Reviews: Kalmre


REVIEWS 

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Kalmre, Eda. The Human Sausage Factory: A Study of Post-war 
Rumour in Tartu (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, 
Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics, 34). Amsterdam-
New York, NY: Rodopi, 2013. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 180 pp. 
Price $65.00 (paper). ISBN 978-90-420-3717-5. 
 

The author discusses the cultural and mental landscape of 
Estonia after World War II – a small country which experienced 
war, three occupations (by USSR, Nazis, and again USSR), national 
humiliation, purges and social division. The 1947 case of persisting 
rumors about a small sausage factory in Tartu processing human 
flesh and selling it on the market tells us how grand narratives of 
catastrophe develops in a particular cultural and colonial 
perspective. As the author posits: “The aim of this study is not to 
reconstruct the historical truth of the attempt to find out whether this 
atrocious blood crime indeed took place in Tartu” (24), but to study 
the tradition as a process. 

Anxiety, frustration, humiliation, post-traumatic syndrome, 
everyday violence found symbolic outlet in popular legend that in 
conditions of a lack of information (which Mark Bloc saw as a 
trigger of all rumors) released emotions and helped ordinary people, 
whom James Scott called “subaltern” and “weak” to have a feeling 
of gaining control over the situation. The narrative of cannibalism 
embodied in the rumor Eda Kalmre placed in a global and temporal 
context of many regions’ lore and Estonian lore from past centuries. 
In this important point of correlation between many folkloric 
narratives, the study could benefit from the classical work by Sir 
James George Frazer The Golden Bough, but, alas, it is not used in 
this book. The study really profits from comparison of an Estonian 
tale about a sausage factory with plenty of different rumors that 
circulated both in Europe and the Soviet Union, for example talks of 
cannibalism in besieged Leningrad.  

The book approaches the legend from the ethnocentric, gender, 
and anthropological perspectives. Beside these fruitful elaborations, 
as a historian, I was especially interested in the political component 
of many horror rumors centered on the Soviet security police 
(misnamed KGB by the author, though it was called MGB in 1947), 



 

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which expanded its operations to Tartu first in 1940 and then in 1944 
with the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union. Several 
popular interpretations hold KGB (sic) directly responsible for the 
imagined sausage factory crimes. The horror of the time was 
expressed in legends about a black car kidnapping people from the 
streets, a meat grinder (or centrifuge???) in the cellar of the building 
occupied by this organization processing the corpses of the shot 
people (pp. 45-56) – all resonating to similar themes in Leningrad 
lore of the 1930s. The image of the enemy: a man in a leather coat, 
or KGB officer, replaces the image of a German baron typical for 
old Estonian rumors, and became an embodiment of evil, together 
with other characters—the Jews and Russian immigrants.  

The sources used in this study were letters, memoirs, 
eyewitness interviews conducted in Tartu in 2001-2007, the post 
war diaries (especially of Jaan Roos), newspapers and materials 
collected by the Estonian Folklore and Estonian Historical Archives 
(not in the list of the sources, but mentioned in the text) since 1990. 
The copy of the MGB report pertaining the rumors and arrests in 
this connection from February 1947 illustrates the story brilliantly, 
but raises the question of if Estonian KGB archives were available 
for the study.  

Historically, cases of cannibalism are associated with periods 
of terrible famines and mass death, but the author informs us that in 
February 1947, (12) “life [in Tartu] began to return to normal, food 
rationing stopped at the end 1947, although the continuing shortage 
of food caused endless queues. Employed people received sufficient 
bread rations.” However, Eda Kalmre does not discuss this 
disassociation though provides good historical and social 
background of post-war Tartu. 

The book shows many photographs of contemporary Tartu and 
caricatures from the newspapers. Unfortunately the publication does 
not tell us a word about the author and her background. Composition 
of the book is a bit chaotic but the translation into English is 
professional and good. 

Olga Velikanova 
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA