The Soviet Sausage Renaissance

Author(s): Neringa Klumbytė

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 112, No. 1 (Mar., 2010), pp. 22-37
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20638759
Accessed: 14-02-2019 07:56 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access to American Anthropologist

This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Soviet Sausage Renaissance
Neringa Klumbyte

ABSTRACT In Lithuania, the first country to secede from the Soviet Union, the term Soviet has been used in public

space to refer to the vanished Soviet empire and to experiences of colonization and resistance. However, in 1998,

the "Soviet" symbol was successfully revived in the Lithuanian consumer food market as a brand name for meat

products?primarily sausages, in this article, I argue that the market is a political arena in which values, ideologies,

identities, and history are being shaped. The marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages is a form of political

engagement that negotiates current power relations and inequalities. The meanings and practices surrounding
"Soviet" sausages tell an intriguing story about broader processes of change. The "Soviet" sausage renaissance in

Lithuania implies a critique of the postsocialist neoliberal state and constitutes an attempt to create an alternative
modernity that is both post-Soviet and European.

Keywords: food, consumption, marketing, political subjectivity, Lithuania

SANTRAUKA Lietuvoje savoka ?Tarybinis" asocijuojama Sac. B ^aHHoii CTaTte h yTBep>k/r,aio, ^to
su Sovietij Sajunga ir sovietine okupacija bei pasipriesinimu ptiHOK ? 3to nojiHTH^ecKaa apeHa, Ha ko
jai. Taciau ?Tarybines" desreles, pasirodziusios rinkoje 1998 TOpOH (|)OpMHpyiOTCH IjeHHOCTH, H^eojiorHH,
m., sukele ldtokiii, teigiamu, asociacijij bei pasi?le alter h^eHTH^HOCTH h HCTopHH. MapKeTHHr h noTpe
natyvia^ sovietmecio versija^, kurioje sovietine praeit\ susiejo ?JieHHe ?co?eTCKHx? KOJi?ac ?BJiaeTCii (f)opMo?
su geros kokybes nat?raliu maistu ir teigiama patirtimi. nojiHTH^ecKO? aKTHBHOCTH, KOTopaa npoxo^ht
Siame straipsnyje analizuojamas ?Tarybinni" desreliij popu b ^HaJIOre C TeKyilJHMH BJiaCTHBIMH OTHO
liarumas Lietuvoje 2004^2007 metais. Straipsnyje teigiama, ineHHHMM h HepaBeHCTBOM b o?mecTBe.
jog rinka yra politine erdve, kurioje kuriamos vertybes, ide 3Ha^eHHH H npaKTHKH, CBH3aHHbie C ?COBeTC
ologijos ir tapatybes. ?Tarybiniii" desrelrq marketingas ir jij khmm? KOJi?acaMH, paccKa3BiBaioT yBJieKa
vartojimas yra politiniai procesai, kuriu, metu gamintojai, TejibHyio HCTopnio, CBH3aHHyio c ?ojiee
vartotojai, intelektualai, zurnalistai, politikai dalyvauja ku niHpoKHMH npoiTeccaMH nepeMeH. PeHeccaHC
riant politines vertes bei jtvirtinant tarn tikrus galios ?co?eTCKHx? KOJiGac b JInTBe no^pasyivreBaeT
santykius. Galima b?tij teigti, jog ?Tarybines" desreles KpHTHKy nocT-cou;HajiHCTHMecKoro HeojiH?e
Lietuvoje reiskia posocialistines neoliberalios valstybes ir so pajibHoro rocy^apcTBa h npe^CTaBjmeT co6oh
cialiniii, politiniij bei ekonominkj procesu. kritika^. Taciau nontiTKy cos^aHHH ajibTepHaTHBHoii coBpe
?Tarybines" desreles kartu yra alternatyvus posovietinis ir MeHHOCTH, O^HOBpeMeHHO nOCT-COBeTCKOH H
Europinis dabarties ir ateities projektas, kuriam pritaria daug eBpone?cKO?.
vartotojij.
By taking food into the body, we take in the world.
PE3IOME B JIhtbc, nepBofi H3 CTpaH, ?Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
Objects create subjects much more than the other way around.
Bbiine/iniHx H3 cocTaBa CoBeTCKoro Coio3a, Tep
?Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things
MHH ?COBeTC KHH? HCnOJIB3yeTCH B ny6jIHMHOM
npocTpaHCTBe, o6o3Ha^aH yine^inyio coBe
TCKyio HMnepHio, a TaK>Ke b cbh3h c oiibitom Lithuania
Union.1 was
In Marchthe
1990,first
more thancountry
a year before to
the secede from the Soviet
KOJIOHH3aiTHH H COnpOTHBJieHHH eft. O^HaKO b Soviet empire finally crumbled, the government of Lithuania
1998 r., cmmboji ?co?eTCKoro? 6biji ycneniHO proclaimed it an independent republic. At the referendum of
B03pO^C^ieH Ha pblHKe npOAOBOJIbCTBHH KaK February 9, 1991, three-fourths of the citizens of Lithuania
SpeH^i MHCOnpO,ZTyKTOB, B OCo6eHHOCTH KOJI voted in favor of forming an independent democratic state. In

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 1, pp. 22-37, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. ?2010 by the American Anthropological Associ
ation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01194.x

This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 23

September 1991, Lithuania became a member of the United
Nations. The establishment of independence was soon fol
lowed by a transition to democracy and a market economy,
as well as integration into NATO and the European Union
in 2004.
As in most of Eastern Europe, the Soviet period is now
officially perceived as a time of colonization, oppression,
suffering, annihilation of the nation, and economic and cul
tural backwardness. Repudiating the past has been part of
building the new European present and future: Soviet stat
ues were demolished; street and park names were changed;
biographies and histories were rewritten; and new laws were
passed guaranteeing the existence of the new nation-state.
Although the public space was purged of objects associ
ated with the Soviet past, Tarybines desreles (Soviet sausages)
emerged in the consumer market in 1998 and reoccu
pied memories, dinner tables, and bodies.2 "Soviet" sausage
brands overwhelmed competing brands and emerged as a
clear leader in the market, gaining about one-fifth of the
sausage market share in 2004. Urban and rural landscapes
have now been populated with billboards inviting people to
consume "Soviet" products (see Figure 1). The billboards in
voke Soviet realities, including the Stalinist era, and contrast
with the post-Soviet state's renderings of the past and the
present.
Journalists, intellectuals, and politicians met the intro
duction of "Soviet" sausage with strong opposition. Man
agers of companies producing "Soviet" sausages were la
beled cynics who, as argued by Audrius Matonis (2005),
call high-quality products "Soviet" without considering that
the Soviet system and Soviet ideology crippled Lithuania
and its people. Erdvilas Jakulis, a linguist from Vilnius Uni
versity, stated that tarybinis, tarybine (Soviet) may invoke
the assumption that the products are made in a nonexistent
state or that producers and consumers of these products are
pro-Soviet.3 Dabartinis lietuviq kalbos zodynas, the modern
dictionary of the Lithuanian language, records that tarybinis
(Soviet) means "belonging to the Soviet rule or state, for
example, the Soviet regime" (2000:831). Some intellectuals
and politicians were convinced that consumers of "Soviet"

>= '

FIGURE 1. A billboard on the Vilnius-Kaunas highway. On the billboard: "Samsonas's most popular meat product SOVIET milk sausages. The newface."
(Photo courtesy of author, July 2006)

This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 24 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010
sausages and their commodified Soviet nostalgia vote pop
ulist and think communist (see Jonusys 2004) and, thus,
were a real threat to independence and democracy. They
called those nostalgic for the Soviet past "victims" longing
for the "torturer" and the Soviet state (see Donskis 2005),
backward people delaying social and political progress, or
"turnips" (derogatory) attempting to stop the country's in
tegration with Europe. Vytautas Landsbergis, a member of
the European Union Parliament and a leader of the national
movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, argued that nos
talgic people long for oppression: "They do not understand or
remember that they weren't free . . . That their lives were
limited, controlled, and threatened" (Landsbergis 2007).
Landsbergis maintained that nostalgic thoughts are infantile
and suggested that business people should display "Soviet"
pig's feet, which would better represent Soviet times.
The producers defended the branding of their sausages
by giving interviews and publishing promotional articles.
But there were invisible supporters of "Soviet" sausages too:
the consumers who savored them, nodded in affirmation
of their tastiness, and, defying mainstream public opinion,
made sausage sales rise exponentially. One is left to wonder:
How could the symbol "Soviet," which signifies oppression
and exteriority and was discredited in national spaces in
postsocialist Lithuania, have become a successful marketing
label?
The case of "Soviet" sausages shows that, in the context
of the post-Soviet transformations in Lithuania, the mar
ket has become a political arena wherein competing values,
identities, and history circulate. In this article, I challenge
the usual understanding of consumption and marketing as
economic practices and examine their importance as politi
cal processes. I argue that marketing and the consumption of
"Soviet" sausages is a form of political engagement wherein
contemporary Lithuanians negotiate current power relations
and inequalities. Marketing and consumption produce spaces
of negativity and of commonality and, at the same time, ob
jectify and shape political subjectivities.
This article follows the circulation of the object ("Soviet"
sausage) from the offices of marketing specialists in meat
packing plants, where they first emerged as ideas, to the
courtroom, where several companies competed for the right
to sell "Soviet" sausages, to consumers' dinner tables, where
they were consumed and invoked memories. I rely on my
research on political identity, nationalism, and the state in
Lithuania during 2003?04 and follow-up research on "So
viet" sausages during the summers of 2005, 2006, and 2007.
The 2003?04 research consisted of about 200 interviews
in three village communities and the cities of Kaunas and
Vilnius. The follow-up research that focused on "Soviet"
sausages included interviews with the marketing and com
merce directors of Samsonas and Vilniaus Mesos Kombi
natas, the meat-packing plants that produce "Soviet" brands.
It was followed by archival and media research on Soviet-era
sausages and post-Soviet "Soviet" sausages. I also conducted
research on the court case brought for the infringement of the
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
"Soviet" trademark. Unstructured, person-centered, open
ended interviews (Levy and Hollan 2000) with consumers
of "Soviet" sausages and those who buy other brands were a
part of the follow-up research. This included interviews with
about 30 people in the city of Kaunas as well as interviews
with 20 former informants from the villages and Kaunas. I
also carried out participant-observation by joining various
situations where food was being bought, exchanged, pre
pared, served, and consumed. Most of the informants were
older than 35 and therefore came of age in Soviet Lithuania.
I start with a review of approaches to consumption
and politics, which constitutes the major theoretical back
ground for the analysis in this article. Next, I present a
short history of sausages, reviewing their career in the food
history of Europe and the former Soviet Union. I then pro
ceed toward the postsocialist "Soviet" sausage industry in
Lithuania. I explore how "Soviet" brands came into exis
tence, how these brands have been marketed, and how some
consumers have responded to this marketing. Finally, I fo
cus on ideas about food, experiences of postsocialism, and
people's political subjectivities. Exploring the biographies
of "Soviet" sausages, I primarily focus on wieners, which
are cured cooked sausages usually made of pork and beef
and are among the most popular among consumers of "So
viet" sausage brands. "Soviet times" refers to the late Soviet
period?namely, the 1970s and 1980s, the years most often
invoked in people's memories.
CONSUMERS, CONSUMPTION, AND POLITICS
Studies of consumption became an important part of an
thropology in the 1980s (Carrier 2006; Miller 1995). Since
then, the bourgeoning literature on consumption has cov
ered a variety of themes, ranging from everyday consump
tion practices and exchange (Elliston 2004; Linnekin 1985)
to consumption as a global process (Holtzman 2003; Kaplan
2007; Miller 1998). Scholars have traditionally associated
consumption with market capitalism; they studied it pri
marily as an economic activity rather than a political one.
In the volume Citizenship and Consumption, Kate Soper and
Frank Trentmann argue that
Texts on citizenship have plenty to say about citizens in relation
to the state, nationality, rights and freedoms, the equality of
sexes, and the environment, but consumption tends to receive
short shrift. . . The consumer appears only as an individuated
figure of a neo-liberal world of markets challenging the citizen.
The consumer here is located within the domain of the market,
distinct from that of the state and its citizens. [2008:1]
Although anthropologists discuss the ways in which con
sumption practices are embedded in historical, social, and
political contexts (Kaplan 2007; Mintz 1985; Wilk 1999)
and analyze how consumption interconnects with power
and identity (Bourdieu 1984; Counihan 1999; Friedman
1994; Humphrey 2002; Roseberry 1996), few concentrate
on consumption, citizenship, and the state.4 In most an
thropological studies, consumption is of minor significance
in the broader political processes of nation-state building,

resistance, or change. It is not seen as a political arena in
which political values and ideologies are being shaped but,
rather, as an economic and social field, with its own politics
and power relations.5
The recent studies of consumption in socialist and post
socialist countries constitute an exception. Anthropologists
have recently documented that the state was and is actively
engaged in shaping consumers and consumer regimes in
Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.
They have shown how consumers emerge as a top-down
phenomena through state-sponsored consumption programs
(Berdahl 1999; Merkel 2006; Patico 2008) and how con
sumption reinforces or challenges state and international
agendas (Caldwell 2002, 2009; Dunn 2008; Gille 2009;
Porter 2008).
Some interesting recent studies that explore the nexus
between consumption and politics in Jordan and the United
States illustrate how consumption can be interrelated with
political subjectivity and citizenship in other than socialist
or postsocialist contexts. Anne Beal's study of villa design
in Jordan illustrates that ideas about taste?and correspond
ing practices such as villa design, interior decoration, and
clothing selection?instantiate conceptions of membership
in different moral and political communities (Beal 2000:65).
Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins show that food desires
among African American followers of Sunni Islam in the
United States are entangled in historically informed per
ceptions of subjectivity, citizenship, and race. Rouse and
Hoskins find food to be "a central medium for expressing re
ligious commitment, and for positioning oneself in relation
to a history of slavery and new forms of liberation" (Rouse
and Hoskins 2004:227, 229). As both studies illustrate, con
sumption in other than socialist and postsocialist contexts
is also intertwined with political processes and historically
rooted practices of citizenship and nationhood. Both Beal's
and Rouse and Hoskins's studies, as well as studies in socialist
and postsocialist societies, encourage asking new questions
about consumption, including the questions asked in this
article: What is the relationship between consumption and
political subjectivity? How does consumption express and
shape political ideologies and histories? How can political
values, sensibilities, and relations be produced not only in
the more traditional spaces of power circulation?such as
social movements, nationalist upheavals, state building, or
colonization?but also in practices of everyday life, like
purchasing and enjoying sausage?
Methodologically, unlike other anthropological studies
that focus on consumers, I follow objects, drawing on the
work of Igor Kopytoff (1986) and Hoskins (1998). Kopytoff
shows that objects, like people, can have multiple and chang
ing natures or careers over time. Following Kopytoff, I
demonstrate that sausage has various competing articula
tions. But I also see sausage as a semiotic phenomenon that
is embedded in and expressive of social, political, and eco
nomic contexts, very much like Clifford Geertz's cocks in
his essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 25
(1973). As a quintessential historical commodity (see be
low), sausage both shapes and is shaped by history. In my
approach, sausage has power to shape identity and politics.
Like Geertz's cocks, sausage is about the people who con
sume them and as such is a lens into social life. However,
unlike cocks, sausage is the site of cultural change, rather
than enduring passions, values, and desires. Sausage is also
the site of competition and the rearticulation of memory and
history.
I share with Hoskins an interest in the biography of
objects that are intimately intertwined with people's lives.
Sausage is a biographical object comparable to Hoskins's be
tel bags, drums, and domestic animals, which are central in
the lives of the Kodi of Indonesia. Unlike Hoskins's biograph
ical objects, sausage has a different circulation and relation
to an individual. It is perishable and temporal. Its biography
is that of an imagined "Soviet" sausage that exists in replicas
or tokens. However, like a biographical object among the
Kodi, sausage is a pivot for reflection and introspection, a
tool of autobiographical self-discovery, and a way of know
ing oneself through things (Hoskins 1998:198). I contribute
to Hoskins's analysis by showing that a biographical object is
also a tool for understanding political history and expressing
a political self.
Building on the studies discussed above, I lay out an
alternative frame of analysis for the consumption of food as
a political expression and for consumption as a political pro
cess. I focus on meaning and signification as well as on social
and political history and political economy to understand
the political careers of "Soviet" sausages. The object-sausage
here is a bearer of meaning generated and negotiated by
advertisers, consumers, intellectuals, politicians, scholars,
and journalists. At the same time, it is embedded in broader
political, economic, and historical processes.
SOVIET-ERA SAUSAGE BIOGRAPHIES
Sausages occupy a specific niche in the food history of Europe.
They have been produced since the days of the ancient Greeks
and Romans. Making sausage was originally a method to
preserve meats, and the word sausage derives from the Latin
salsus, meaning "salted." Although there is no exact docu
mentation of where the first wiener-type sausage was pro
duced, there are some indications that Johann Georg Lahner
of Frankfurt first produced it in 1805 in Vienna.
Sausages emigrated from Europe a long time ago, and re
tailers in the United States now sell Polish kielbasa, German
bratwurst, and sausages labeled Italian, Lithuanian, and Irish.
Although the global career of sausages from Europe appears
fragmented when compared to the careers of other pro
cessed foods, such as sushi or McDonald's fries, sausage is a
distinctive product in the diets of many Europeans, including
Lithuanians, within and outside Europe (see Figure 2).
During the Soviet era, sausages produced and consumed
in Lithuania and other Soviet republics were integral to
Soviet modernity. The centerpiece of Soviet modernity was
its massive drive for industrialization and the creation of an
26 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010
FIGURE 2. Celebrating the birthday of the city of Utena, Lithuania. The Utena meat-packing plant produced a gigantic sausage shown carried in a
parade. September 1996. (Photo courtesy of Susanne Cohen)
industrial proletariat (Kotkin 1995). Anastas Mikoyan, the
Communist Party leader in charge of provisioning through
out the 1930s, introduced frankfurters, a kind of sausage new
to Russians and derived from the German model, to the mass
urban consumer (Fitzpatrick 1999:90?91). He used imagery
of pleasure, plenty, and modernity to promote them. Ac
cording to Mikoyan, frankfurters, "a sign of bourgeois abun
dance and well-being," had to be available to the masses
(Fitzpatrick 1999:90?91). As mass-produced products, they
were superior to food produced in the old-fashioned way by
hand (Fitzpatrick 1999:91). Soviet Stalinist experience with
sausage production was introduced to Lithuania after its in
corporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 and its consequent
reintegration after World War II.
In Lithuania, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, in
dustrialized food produced in huge plants and connected
to Soviet state-sponsored culture signaled social and eco
nomic transformations as well as a change in people's diets,
habits, and bodies (Mincyte 2003). Consumers who had
previously eaten either homemade sausages or those from
various private firms and meat-packing plants were now sub
jected to common tastes encoded in the GO ST standards,
rocydapcmeennbie cmandapmu CCCP (USSR gov
ernment standards), developed and regulated by the Soviet
state. Thus, industrialized food was also a form of col
onization (and self-colonization because people purchased
sausages voluntarily); it helped to link the empire together,
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
creating common forms of daily life among people with pre
viously distinct culinary traditions (cf. Dunn 2008; Toomre
1997).
Industrially produced sausages indicated the vitality of
the Soviet empire, beginning with the construction of huge
meat-packing plants that produced a variety of sausage brands
and ending with the stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s, when
food production and per-capita consumption decreased.6
This deteriorating situation was the object of many jokes,
such as the one about the Soviet Union's progress toward
communism:
Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism plan a get
together. But Socialism arrives half an hour late.
Socialism: Sorry, comrades, I had to get some sausage
for dinner, and there was a long line.
Capitalism: What's a line?
Communism: What's sausage?
No less telling are the "sausage trains/' which refer to
trains rolling into Moscow from outlying areas, from which,
according to Peter Aleshkovsky (1990), "hordes of peo
ple alight driven by the single-minded desire to buy sausage"
(Oushakine 2000:97). The existence of these "sausage trains"
illustrates that sausage availability varied and that its avail
ability indexed the difference between the center and the
periphery.

In the 1970s and 1980s, sausages were a luxury, in the
sense of transcending basic needs or exceeding the regular
shared standard of life, in the eyes of both consumers and
authorities.7 In the Soviet space, and less so in Lithuania it
self, sausage was a sign of material wealth; people admitted
emigrating to the West "for sausage." As Katia Belousova
pointed out, "leaving for sausage" was opposed to "leav
ing for freedom," and both constituted "self-identified lines
of emigration" (personal conversation, April 28, 2007). In
September of 1999, at Moscow State University, Vladimir
Putin, then prime minister of the Russian Federation, as
tutely mentioned both freedom and sausage as evidence
of Russia's success: "The 20-year-old down-to-earth dream
of Soviet paradise?with sausage and freedom as its main
symbols?is almost fulfilled now; we have plenty of both"
(Oushakine 2000:98).
Considered an extravagance of late Soviet times, niaus Mesos Kombinatas aimed to benefit from the good
sausages were saved for children or the sick, offered to reputation and popularity of Samsonas's "Soviet" brands.14
guests, and served at dinner or birthday parties.8 Getting According to Samsonas, the name Tarnybinis is not suffi
two wieners with bread and mustard at a state-run restaurant
ciently different and may mislead consumers.15 During the
in a resort was a way to engage in a pleasurable gastronomic
indulgence. Sausages were also available at special stores for
the citizens privileged and honored by the Soviet state, such
as war veterans, mothers with many children, and the So
viet bureaucratic elite. They were distributed through some
workplaces as incentives and rewards, thereby stimulating
unity with the Soviet state. Among the people I interviewed,
only a few were able to purchase sausages on a more or less
regular basis. The majority remembered that sausage was
hard to get.
Even if not originally labeled as such, "Soviet" sausages
constitute a meaningful order that was recaptured and re
circulated by the postsocialist market. Sausages, with their
rich Soviet-era biographies, provide a positive environment
for the "Soviet" brand to thrive. Production of post-Soviet
"Soviet" sausages in Lithuania, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Kyr
gyzstan, and elsewhere indicates their significance as a com
modity throughout the former Soviet space (see Figure 3).9
THE "SOVIET" SAUSAGE INDUSTRY
The Origins
The closed joint-stock company Samsonas started the "So
viet" sausage industry in 1998 (see Figure 4). The company's
profits skyrocketed after it began to produce "Soviet" brands;
by 2005 they constituted more than half of Samsonas's meat
production.10 In 2006, Samsonas produced 21 brands of var
ious meat products labeled "Soviet," most of them among
their premium products. In 2004, Samsonas "Soviet" brands
captured about 20 percent of the sausage market share in
Lithuania.11 The next most popular brand, "Lithuanian stan
dard," produced by the company Bio vela, made up only
five percent. The popularity of "Soviet" brands had not sig
nificantly decreased by 2007.12 Some "Soviet" brands had
disappeared from store shelves by 2009. In 2009, however,
in Vilnius supermarket chain Maxima, "Soviet Milk Sausages"
continued to enjoy their popularity; in fact, the store ad on
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 27
the shelves with tens of different sausage brands announced
that "Soviet Milk Sausages" is "the most popular Lithuanian
[sausage] product" at Maxima.
At the end of 2002, the joint-stock company Vilniaus
Mesos Kombinatas, another meat-packing company, also
started to produce "Soviet" brand sausages. Samsonas, the
legal owner of the trademarks for "Soviet" sausages (which at
the time included "Soviet Doctor's sausage" and "Soviet Milk
sausages"), requested Vilniaus Mesos Kombinatas to change
the name of its products. After negotiations, Vilniaus Mesos
Kombinatas renamed its products to Tarnybinis, semanti
cally different (an adjective meaning work, service), but
phonetically and graphically very similar to the word tarybi
nis. Samsonas, objecting to the choice of Tarnybinis, brought
Vilniaus Mesos Kombinatas to court for unfair competition
and trademark infringement.13 Samsonas argued that Vil
lawsuit, government institutions such as the State Language
Commission, university professors, public relations experts,
lawyers, journalists, and many citizens discussed the mean
ing and value of the label "Soviet." The lawsuit, statements
by various experts, and reports in the media contributed to
the visibility of "Soviet" brands.
The Appellate Court decision of May 2004 prohibited
Vilniaus Mesa, the company that had taken over Vilniaus
Mesos Kombinatas's production and brands, from using
Tarnybinis in commercial activity. The company moved its
"Soviet" brands to Latvia and Estonia, where it is a rightful
seller of "Soviet" sausages. Thus, products utilizing "Soviet"
also proliferate outside Lithuania. Used in former Soviet
countries, "Soviet" products symbolically reunite the for
mer Soviet space.
The ideology of Food
Samsonas, currently the only legitimate producer of "So
viet" sausages in Lithuania, promotes an apolitical image of
their product. They claim that "Soviet" sausages are exclu
sively about taste and lifestyle but not politics. According to
Samsonas, "Soviet" meat products represent a resolute search
for quality and a return to the natural (Samsonas 2006).
Rimgaile Vaitkiene (2004), the former director of market
ing for Samsonas, claimed that in Soviet times sausages were
made without meat substitutes and, therefore, were more
natural and more delicious. Similarly, Vilniaus Mesa's web
page introducing its "Soviet" sausages sold in Latvia argues
that the brand name does not mean a return to the Soviet
system. It is a reminder of what was best in Soviet times,
when producers did not use meat substitutes (Vilniaus Mesa
2006).
Marketing of "Soviet" sausages recirculates food ideolo
gies that many consumers share. These ideologies prioritize
natural food and Lithuanian traditions. As in the commentary
below, people invoke a specific historical and geopolitical
28 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010

FIGURE 3. (A) From Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a 2006 billboard echoing D. S. Moor's poster inviting people to join the Bolsheviks in the
Civil War of 1918?21 in Russia. The text reads: "The taste and quality of the great country. Have you bought 'Soviet' sausage? 100% meat. We care
about your health!" (Photo courtesy of Serguei Oushakine) (B) D. S. Moor's poster, "Are you a volunteer?" (Image in the public domain)

order when describing good quality food. Regina, a woman
in her early seventies from the city of Kaunas, maintained:
Earlier food was natural. My relatives from Germany used to ask
me to bring butter and cheese from [Soviet] Lithuania because
they did not have good food. And Lithuanian food was deli
cious and natural. Now, when they [the producers in Lithuania]
started to copy everything from the West, all the food got much
worse ... Sausage was also good [in Soviet times]. Now bologna
is simply starch and blood, [interview, July 20, 2003]

This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FIGURE 4. Tarybine daktariska ('Soviet Doctor's sausage'), a type of bologna, was among thefirst "Soviet" brands produced by Samsonas. Red stars and
hammers and sickles decorated the packages. August 2003. (Photo courtesy of author)
In contrast to the Cold War discourses and post-Soviet
official narratives, which privilege Europe and the West,
in Regina*s reflections Soviet-era Lithuanian tradition is the
source of goodness: Soviet-era food is good while post-Soviet
Western "copies" are not.16
Like Regina, many consumers attribute "naturalness"
to Soviet-era food as well as post-Soviet "Soviet" sausages.
"Naturalness" is a major indicator of food quality throughout
the former Soviet space (Caldwell 2002). As other ethno
graphic studies of Eastern Europe confirm, consumers pre
fer food they perceive as "natural" because they assume it
lacks preservatives and additives. The use of antibiotics and
growth hormones in animal feed also makes food "unnatural"
(see also Lankauskas 2002). Informants considered "Soviet"
sausages natural because they lack meat substitutes such as
soy, starch, or finely ground bone. A doctor in her early
fifties from Kaunas argued that she buys "Soviet" sausages
"because they don't contain meat substitutes. As they were
earlier [in Soviet times]. Without chemicals or soy. They are
the best of all. Very delicious" (interview, July 20, 2006).
The "natural" Soviet-era sausage invoked pleasant memories
of Soviet food and life for Jonas, an unemployed former
landscape engineer in his early fifties from the suburbs of
Kaunas. When he was traveling down memory lane, listing
prices, items, shops, and superb taste, I asked him about
quality. Yes, my interlocutor remembered, he found a rat
nail in a sausage once. He started to laugh and said you could
have used it instead of a toothpick. He also said that back
then factory caldrons echoed with the shrieking of rats. But,
he said, at least you can take out rat nails, they're natu
ral. It wasn't as bad as it is now, he concluded. Chemicals,
according to his wife, a farmer in her fifties, kill people.
The packaging on "Soviet" sausages is designed to appeal
to these attitudes toward naturalness.17 Every package has a
logo "No for meat substitutes!" which represents producers'
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 29
ideology about natural sausage. Moreover, most images in
clude smiling and happy young people on a background of
nature, which, according to Vaitkiene, should also invoke
ideas about "naturalness."18 The images promise a positive
experience: the smiling, happy, healthy-looking men and
women looking out from the packages of the "Soviet" brands
do not bring Stalinist horrors to mind but, instead, conjure
up optimism and happiness as fashioned by the Soviet state
(see Gronow 2003; Fitzpatrick 1999; Kotkin 1995). The
images of people are signs of youth, beauty, energy, fitness,
romance, and enjoyment. They promise pleasurable positive
involvement in an aesthetic post-Soviet community.
Although consumers like Regina and Jonas disagree, in
late Soviet times, most sausage did contain meat substitutes.
As I have mentioned, the Soviet-era food production be
gan to stagnate in the 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev. The
Moscow authorities asked all the Soviet republics to econo
mize on meat; therefore, various meat substitutes were used
in sausages, with the exception of the premium brands dis
tributed in special stores for privileged citizens. Currently,
according to the Lithuanian Standardization Department, all
the highest-grade sausages are made without meat substi
tutes, unlike first- and second-grade sausages.19 However,
only a few of my informants were acquainted with the ex
isting quality classification of sausages, and none of them
knew that all the sausages ranked as highest quality are made
without meat substitutes.
Furthermore, none of the post-Soviet "Soviet" sausages
are exact replicas of those available in Soviet times, because
the technology and recipes used in their production are dif
ferent. However, my interviews, representative surveys,
and linguists' analyses confirm that many consumers asso
ciate Samsonas's "Soviet"sausages with Soviet-era sausages.20
Consumers project familiarity, rather than authenticity, onto
the sausages. Familiarity implies continuity with the past and
30 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010

the intimate biographical link of a subject to an object. Famil

iarity, like authenticity, is a form of cultural discrimination
(Spooner 1986:226). However, unlike authenticity, it does
not guarantee the homogeneity of the objects under consid
eration. Despite not being exact replicas, "Soviet" sausages
are related to sausages of the Soviet period because they re
mind consumers of the Soviet-era sausages. As the following
discussion shows, they also invoke the goodness of the Soviet
past.

Post-Soviet Modernity
The opponents of "Soviet" sausage often fail to recognize that
it is a post-Soviet hybrid, imbued in the imagination with both
Soviet and Western goodness. Samsonas represents itself as
a "European and modern company." This description im
plies that Samsonas produces healthy, safe, and good-quality
products; meets the EU's sanitary requirements; uses new
production and packaging methods; and exercises effective
quality and production control.21 Samsonas also takes pride
in producing sausages using "mature Western technologies."
"Technology" associates sausages with progress, prestige,
success, and the West. The labels of "Soviet" products also
project the Western or European value of sausages. "Soviet
salami," for example, is a product that was never produced in
B
Soviet times. During our conversation, Art?ras Skairys, the
marketing director of the meat-packing company Bio vela,
pointed out that taste-testing experiments conducted by the
Kaunas University of Technology Food Institute showed that
Lithuanians love to see a piece of fat in a sausage. He claimed
that this attitude is rarely encountered in the West, where
these pieces are mixed well to make sausages like salami.22
Thus, a product such as "Soviet salami" marks developing
"Western" tastes (see Figure 5).
During the Soviet era, the state was the primary agent
of modernization; now the state's role is circumscribed by
the market offerings of modern gastronomic endeavors.
The market reflects the broader political economic trans
formations that took place in Lithuania, including the de
centralization of state authority and functions, integration
into the European Union market, and changing identities.
For producers and many consumers of "Soviet" sausages in
this changing political, economic, and social space, "Soviet"
increasingly becomes synonym for "ours" and "Lithuanian,"
which challenges the normalized dichotomy of "Soviet" ver
sus "Lithuanian" in the mainstream official discourse. As one
woman from the city of Siauliai argued, much credit is owed
to Samsonas, the producer of "Soviet" sausages, for recogniz
ing "our Soviet experience." For her, the Soviet era was also
"our" national era, characterized by pleasant memories and
positive gastronomic experiences, rather than foreignness,
oppression, and suffering. She identified "Soviet" sausage as
FIGURE 5. (A) The post-Soviet hybrid "Soviet salami," Vilniu
"our" Lithuanian sausage, presumably a replica of sausage
produced in Soviet Lithuania. 2007. (Photo courtesy of author) (B) The woman pilot in the o

Moreover, consumers like the woman from Siauliai rec Stalinist-era toothpaste advertisement by I. Bograd, 1938. (Image

ognize "Soviet" tradition as part of their "Lithuanian" self, public domain)

This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

which is made up of both Soviet and more recent Euro
pean experiences. Thus, the production and consumption
of Lithuanian "Soviet" sausages becomes a commentary on
the public Cold War renderings of Eastern Europe, in which
"East" and "West," and "Soviet" and "European," are exclu
sive categories indexing oppositional social, political, and
moral spaces. Sausages create a new sense of identity and
modernity where Soviet tradition and the European present
are reconciled.
Similar processes have been observed in other post
Soviet states. Paul Manning and Ann Uplisashvili (2007)
demonstrate the ways in which the time of tradition and
the time of (European) modernity are embedded in the new
ethnographic Georgian beer brands. As in the case of "Soviet"
sausages, there is no clear return to traditional production
methods. In both cases, the new national ideology, which
corresponds to circulating ideas about Europe and senti
ments about the past and future, is embodied in the new
brands. In the case of Lithuania, semiotic ideologies pro
duced by the marketing specialists of post-Soviet "Soviet"
brands compete with official state ideologies about national
tradition and modernity. Thus, in Lithuania, as elsewhere in
Eastern Europe and the former USSR, questions of what con
stitutes modernity?and what the correct path to modernity
is?are still open (Dunn 2009).
Stripped of their original context of an economy of
scarcity and an oppressive regime, "Soviet" sausages largely
recall a time that never existed and a food that only a minority
tasted. Producers re-create the past by associating "Soviet"
with quality, prestige, luxury, nativeness, purity, goodness,
happiness, and naturalness. They challenge the political value
of "Soviet" as it is projected by the post-Soviet state and
transnational organizations like the European Union. The
consumption and marketing of "Soviet" sausages becomes a
political process that opposes state ideologies and values and
launches new ideologies and values about tradition, iden
tity, and modernity. Ideologies about "Soviet" brands reflect
and shape larger processes of change and identity, as the
following discussion of consumption shows.
THE POLITICAL LIVES OF "SOVIET" SAUSAGES
Nostalgia and "Soviet" Sausages
Markets create political values, and "Soviet" sausages have
political lives and careers. As Ina Merkel argued, commu
nist signs and symbols, whether invoked as representations
of a political system or as signs of everyday life, are princi
pal forms for negotiating fundamental questions about dif
ferent value systems, repression and freedom, individual
ity and community, and distinction and equality (Merkel
2006:251). "Soviet" sausages shape political spaces and po
litical subjectivities. They are integral to the circulation of
power, resource, and prestige and to the production of hi
erarchies and political imaginations.
Pensioners, the unemployed, or the underemployed,
from both the villages and the city of Kaunas, tended to speak
positively about the availability and quality of food in the
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 31
late Soviet period. In their minds, the shortages of the Soviet
era were insignificant compared to the current shortage of
money, which leads to experiences of subjective hunger
and the suppression of desires.23 They repeatedly stated that
"there are goods, but there is no money" and minimized their
market participation (see Creed 2002). People who live on
meager pensions or who are unemployed can rarely afford to
buy sausages widely available today, which only sporadically
appeared on store shelves in Soviet times. Roma, a villager in
her early fifties, claimed not to have experienced denigration
in Soviet-era food lines, nor to have felt oppressed, nor to
have resisted the Soviet order of things. She remembered
the Soviet past as the "better one" and recalled a happier
social and individual life, when she had things to put on the
table at parties?seldom given today?or when she got the
beloved medziotojq. desreles (hunter sausages) "from under
the counter" (using connections). The "better times" were
times with full tables and full stomachs. At present, emptier
tables and stomachs are a daily reminder of a changed social
position in postsocialist society.24
Nostalgia for better Soviet times indexed people's ex
periences of inequality, isolation, poverty, and insecurity.25
For Elvyra, a doctor in her early sixties and a Kaunas resident,
relative hunger and belt-tightening illustrated increased so
cial stratification and shifts in status. She remembered Soviet
times as a period of equality, security, and well-being:
I think about justice. If we have to tighten our belts, all of us have to
do that. Not only those so-called masses. Those who are in Vilnius
[the political elite], they don't tighten their belts. Not likely! ... I
have an acquaintance in Jonava. She was an obstetrician all her
life. She gets such a [small] pension that she has to choose between
getting food and buying medicine. She said that she chooses to
eat. She doesn't see doctors . . . Earlier we were all equal. We did
not have much, but. . . but. . . everyone had social benefits ... [In
health care] many things were much better, [interview, November
8, 2003]
People also criticized the post-Soviet social and political
order in their conversations about sausages. They invoked
Soviet-era sausage as a symbol of better times, while the
contemporary food situation illustrated post-Soviet decline
and chaos. Dalia, a coat room employee in her forties from
the city of Kaunas, said to me:
Meat does not look nice in shops [at present]. One sausage is
brown, the next one, too, until you find something. Well, there
is variety, but, well, all those sausages are .. . Earlier [in Soviet
times] there weren't very many, you went to a shop, you bought it.
Now you search and search and all of them look suspicious. Once
I bought a rosy one. I think there were some kind of colorings
added. Earlier a sausage was a sausage, you knew that you were
eating meat, well, maybe there was some starch in it, anyway. I
don't know . . . Those were times, those were good times then,
[interview, July 17, 2004]
As if engaging in a dialogue with others who have a different
opinion, Dalia then added: "They say we ate bones. No,
we ate meat all the time. We didn't eat bones. Really"
(interview, July 17, 2004). Her mother sighed in agreement:
32 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010
"The best sonine (a type of bacon) was two rubles" (interview,
July 17, 2004).
By purchasing, cooking, and eating sausages, people act
on their political subjectivities and reflect on changing citi
zenship regimes. In the Girstupis market, I met an old lady
with a scarf who bought several "Soviet" sausages. After or
dering the sausages, the old lady commented: "We were full
under the kacapai (a derogatory term for Russians)" (per
sonal communication, Girstupis market, June 17, 2006).
Her stunningly reproachful tone was a commentary on post
Soviet changes and relative hunger. The derogatory name
for "Russians" shows that the nostalgic stance toward the
Soviet past does not imply tolerance for Russians, the lead
ing nationality of the former USSR, and, as other studies
confirm, are not about the return of the USSR and socialism
(cf. Boyer 2006). People such as this elderly woman reflect
on post-Soviet alterity and express sentiments for inclusive
citizenship (see also Klumbyte 2008). The sausage, as mani
fested in this microspace, objectifies their feelings and gives
a material form to circulating sentiments about society, po
litical community, and the post-Soviet political and social
history.
Nostalgia for Soviet times finds expression in differ
ent forms of political behavior, including voting. Roma
and Dalia, mentioned above, voted for excommunist and
populist parties throughout the post-Soviet period. Many
journalists, intellectuals, mainstream political party politi
cians, and scholars consider votes for populists to represent
people's antagonism toward democracy. Votes, however,
express deep feelings of difference and marginality in post
Soviet society rather than negativity toward democracy. Peo
ple voted for agendas that promised honorable citizenship
and recognition; they did not vote against the democratic
regime. Most of the informants whom I interviewed were
willing to live in a democratic European society and voted
for a better future for their children in the European Union
during the referendum for integration in 2004. People's
votes, like "Soviet" sausages, expressed the local political
vernacular in which the Soviet-Lithuanian tradition and the
European present coexist.
Scholars note that nostalgia depends on a fiction of the
past, an idealized and sanitized version of it (Lupton 1996),
and that it is essentially about the present (Boym 2001). An
important conclusion by marketing research is that personal
nostalgia allows the reshaping of incidents and relationships
stored in memory so that they yield pleasure in the recollec
tion, even if they were not pleasurable at the time they were
experienced (Stern 1992). Advertising performs a recon
structive function when it offers consumption experiences
as a means for recovering the ideal self (Stern 1992).
In nostalgic reminiscences, people restore their status
and dignity. For people like Roma or Dalia, consumption of
"Soviet" sausages creates a space for social and individual rec
onciliation. For these individuals, consumption of "Soviet"
sausages is not only a reintegration of Soviet tradition into
the present but also integration of oneself as a respectable
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
subject, a reinvocation of the whole semiotic space in which
one is an honorable person and citizen. This is why "Soviet"
sausages, even if expensive, make a difference on the din
ner table. Like the kula exchange in Gawa wherein shells
and men are reciprocal agents of each other's value defini
tion (Munn 1986), buying even a single "Soviet" sausage is
a statement about one's value (as well as a judgment about
the value of a "Soviet" sausage).
Soviet Alterity and "Soviet" Sausage
Those who remember how people used to steal meat from
factories, how they themselves consumed so-called poor
quality slapianka ("wet sausage"), and how they participated
in "state absurdity" by queuing in food shops often invoke the
Soviet past in congruence with official postsocialist discourse
in terms of oppression, inhumanity, and foreignness. Linas,
an engineer in his forties who is from the city of Kaunas but
was born in Siberia because his family was deported there
by the Soviet authorities and who returned to Lithuania as a
child, remembered:
[Restaurants] served cutlets without meat. All the restaurant em
ployees went home with full bags. . . . They were not ashamed to
talk about stealing. It was good and they were proud of it. And
you, a stupid engineer [refers to himself], cannot do it. You get
your hundred rubles and that's it. . . . Everywhere it was the same.
It could not have been different. . . . Lithuania was ruined for fifty
years, everything was done differently than normal people do in
a normal world, [interview, August 16, 2004]
In this context, shortages in general, and shortages of
sausage in particular, were among the hegemonic mecha
nisms extending to the compromised tables of Soviet citizens
and reaching into their bodies. Those in power were able to
devalue others' sense of self: the inability to provide for one
self and the family was a sign of one's powerlessness, even
if it was conceived as a form of moral power by the subjects
themselves. Darius, a historian in his forties from Vilnius,
remembered a relative who always had meat on the table,
a fact of which she was proud. The relative worked every
third day at the airport. On her free days, she traveled from
one shop to another, followed delivery schedules, stood in
queues, and was able to find and buy meat and sausages.
Although the state shortages extended to both Darius and
his relative's stomachs, for Darius it was an experience of
state hegemony, but for his relative it was an experience of
her heroism (cf. Ries 1997). Her sausages pointed to her
status and power and to Darius's powerlessness and relative
hunger.
Soviet-period sausages were integral to the negative
memories of Soviet times in Linas's and Darius's narratives.
As Darius observed: "Earlier in a shop you could see a loaf
of bread, two eggs, herring, but there were no sausages. I
remember those times. Empty shops. If you got a good salary
you could buy everything that was in a shop" (interview, July
28, 2006). Criticizing the quality of Soviet-era sausages, an
art expert in his mid-forties joked: "In meat-packing plants

they had the technology to make sausages from mice and
rats" (interview, May 29, 2004).
At present, people who refuse to find anything admirable
in the Soviet past either reject consuming "Soviet" sausages
or apparently suspend their political consciousness. Darius
and Linas express their political subjectivities in their re
fusal to consume "Soviet" sausages. In 2007, the Samsonas
company launched some new sausage brands aimed at con
sumers like Darius and Linas, including "All times," "New
times of 1991" (the year the USSR collapsed and Lithuania
gained international recognition), and "Smetoniska," named
after An tanas Smetona, a long-term president of pre-Soviet
Lithuania.
In the case of those nostalgic for the Soviet past, the
goodness of the post-Soviet "Soviet" sausages reinforces their
visions of the past and gives their memories, marginalized
publicly, authority and power. In the case of those who are
critical of the Soviet period, "Soviet" sausage opens up the
space to reaffirm their negative views about the Soviet past.
"Soviet" sausages are intimately intertwined with people's
political sensibilities and experiences of social history. Like
biographical objects among the Kodi in Indonesia, "Soviet"
sausage is a pivot for reflection and introspection, a tool of
autobiographical self-discovery, a site for knowing oneself
through objects, and a means of relating to social history
and political community. It is a site of competition and
negotiation as well as of recirculation of political values and
ideologies.
CONCLUSION
Marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages illuminate
the ways in which public identities and citizenship are con
structed in the context of postsocialist and post?European
Union enlargement. In this context, individuals are vested
not only with juridical competences, obligations, and enti
tlements (or lack of them) endowed by the state but also with
particular modes of belonging based on their subjectivities
and experiences (cf. Davila 2001:10?11). As research on
the Latino market in the United States has shown, it is in the
market and through marketing discourse that populations
are increasingly debating their social identities and public
standing (Davila 2001:2). Consumers of "Soviet" sausages,
especially those who are nostalgic for Soviet times, debate
the post-Soviet personhood and citizenship regimes and their
status as the disempowered or the marginalized.
From one perspective, the "Soviet" sausage renaissance
in Lithuania carries a critique of the postsocialist state and
skepticism toward the ideals of liberal democracy. Scholars,
intellectuals, politicians, and consumers whose thinking is
informed by Cold War idioms and the binaries of capitalism
versus communism, totalitarian regime versus democracy,
and East versus West would be among the ones to question
the ethics and politics of "Soviet" sausages. Paradoxically,
this reproduces the visions that inform their thinking: the
Cold War discourses and the antagonisms it entailed. The
consumers and producers of "Soviet" sausages are classified
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 33
with communists, the oppressive Soviet state and its suc
cessor Russia, and the new populists and radicals who chal
lenge democracy, sovereignty, and concurrent integration
into Western and European structures. In this context, the
production and consumption of "Soviet" sausages redefines
the boundaries of society and reproduces alterity (cf. Boyer
2001). Consumption of "Soviet" sausages is an important
criterion for inclusion or exclusion as well as a reiteration of
hegemonies and ideologies. As elsewhere in food contexts,
"Soviet" sausages signal rivalry and commonality, solidarity
and segregation, and intimacy and distance (cf. Firth 1973;
Geertz 1960; Ortner 1978; Young 1971).
However, although "Soviet" sausage is about politics and
power, it is not about a return to Soviet times. For many
"Soviet" sausage consumers, consumption is a way to re
claim honorable citizenship and recognition in a post-Soviet
neoliberal state. By purchasing "Soviet" sausage (and voting
for populists or excommunists), they resist economic and
social marginalization without resisting democracy. Thus,
from another perspective, "Soviet" sausages may be consid
ered an example of the new postsocialist Utopia, successfully
consumed in the literal and metaphorical sense, which mixes
the imagined Soviet past and the European present in peo
ple's imaginations to produce a distinctive fantasy of their
reconcilability.
Neringa Klumbyte Department of Anthropology, Miami University,
Oxford, Ohio 45056; klumbyn@muohio.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am very thankful to Dominic Boyer,
Melissa Caldwell, Gerald Creed, Bruce Grant, Robert Hayden, Yuson
Jung, Diana Mincyte, Gediminas Lankauskas, Elizabeth Novickas,
Randy Richards, and Giedrius Subacius for their comments and sug
gestions on the earlier drafts of this article. I am very grateful to
Tom Boellstorff and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable
criticism and advice on how to improve this article. I also thank
Katia Belousova, Susanne Cohen, Serguei Oushakine, and Kim Lane
Scheppele for sharing various ethnographic details, Vitaly Chernetsky
for translating the abstract into Russian, and Masha Misco and Janice
Pilch for their assistance with ethnographic materials.
1. Lithuania was integrated into the USSR in 1940. It was oc
cupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. From 1944 to
1990, it was a Soviet Socialist Republic.
2. Feminine tarybine, plural masculine tarybiniai, plural feminine
tarybines. I use the English term Soviet in this article. I use
the general term "Soviet" brands following consumers' under
standing; the actual brand names were longer, such as "Soviet
Salami" or "Soviet Milk Wieners."
3. Vilnius District Court. Case No. 3K-3-461.
4. On consumption and the state, see Dunn (2008), Patico
(2008), ?zy?rek (2006), and Verdery (1996); on consump
tion and nationalism, see Caldwell (2002) and Foster (2002);
on consumption and citizenship, see Berdahl (2005) and
34 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010
Porter (2008); and on consumption, democracy, and political
belonging, see Greenberg (2006). Nationalism and citizenship
have been more explicitly addressed by anthropologists who
study marketing and advertising, rather than consumption per
se (see Davila 2001; Foster 2008; Manning and Uplisashvili
2007; Mazzarella 2005).
5. In anthropology, the interconnections between consumption
and political history have been most thoroughly discussed in
studies of political economy and globalization. (See Foster
2008; Miller 1998; Watson 1997; and Wilk 1999 on con
sumption and globalization. See Kaplan 2007 and Mintz 1985
on consumption and political economy.) The issues of power
and identity have been addressed by numerous studies. Con
sumption is discussed as an expression of ethnicity (Gronow
2003; Toomre 1997); gender (Counihan 1999); class and sta
tus (Bourdieu 1984; Roseberry 1996); nation (Cwiertka 2004;
Pilcher 1998; Wilk 1999); kinship (Howard and Kirkpatrick
1989); or, generally, identity (Friedman 1994).
6. On the deterioration of the food situation in the late Soviet
period, see Kenneth Gray (1989).
7. Wieners in Soviet times were less prestigious than some other
foods, such as caviar, smoked eel, exotic fruits such as pineap
ples and bananas, or the expensive smoked sausage "Serve
latas." In Soviet Lithuania, many other foods were in short
supply; thus, they were not consumed regularly and can be
considered "luxuries." Chicken is an example of this type of
luxury food.
8. Other meat dishes, such as steak, were more appropriate
at birthday parties. In general, unprocessed meat products
ranked higher than processed ones.
9. "Soviet" sausage is a type of nostalgia branding. On nostalgia
and consumption in East Germany, see Berdahl (2001), Boy er
(2001), Buechler and Buechler (1999), Merkel (2006); in the
former Yugoslavia, see Velikonja (2008) and Zivkovic (2007).
10. Personal communication with Rimas Frizinskas, director of
commerce for Samsonas, August 25, 2005.
11. Personal communication with Rimgaile Vaitkiene, former di
rector of marketing for Samsonas, July 12, 2007.
12. Personal communication with Rimgaile Vaitkiene, former di
rector of marketing for Samsonas, July 12, 2007.
13. Vilnius District Court. Case No. 3K-3-461.
14. Vilnius District Court. Case No. 3K-3^1-61.
15. Vilnius District Court. Case No. 3K-3^1-61.
16. In the socialist era, Western commodities and images were
important for self-value and dignity (see Fehervary 2002 on
Hungary).
17. Personal communication with Rimgaile Vaitkiene, former di
rector of marketing for Samsonas, July 12, 2007.
18. Personal communication with Rimgaile Vaitkiene, former di
rector of marketing for Samsonas, July 12, 2007.
19. See Lithuanian Standard LST 1919. The Lithuanian Standard
ization Department, Vilnius, 2003.
20. See Vilnius District Court. Case No. 3K-3-461 for represen
tative survey and linguists' analyses data.
21. Samsonas production catalog.
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
22. Personal communication with Art?ras Skairys, the director
for marketing of Bio vela, August 8, 2007.
23. In Lithuania, most people do not suffer from hunger; how
ever, they feel what Melissa Caldwell (2004) called subjective
hunger.
24. On consumption, prosperity, and exclusion, see also Berdahl
(2005) and Humphrey (2002).
25. I call people's relation to post-Soviet history "nostalgia" be
cause they long for a place and time that no longer exist; this
longing embraces feelings of romance, pleasure, loss, irre
versibility, and displacement as well as grief and stasis in some
cases (see also Klumbyte 2008).
REFERENCES CITED
Aleshkovsky, Peter
1990 About Sausage. In The Best of Ogonyok: The New Jour
nalism of Glasnost. Vitaly Korotich, ed. Pp. 19?23. London:
Heinemann.
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1984 Rabelais and His World. Helene Iswolsky, trans.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Beal, Anne
2000 Real Jordanians Don't Decorate Like That! The Politics of
Taste among Amman's Elites. City and Society 12(2):65?94.
Berdahl, Daphne
1999 Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in
the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
2001 "Go, Trabi, Go!": Reflections on a Car and Its Symbolization
over Time. Anthropology and Humanism 25(2): 131?141.
2005 The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship
in Post-Wall Germany. Comparative Studies of Society and
History 47(2):235-251.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Boyer, Dominic
2001 Media Markets, Mediating Labors, and the Branding of East
German Culture at Super Illu. Social Text 19(3):9?33.
2006 Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany.
Public Culture 18(2):361-381.
Boym, Svetlana
2001 The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Buechler, Hans, and Judith-Maria Buechler
1999 The Bakers of Bernburg and the Logics of Communism and
Capitalism. American Ethnologist 26(4):799-821.
Caldwell, Melissa
2002 Taste of Nationalism: Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow.
Ethnos 67(3):295-319.
2004 Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
2009 Food and Everyday Life in Postsocialist World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Carrier, James
2006 The Limits of Culture: Political Economy and the Anthro
pology of Consumption. In The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Frank
Trentmann, ed. Pp. 271-289. Oxford: Berg.
Creed, Gerald
2002 (Consumer) Paradise Lost: Capitalist Dynamics and Dis
enchantment in Rural Bulgaria. Anthropology of East Europe
Review 20(2): 119-125.
Counihan, Carole
1999 The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning,
and Power. New York: Routledge.
Cwiertka, Katarzyna
2004 Western Food and the Making of the Japanese Nation-State.
In The Politics of Food. Marianne E. Lien and Brigitte Neriich,
eds. Pp. 121-141. Oxford: Berg.
Dabartinis lietuvhj kalbos zodynas
2000 Dabartinis lietuviij kalbos zodynas [The modern dictio
nary of the Lithuanian language]. Vilnius, Lithuania: Mokslo ir
enciklopedijij leidybos institutas.
Davila, Arlene
2001 Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of People.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Donskis, Leonidas
2005 Aukos meile budeliui, arba uz ka_ lietuviai taip myli Rusija.?
[The victim's love for his torturer, or why do Lithuanians
love Russia so much?]. Klaipeda, February 28. http://www.
delfi.It/archive/index.php?id=6138259, accessed March 12,
2005.
Dunn, Elizabeth
2008 Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies, and the State in the
Republic of Georgia. American Ethnologist 35(2):243?258.
2009 Afterword?Turnips and Mangos: Power and the Edi
ble State in Eastern Europe. In Food and Everyday Life in
the Postsocialist World. Melissa Caldwell, ed. Pp. 206-222.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Elliston, Deborah A.
2004 A Passion for the Nation: Masculinity, Modernity, and Na
tionalist Struggle. American Ethnologist 31(4):606?630.
Fehervary, Krisztina
2002 American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for
a "Normal" Life in Post-Socialist Hungary. Ethnos 67(3): 369
400.
Firth, Raymond
1973 Symbols: Public and Private. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila
1999 Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times:
Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Foster, Robert J.
2002 Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and
Media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
2008 Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York
to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 35
Friedman, Jonathan, ed.
1994 Consumption and Identity. Switzerland: Harwood Aca
demic.
Geertz, Clifford
1960 The Religion of Java. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic.
Gille, Zsuzsa
2009 The Tale of the Toxic Paprika: The Hungarian Taste of
Euro-Globalization. In Food and Everyday Life in Postsocial
ist World. Melissa Caldwell, ed. Pp. SI-17. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Gray, Kenneth
1989 The Soviet Food Complex in a Time of Change. Na
tional Food Review, October?December, http://www.
findarticles. com / p / articles / mi_m3284/ is_n4_v 12/ ai_
8274317/pg_3, accessed October 20, 2005.
Greenberg, Jessica
2006 Noc Reklamozdera [The night of the adgorgers]: Democ
racy, Consumption, and the Contradictions of Representation
in Post-Socialist Serbia. PoLAR: The Political and Legal An
thropology Review 29(2):281-207.
Gronow, Jukka
2003 Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of
the Good Life in Stalin's Russia. Oxford: Berg.
Holtzman, Jon
2003 In a Cup of Tea: Commodities and History among Sam
buru Pastoralists in Northern Kenya. American Ethnologist
30(1):136-155.
Hoskins, Janet
1998 Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peo
ple's Lives. New York: Routledge.
Howard, Alan, and John Kirkpatrick
1989 Social Organization. In Developments in Polynesian Eth
nology. Alan Howard and Robert Borofsky, eds. Pp. 47-94.
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Humphrey, Caroline
2002 The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after
Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jonusys, Laimantas
2004 Sovietines desreles ilgesys [Longing for Soviet sausage].
Literat?ra ir menas, December 10. http://www.culture.
lt/lmenas/?leid_id=3027&kas=straipsnis&st_id=5860, ac
cessed May 12, 2006.
Kaplan, Martha
2007 Fijian Water in Fiji and New York: Local Politics and a
Global Commodity. Cultural Anthropology 22(4):685-706.
Klumbyte, Neringa
2008 The Post-Soviet Publics and Nostalgia for Soviet Times. In
Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist
Eastern Europe. Ingo Schroeder and Asta Vonderau, eds. Pp.
27-^-6. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Kopytoff, Igor
1986 The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as
Process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective. Arjun Appadurai, ed. Pp. 64?91. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
36 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010
Kotkin, Stephen
1995 Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Landsbergis, Vytautas
2007 Ant svarstyklrq [On the scales]. Gintaras Aleknonis's radio
broadcast. Edition on post-Soviet nostalgia. Lithuanian Na
tional Television and Radio, July 31.
Lankauskas, Gediminas
2002 On "Modern" Christians, Consumption, and the Value of
National Identity in Post-Soviet Lithuania. Ethnos 67(3): 320?
344.
Levy, Robert I., and Douglas W. Hollan
2000 Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation. In Hand
book of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Russell H.
Bernard, ed. Pp. 333-364. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press.
Linnekin, Jocelyn
1985 Children of the Land: Exchange and Status in a Hawaiian
Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Lupton, Deborah
1996 Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage.
Manning, Paul, and Ann Uplisashvili
2007 "Our Beer": Ethnographic Brands in Postsocialist Georgia.
American Anthropologist 109(4):626-641.
Matonis, Audrius
2005 Be pykcio [Without anger]. Interview by Leonidas Donskis.
Lithuanian Television, July 2005.
Mazzarella, William
2005(2003] Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization
in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Merkel, Ina
2006 From Stigma to Cult: Changing Meanings in East German
Consumer Culture. In The Making of the Consumer: Knowl
edge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Frank Trent
mann, ed. Pp. 249-270. Oxford: Berg.
Miller, Daniel
1995 Consumption and Commodities. Annual Review of Anthro
pology 24:141-161.
1998 Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad. In Material
Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Daniel Miller, ed. Pp.
169?187. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2008 The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity.
Mincyte, Diana
2003 The Chemistry of Sovietization: Industrial Solvents and Na
tionalist Reactions in the 1960s Lithuania. In Synthetic Planet:
Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life. Monica
Casper, ed. Pp. 237?254. London: Routledge.
Mintz, Sidney
1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern His
tory. New York: Viking.
Munn, Nancy
1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transfor
mation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Ortner, Sherry
1978 Sherpas through Their Rituals. New York: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Oushakine, Serguei
2000 The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New
Russia. Theory, Culture and Society 17(5):97?120.
Ozy?rek, Esra
2006 Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday
Politics in Turkey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Patico, Jennifer
2008 Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle
Class. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M.
1998 The Conquests of Wheat: Culinary Encounters in the Colo
nial Period. In jQue vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making
of Mexican Identity. Jeffrey M. Pilcher and Lyman L. John
son, eds. Pp. 25-45. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Porter, Amy
2008 Fleeting Dreams and Flowing Goods: Citizenship and Con
sumption in Havana Cuba. PoLAR: The Political and Legal
Anthropology Review 31 (1): 134-149.
Ries, Nancy
1997 Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Roseberry, William
1996 The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class
in the United States. American Anthropologist 98(4):762?
775.
Rouse, Carolyn, and Janet Hoskins
2004 Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam: Explorations at the In
tersection of Consumption and Resistance. Cultural Anthro
pology 19(2):226-249.
Samsonas
2006 Services and Products, http://www.litfood-fair.com/
samsonas/index.php?page=3, accessed June 13, 2006.
Soper, Kate, and Frank Trentmann
2008 Introduction. In Citizenship and Consumption. Pp. 1?16.
Hampshire, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Spooner, Brian
1986 Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Car
pet. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective. Arjun Appadurai, ed. Pp. 195?236. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Stern, Barbara
1992 Historical and Personal Nostalgia in Advertising Text: The
Fin de Siecle Effect. Journal of Advertising 21(4): 11?22.
Toomre, Joyce
1997 Food and National Identity in Soviet Armenia. In Food
in Russian History and Culture. Musya Giants and Joyce
Toomre, eds. Pp. 195?215. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Vaitkiene, Rimgaile
2004 "Samsonas" apgyne savo prekes zenkla^ teisme [Samsonas
defends its brand name in court], http://www.takas.lt/pr/
archyvas/?st? 1 &msg id=440, accessed February 13, 2005.

Velikonja, Mitja
2008 Titostalgia?A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz. Ljubljana,
Slovenia: Mirovni institut.
Verdery, Katherine
1996 What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Vilniaus Mesa
2006 Zenklo gimimo data?2002 metai [The brand originated in
2002]. http://www.vilniausmesa.lt, accessed June 13, 2006.
Watson, James L., ed.
1997 Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Wilk, Richard
1999 "Real Belizean Food": Building Local Identity in the Transna
tional Caribbean. American Anthropologist 101 (2):244?255.
Young, Michael
1971 Fighting with Food. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Zivkovic, Marko
2007 "Mile vs. Transition": A Perfect Informant in the Slushy
Swamp of Serbian Politics? Social Identities 13(5):597?610.
FOR FURTHER READING
(These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorial
interns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They do
not necessarily reflect the views of the author.)
This content downloaded from 109.205.44.6 on Thu, 14 Feb 2019 07:56:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Klumbyte Soviet Sausage Renaissance 37
Foster, Robert
2007 The Work of the New Economy: Consumers, Brands,
and Value Creation. Cultural Anthropology 2 2(4): 707?
731.
Heath, Deborah, and Anne Meneley
2007 Techne, Technoscience, and the Circulation of Comestible
Commodities: An Introduction. American Anthropologist
109(4): 593-602.
Kalb, Don
2009 Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden His
tories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Post
socialism (and Beyond). American Ethnologist 36(2):207?
223.
Mintz, Sidney
2003 Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and
Memory. American Ethnologist 30(3):474-^-75.
Ries, Nancy
2009 Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia. Cultural
Anthropology 24(2): 181-212.
Rivkin-Fish, Michele
2009 Tracing Landscapes of the Past in Class Subjectivity: Prac
tices of Memory and Distinction in Marketizing Russia. Amer
ican Ethnologist 36(l):79-95.
Vizcarra Bordi, Ivonne
2006 The "Authentic" Taco and Peasant Women: Nostalgic Con
sumption in the Era of Globalization. Culture and Agriculture
28(2):97-107.