Russian Flu Pandemic (1889-1890): The First Modern Pandemic

The Russian flu was a worldwide epidemic of respiratory illness that swept the globe between 1889 and 1890, with further waves for several years. It is often described as the first modern pandemic because it travelled along railways and steamship routes and was tracked almost daily by newspapers and telegraph. It killed an estimated one million people, and its cause is still debated.

Background: a connected world

By the late 1880s Europe and North America were linked by dense railway networks, fast steamships and the telegraph. Cities had grown rapidly, and millions of people travelled for work and trade. These connections created conditions in which an infection could move across continents in weeks instead of months.

Influenza, known in English as “the grippe” from the French la grippe, was a familiar illness, but there had been no major pandemic since the 1840s. Doctors had no means of identifying viruses, which were not discovered until the 1890s and not seen until much later. Bacteriology, led by figures such as Robert Koch, was at its height, and many expected a bacterium to be found behind the disease.

Origins and spread

Reports of an outbreak came from Bukhara, in Russian Central Asia, in May 1889. Whether this was the true starting point is uncertain, since cases elsewhere may have gone unrecorded. The disease was noticed on a large scale in St Petersburg in October and November 1889, which is why it became known as the Russian flu.

From St Petersburg it spread with remarkable speed. It reached Berlin, Vienna and Paris by late November and December 1889, and London in December. Studies of hospital and mortality records suggest that most major European cities were hit within about five to six weeks of the outbreak in the Russian capital.

The disease crossed the Atlantic aboard ships and was reported in the United States by mid-December 1889. It reached Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia over the following months. Contemporary observers noticed that it moved along railway lines and shipping routes, appearing first in ports and junctions before spreading to the countryside.

Symptoms and toll

The illness typically struck suddenly, with fever, headache, aching limbs, exhaustion and a cough. Most people recovered within a week or two, though many complained of lasting fatigue and depression. Deaths were mainly caused by complications such as pneumonia, especially among the elderly and people with existing lung or heart disease.

A large share of the population fell ill. Contemporary surveys in some cities suggested that a quarter to a half or more of residents caught the disease during the first wave. Schools, offices, factories and post offices closed or ran short of staff, and in some cities undertakers struggled to keep up.

Estimates of the death toll are uncertain because many countries did not keep good records. The figure most often cited is around one million deaths worldwide. The case fatality rate was low by the standards of the 1918 pandemic, often estimated at around 0.1 to 0.3 per cent, but the sheer number of cases made the total heavy.

The age pattern of deaths was typical of seasonal influenza rather than of the later 1918 pandemic. Young children and especially the elderly were most at risk, while healthy young adults usually recovered. Excess deaths were often recorded as pneumonia, bronchitis or heart disease rather than influenza, which makes national totals difficult to calculate even where good records exist.

Recurrent waves

The pandemic did not end in 1890. Further waves struck in 1891 and 1892, and some were more deadly in particular places than the first. In Britain, for example, the later waves caused more deaths than that of 1889-1890.

One prominent victim of the later waves was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale and grandson of Queen Victoria, who died of influenza and pneumonia on 14 January 1892. His death caused great public grief and changed the British line of succession. In the first wave the dowager German empress Augusta, widow of Wilhelm I, had died on 7 January 1890.

The search for a cause

Doctors and officials studied the pandemic intensively. In Britain the Local Government Board asked H. Franklin Parsons to prepare a detailed report, published in 1891, which mapped the spread of the disease and concluded that it was passed from person to person rather than carried by weather or bad air.

In 1892 the German bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer, a pupil of Koch, announced that he had found the cause: a small bacterium he called Bacillus influenzae, now known as Haemophilus influenzae. For decades many scientists accepted this. Only in the 1930s was it shown that influenza is caused by a virus and that Pfeiffer’s bacterium was a secondary infection.

The true agent of the 1889 pandemic remains unknown, since no tissue samples survive. Studies of antibodies in elderly people, carried out in the twentieth century, suggested an influenza A virus of the H2 or H3 subtype. In 2005 Belgian researchers proposed a different explanation: that the coronavirus OC43, now a cause of common colds, may have jumped from cattle to humans around 1890. Both ideas remain hypotheses.

Consequences and legacy

The Russian flu was the first pandemic to be followed in near real time by the press. Newspapers printed daily reports on its progress from city to city, and the telegraph allowed officials to compare notes. This made it a public event in a way earlier epidemics had not been, and it fuelled both anxiety and a boom in patent remedies.

Its rapid spread showed that quarantine at borders could do little against a fast-moving respiratory disease. Public health officials began to think about influenza as an international problem that required international data. The pandemic also helped prompt studies of how infections move through populations, work that later fed into epidemiology.

Historians and scientists often compare it with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which was far deadlier, and with the COVID-19 pandemic. The parallels with COVID-19, including the possibility of a coronavirus cause and the role of global travel, renewed interest in the 1889 pandemic after 2020.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1889, May: An outbreak of influenza-like illness is reported in Bukhara, in Russian Central Asia.
• 1889, October-November: A major epidemic breaks out in St Petersburg.
• 1889, December: The disease sweeps through Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London and reaches the United States.
• 1890, 7 January: The dowager German empress Augusta dies during the epidemic.
• 1890, early months: The pandemic spreads to Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
• 1891: H. Franklin Parsons’s report on the epidemic is published in Britain; a second wave strikes.
• 1892, 14 January: Prince Albert Victor dies of influenza and pneumonia.
• 1892: Richard Pfeiffer announces his “influenza bacillus”, later shown not to be the cause.

Why it matters

The Russian flu showed how quickly disease could travel in a world tied together by railways, steamships and telegraph. It killed around a million people, reshaped thinking about influenza as an international threat and remains a scientific puzzle that continues to inform research on pandemics.