead and the Jews be allowed to stay.

  Her funeral took place the next day, also in the cathedral, and it was captured on camera–as was only fitting in the temporary capital of the Russian film industry. One journalist who was present wrote later that he had felt as if he were on the set of a movie in which the queen of the screen was starring. He recalled the last film he had seen of hers, and how the audience had burst into applause at her first appearance. The cathedral was once again full, and crowds lined the route to the First Christian Cemetery, where Kholodnaya was to be placed in the crypt of the cemetery church, pending the move to Moscow. Her open coffin was carried by some of her admirers, and inside it she lay in the dress she had worn in one of her most popular films, a tragic romance called U Kamina (By the Fireside).

  Kholodnaya’s remains never reached Moscow, and at some point they vanished. The most likely explanation is that they were still in the church at the First Christian Cemetery when it was destroyed in the 1930s, and the site asphalted over. But the mysterious disappearance fuelled the many conspiracy theories that surrounded her death, and that still surround it to this day. According to one such theory, she was poisoned by white lilies–her favourite flower–brought by a French diplomat who suspected her of spying for the Reds. Within a few days of her funeral, the film of it was being shown in the same cinemas that had shown The Woman Who Invented Love the previous summer, while Paustovsky wrote that Yaponchik’s bandits, sated with looting, crowded Odessa’s nightclubs, ‘singing the heart-rending lay of Vera Kholodnaya’s death’.

  The war and the plagues over, the indefatigable Bardakh turned his home into the local headquarters of a nationwide campaign to eradicate typhoid and cholera. He continued to conduct his own research, despite the ongoing shortages, adapting as always to circumstance. ‘The winter of 1921–2 was harsh in Odessa, the laboratories were not heated,’ he wrote. ‘As a result, it was only possible to study the bacteria that could develop under very low temperatures.’13 Under his guidance, the city’s Novorossiya University became one of the Soviet Union’s leading centres for bacteriology.

  After his death in 1929, he was buried in Odessa’s Second Jewish Cemetery, ‘among the Ashkenazis, Gessens and Efrussis–the lustrous misers and philosophical bons vivants, the creators of wealth and Odessa anecdotes’, as Babel described it. The cemetery was demolished in the 1970s, and its occupants consigned to oblivion. Only a few were spared after their families protested, and they were transferred to the Second Christian Cemetery. Among them was Bardakh, whose grave now stands next to that of another prominent Odessan Jew in a sea of Orthodox crosses. The other Jew was Mendele Mocher Sforim, the writer who, in his Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, described a black wedding conducted in the belief that ‘the knot tied amidst the graves of the parish dead, the contagion would at last stop’.

  10

  Good Samaritans

  Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish. Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself. In general, however, people did not do this. They reached out to each other, showing what psychologists refer to as ‘collective resilience’.1

  ‘That there was a great many robberies and wicked practices committed even in this dreadful time I do not deny,’ wrote Daniel Defoe in 1722, describing the 1665 outbreak of plague in London. But he went on to describe how ‘The inhabitants of the villages adjacent would, in a pity, carry them food, and set it at a distance, that they might fetch it, if they were able.’2 A similar pattern was observed during the Spanish flu. There were certainly examples of antisocial behaviour. One Major Wells, a police officer in south-west Tanzania, for example, reported an increase in crime and cattle theft which he attributed to the pandemic, and reports are legion of profiteering when food, medicines or coffins ran short.3 But on the whole, these were the exceptions that proved the rule.

  The discovery that most people behave ‘well’ in a crisis may warm our hearts, but it reveals a fundamental irrationality in the way we think about epidemics. When the French pacifist and writer Romain Rolland–a man who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915–developed the symptoms of Spanish flu while living at a hotel on Lake Geneva, the hotel staff refused to enter his room. If it hadn’t been for the devoted attentions of his elderly mother, who happened to be visiting him, he might not have survived. We are tempted to condemn the hotel staff for their callous attitude, but in fact their actions probably limited the spread of the disease, and perhaps even saved lives. They unwittingly imposed a very small, very localised sanitary cordon around the unfortunate Rolland.

  Doctors tell us to keep away from infected individuals during an outbreak, yet we do the opposite. Why? Fear of divine retribution might be one factor, especially in earlier eras. All three major monotheistic religions–Islam, Judaism and Christianity–insist on the importance of family, charity and respect for others. Fear of social ostracisation once the sickness has passed might be another. Or perhaps it is simple inertia: in normal times, or even in the context of a different kind of disaster–an earthquake, say–to help others might be the most appropriate response. It’s only contagion that turns that rationale on its head, but we are too slow, or perhaps too dazed, to work it out. Psychologists suggest an even more intriguing explanation, however. They think that collective resilience springs from the way people perceive themselves in life-threatening situations: they no longer identify as individuals, but as members of a group–a group that is defined by being victims of the disaster. Helping others within that group, according to this theory, is still a form of selfishness, just selfishness based on a broader definition of self. It is the idea that we are all in this together. And it makes no difference if the disaster is an earthquake or a flu pandemic–only in one case the response is rational, and in the other it is not.

  Take health workers, for example. These pe
ople are in the front line of any epidemic, and governments often worry that they will desert their posts as soon as they see that their own lives are in danger, and renege on their ‘duty to treat’.4 The Spanish flu showed the opposite: most doctors stayed at work until they were no longer physically able to, or until they posed a risk to their patients. ‘Then the flu hit us,’ wrote the poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, in Rutherford, New Jersey. ‘We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of us died, others caught the thing, and we hadn’t a thing that was effective in checking that potent poison that was sweeping the world.’5

  ‘We were all in the same boat, tossed about on pestilent seas, sick at heart and frustrated,’ wrote Maurice Jacobs, a physician in Hull, England. ‘More than one doctor expressed the intention of committing some minor crime with the object of being locked up for the duration of the epidemic. Needless to say the idea was never carried out in practice.’6 In Japan, volunteers from the Tokyo Doctors’ Medical Association gave free vaccinations at night to the poor and the burakumin (outcasts), while in Baden, Germany, the Catholic Church set up a programme to train young women as nurses. These women, who were required to make home visits, apparently took up their duties with enthusiasm, because in 1920 an anonymous German doctor complained about overzealous Catholic nurses exceeding their competence and being a nuisance to rural doctors.