During the Russian Civil War and its accompanying famine, louse-borne typhus killed an estimated 1.5 million people in Russia and the surrounding territories between 1918 and 1921. Lenin famously declared that 'either socialism will defeat the louse, or the louse will defeat socialism,' recognising the political consequences of the epidemic. The conditions of military conflict, mass displacement, and the collapse of public health infrastructure created ideal conditions for the body louse to flourish, making the epidemic one of the worst in modern history.

The Russian Civil War typhus epidemic found its literary voice in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and other poets of the Silver Age who survived or witnessed the catastrophic intersection of revolution, war, and epidemic disease. The louse's role in the Civil War entered Soviet literary and political discourse and shaped the social poetry of the 1920s, which grappled with the biological and social conditions of the new revolutionary state. Lenin's famous phrase gave the body louse a central place in Soviet political rhetoric and imagery.