[anovikov]

Even in Soviet Russia, when things were so dire people used to die in scores for a multitude of reasons in a country that was defeated in WWI, ravaged by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary gangs of all sort, with epidemics of cholera, typhus, and multitude of other diseases running entirely unchecked due to complete collapse of all institutions of organised society, the Spanish flu is remembered. Not as a "worst thing ever" it was in the U.S., but it is remembered.