Abstract
In 1989, much of the Communist world disappeared. But in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania the Communist leadership hunkered down and insisted its path was uninterrupted by events in countries that had hardly been real socialist countries anyway. By then, Albania’s long-time ruler Enver Hoxha had been dead for four years. Having survived regime changes that shook the Communist world, Hoxha was decidedly obsessed with the ensuring that his succession would ensure that Albanian Stalinism would survive. Starting in 1981, when Hoxha embarked on what would become his last really great purge, one can see signs of what lay ahead. These events shed light on what happened in Albania when Communism started to unravel in late 1990 and inaugurated what looks like a never-ending transition.
Let us not start the story in 1989, which means something very different in much of the Balkans than it does in central Europe. In 1989, for Albanians, what was happening in central Europe must have seemed like a drama from another planet. The Communists in Tirana maintained that they were immune to the changes that Moscow had introduced in the late 1980s. But things did change. In 1990, impatience with the slow pace of reform became obvious. In 1991, quasi-free elections took place that the Communists easily won. In 1992, elections put democratic forces in government, but in a matter of months, it was obvious that they had only the most rudimentary understanding of democracy and that shaking the legacy of the dictator Enver Hoxha would take decades. 1 Albanians are still trying to shake that legacy. Indeed, Albania’s peculiar form of Communism, which stayed extremely violent to the end, shaped what happened when the whole edifice came crashing down.
That all said, 1981 is my starting point. Things were happening, especially in Albania, which had long ago fallen off the list of places to care about. There were significant demonstrations in Kosovo, during which Albanians demanded the recognition of a republic for Albanians within Yugoslavia. Tito had been dead for a year. The other Balkan leaders, Nicolae Ceaușescu and Todor Zhivkov, looked to be secure. In 1981, Albania entered a succession crisis that rippled throughout the 1980s. Even for a country that had grown accustomed to regular bloodletting at the top of the ruling party, this time was different. After all, class struggle, as defined by Hoxha, never ended; it zigged and zagged, as he liked to say. That was one of the great hallmarks of Albanian Communism, which was unique in Communist Europe. As analysts, we are often looking for some signs that tell (or more likely told) us what is ahead. Albania’s succession crisis is essential for understanding just how violent the Communist regime was until the end, how Ramiz Alia ended up as the country’s leader (which had important implications for the end of Communism), and how the past shaped the years that followed.
In the fall of 1981, the country’s long-time number two, Mehmet Shehu, was called out by Hoxha for allowing his son to marry a woman with a bad biography. The long-term implications of bringing a family of ill repute into the inner circle of the party, lacking the right past, would unsettle the masses and bring down the regime. The spat over bad choices spilled over to the Politburo, which had long before been purged of people with skills or talent. Hoxha used the moment to settle the issue of succession that so terrified him. By then, Hoxha was frail and weak from illness. At that moment, Shehu was younger and certainly more vibrant than Hoxha. Moreover, Hoxha’s last five years witnessed epic levels of madness. He was determined that Albania should avoid the chaos that came when Stalin died in 1953. Despite his obsession with external threats, as an avid reader of history he knew that an attempt to derail his vision of Stalinist modernity would be an inside job. Hoxha’s powerful wife, Nexhmije, worried about preserving her privileges in the next era, and she and Shehu’s wife likely quarrelled over petty things inside the tiny enclave (known as the Blloku to ordinary Albanians on the other side of the fence) where the party elite holed up, immune from the deprivation they had imposed on a completely beaten population. If the roots of opposition could be seen with hindsight elsewhere in Communist Europe, Albanians were inactive and complacent. 2 The break with China after Mao’s death in 1976 and the end of financial support from Beijing had ruined everything, and dark times persisted. A sense of hopelessness prevailed and Albanians who lived through this period speak of a constant sense of dread. There could be no Solidarity Movement, Magic Lantern Theatre, or Danube Circle in Albania. Hoxha had warned everyone that the Albanians would eat grass before bowing to foreign pressure. There were well-kept lawns and gardens in the Blloku but no grass for eating.
However, some good news finally came. In December 1981, state radio announced that Shehu had killed himself. Shehu’s poor choices killed him, and given his time in the inner sanctum, it would be hard to say that he did not know that a “natural” death was unlikely, given the fate of those who preceded him. Since many considered Shehu to be the real force of evil in what was a very violent and predatory Communist regime, who could blame people for seeing a glimmer of hope in the death of the prime minister amidst such a dire situation? State radio made the announcement but instead of following it with funeral music, as would have been the custom, popular music came. It was not quite “Ding-dong the witch is dead,” but something deeply strange was occurring inside the most ironclad of all ruling parties in the region. That had to be a good sign. No state funeral followed—not necessary for those who killed themselves, according to the party. Shehu’s photo, which had hung alongside Hoxha’s in the nation’s schools and offices, disappeared. A prime minister for more than 25 years, the real sword and shield of the party, an interior minister, arguably Albania’s best partisan leader and a Spanish Civil War veteran of the Garibaldi Battalion, went to a grave in an ordinary cemetery almost completely devoid of mourners—far too risky to make an appearance. Buried “like a dog,” according to Hoxha. In a November 1982 speech to the party, Hoxha added that Shehu “broke his head on the unity of the party.” 3 Shehu’s family members were disgraced and some chose suicide. His wife was sent to jail. She did get the odd visit from Mrs. Hoxha after her husband’s death. Whatever was said, these visits must have been an act of extraordinary cruelty.
That Shehu was later ludicrously exposed as a poly-agent in the service of multiple foreign intelligence agencies hardly mattered. His crimes were legion, but nobody asked aloud how the strongest party in Eastern Europe could have allowed Shehu to work unhindered for so long in the service of the Germans, Americans, British, Soviets, and Yugoslavs—a remarkable achievement by any standard. According to Hoxha, he was supposedly caught red-handed only days before he was set to poison Hoxha and return Albania to King Zog’s gangster capitalism. 4 However, nobody believed that nonsense after forty years of incredibly ridiculous stories of betrayal within the top echelons of the ruling party. More purges followed in what was Hoxha’s (and his wife’s) last great housecleaning. 5 If her husband sought to avoid the aftermath of Stalin’s death, Mrs. Hoxha was haunted by the fate of Madame Mao, who had been arrested in 1976 and convicted in 1981.
The main beneficiary of this purge was Ramiz Alia, who eventually became Albania’s last Communist leader. Alia was not a murderer, but he was certainly a beneficiary of murder. His biggest achievement to date had been leading the party’s effort to destroy religion in the late 1960s, which led to the brazen attacks on and later shuttering of all religious institutions. 6 That Hoxha chose Alia as the man best suited to defend Albanian Stalinism to the bitter end is odd, given how easily Alia caved to opposition forces in late 1990. Shehu’s final letter to Comrade Enver is essential to understand just where Albania was in 1981. Citing a dedication Hoxha had made to him in a book that spoke of Shehu as his “best friend,” Shehu did not plead his case but instead said he was dying for the party as an innocent man betrayed by lowlifes. 7 He knew who had set him up: Ramiz Alia and Kadri Hazbiu. The note warned Hoxha of Alia’s duplicity and betrayal of Stalinist principles. The letter portrays Alia as the Albanian Khrushchev, one of Hoxha’s arch-enemies, who would introduce poisonous revisionism. As an avid reader, Shehu chose to liken Hazbiu to Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. Maybe Shehu was right, as Hazbiu was executed in 1982 as a coup plotter. Alia, very much a mediocrity out of a Dickens novel, was the second-to-last survivor of the regime, dying in 2011, almost 86 years old. Nexhmije, dubbed the Lady Macbeth of Albania, died in 2020, aged 99. 8
However, Shehu’s death did not lift the clouds. Things actually got much darker. Shehu was killed by his friends but at least he had a marked grave. His principal legacy was unmarked graves. As if on cue, in 1982, the Politburo announced it had foiled a landing of criminals who had guns, clothes, cash, and binoculars. The madness continued as Hoxha drifted towards insanity. The real opening came in April 1985, when Hoxha died as the longest-serving Communist leader. Behind the state-sponsored hysteria, the spontaneous poetry from schoolchildren, and endless lines of mourners along Tirana’s Boulevard of Martyrs, many people saw the opening they had hoped for. The funeral was decidedly more domestic and austere than Tito’s in 1980. Foreigners were not invited. Of course, it rained. But like Tito, Enver was not really dead, as Enverism was still the guiding force of the nation—an Albanian version of “After Tito, Tito.” Leading the speeches was Alia, with a photo of Enver and with the statue of Skanderbeg in the background. The symbolism was clear. Only two people mattered in 500 years of Albanian history—a depressing thought.
The state-security eavesdroppers in Tirana’s House of Leaves could listen to the odd dissident family talking of a feast to celebrate what had to be the end of the country’s misery. But what to feast on in a nation of shortages and endless queues? Inside the party enclave, the fat cats of Albania’s last Politburo were obviously nervous as to what was next. The heavyweights of the liberation war had all been murdered along the way, leaving only the most servile in their place. The goading and taunting of Shehu drove him to suicide, which maybe could save his family. What would be the fate those whose only achievements were in the realm of fealty to the leader?
Urban Albanians were not nearly as isolated as the stories told. They listened to the BBC and watched Italian and Yugoslav television. Outside Albania, things were happening. Gorbachev was in power in the USSR, though he had not started to tinker with the system. For the Politburo men (and one woman) things looked good. Alia would stay the course, as Enver had anticipated. Privileges inside the enclave were secure. All eyes turned to Nexhmije and her protégé, Ramiz. Smiles returned to the party bosses as they gathered in the gardens of the villas toasting their good fortune—they had survived. The country’s murderer-in-chief was dead. Although Enver could not actually die, he did get a grave. In fact, he got the best grave in the country, beside the Mother Albania statue, high above Tirana, in a cemetery devoted to the fighters of Albania’s wartime liberation struggle against the Italians, Germans, and domestic collaborators.
Alia could not hold the Stalinist course, so Shehu was right again. Alia ultimately betrayed Enver and Enverism because he was weak. Albania’s failed self-reliance after the break with China destroyed the economy, and Alia’s attempts at a controlled opening to the world failed. By then, Albania had sunk too deep to respond to half-measures. There is no reason to retell the events that led to the half-death of Albanian Communism. I say half-death because the years of transition were extremely fraught, and Communism lingered in weird but obvious ways. It is still fair to say that Albania had a revolution because everyone else in the region had one. 9 In all likelihood, it was events occurring outside Albania’s borders that had the most impact on what happened inside Albania. But the outcome would once again make the country an odd exception.
In July 1990, hundreds of people sought asylum in foreign embassies. Alia finally permitted people to have passports, and thousands left although the regime called them “hooligans.” 10 Alia reiterated calls for class struggle against “reactionary” elements. In the fall of 1990, Albania’s most prestigious writer, Ismail Kadare, sought asylum in France. In December, a weakened Alia gave in to protesting students and allowed for political pluralism; Albania soon had its first opposition party since the end of the war.
In an era when symbolism mattered, in February 1991 Enver Hoxha’s seven-metre bronze statue in Tirana’s main square came down, erasing a powerful Communist symbol from the capital’s memoryscape. Hoxha was walking East, of course, to teach the Soviets and others a lesson about sticking to the modernization principles of Stalin—his left foot forward, his back to the West. The statue survived for only three years. It had been a staple for school visits as people rubbed the left shoe (of course) for good luck and kids posed with parents. By March 1991, Albania had elections that kept Alia and the Communists in power. 11 Three months later, in a decidedly lazy attempt to become mainstream European socialists, the Communists threw out much of the old guard and offered some crocodile tears over the damage they had inflicted on Albanian society, but they failed to make a clean break with the past. They expected everyone to forgive them. The fact that the European Left accepted them, but not all Albanians did so, is a shame but that is an entirely different story. For many Albanians, the transformation was too hasty and too many of the old guard survived. To be sure, in the plethora of political forces that appeared in 1991 and after, Albania did not get a single decent political party; instead it got crooks and fraudsters focused mostly on getting rich as quickly as possible. It is hardly surprising, then, that the whole country ended up in a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme between 1995 and 1997, which practically tore the place apart.
But let us return to the concept of legacy. In his 1990 essay reflecting on the revolutions in Europe, Ralf Dahrendorf, a British-German sociologist, politician, and public intellectual, spoke of the need for sixty years to create a civil society.
12
Taking stock of post-Communist Europe, then, Dahrendorf was correct and even optimistic! Writing about the Balkans in 2000 to mark ten years since 1989, Ivan Vejvoda, a political scientist and key figure in the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, noted that What we have today in the case of ethnically or nationally driven politics is that rulers, this time legitimately elected in more or less free elections, are again concentrating all political and state prerogatives into their own hands and are making decisions concerning the destinies of whole societies while marginalizing parliaments, public opinion, and other key intermediary institutions.
13
What had changed? Nothing, in fact. And worse still, society still lacked the forces to resist the new bosses. Strongman rule survived not despite the past but because of it.
When Albania’s first-ever democratically elected government took office in March 1992, it had no idea what to do first. The past was an enormous burden and people wanted a clean slate provided by really easy answers. Many Albanians undoubtedly felt ashamed that they had allowed the regime to last so long, in part because they had failed to resist. In addition—and this was paramount—the new rulers had to prove to the population that they were not simply closet Communists who quickly jumped from one side of the barricade to another. I can imagine in these early meetings someone saying, “Let’s dig up Hoxha’s body!” The statue was down, the pyramid museum to his and the party’s life (they were interchangeable) shuttered. So Enver joined Shehu in an ordinary (but marked) grave. The two giants of Albanian Communism met similar fates.
To the country’s new leaders, moving Hoxha’s grave was a stroke of genius, but they still did the whole thing quietly lest they upset people. Hoxha’s family got hardly any notice of what was afoot. It was a quick dig-and-cover operation. But that decision was fateful in unknown ways. As I have stressed in previous writings and in a forthcoming biography of Enver Hoxha (co-written with Artan Hoxha of the Albanian Academy of Sciences), Hoxha’s most obvious legacy is the twisted nature of the transition. 14 These early mistakes proved costly, as they perpetuated a certain type of Communist memory management.
What I mean by a “twisted” transition (which was not an exclusively Albanian problem insofar as most post-Communist states struggled with memory management and fell easily into black-and-white narratives) is the persistence of binary thinking, which was essential to Hoxhaism. It has defined the Albanian post-Communist experience and served to hinder a real and complete democratic consolidation (which is also not an exclusively Albanian problem). It means that the past never really received the attention it deserved. Albania did have transitional justice, including lustration, but only to serve political purposes. 15 There was no serious public engagement with the atrocious past, and victims of the old regime received little of the attention they deserved. One of the reasons that so many Albanians remain ambivalent about Hoxha is this amnesia and the absence of serious research on him (or on Shehu for that matter) and his involvement in gross human rights violations.
Here is a recent example of this binary thinking in action. Albania’s current prime minister is Edi Rama. He is very much at home in the pantheon of strongmen who shape (and often ruin) the future of Balkan peoples, and he fits well into Vejvoda’s analysis. In 2020 Rama said that his father, like many other hardcore Communists during the war, had been on the right side of history. 16 There was an uproar in response from many quarters, especially since many Albanians firmly believe that the apple never falls far from the tree, so that Rama must also be a Communist. But Rama shattered the binary, as what he said was not far from the truth. At a few moments in time the Communists were on the right side of history, but not always. The mantra of 1992, perpetuated ever since, was that everything from the Hoxha period had to be bad. Rama’s statement was therefore blasphemy. There was no possible way a Communist could be on the right side of history, as that would negate the new narrative. For me, he was just adding a bit of nuance because during the war, Albania’s partisans were the allies of choice for the Allies, and they won the liberation war fair and square. What happened after is an altogether different story. This binary thinking persists and Albanians have yet to grasp in a complete way the multiple legacies of Communism or even the system that preceded it.
Let’s think about King Zog, in power between 1928 and 1939, to illustrate this binary thinking. With Mussolini’s help, he plundered Albania while smoking himself to death. 17 He was nonetheless rehabilitated. His mortal remains came home (nothing wrong in that), as he was born in Albania, but he got a street and a statue, too, albeit a small one, in 2012. There was no public discussion as to whether he deserved any recognition at all. I would argue he did not but the quest for usable history entails compromises. In the black-and-white world of Albania today, however, he had to have been good or at least less bad than Hoxha! Heroes seemed to be in short supply. In an absolutely beautiful PR move, in 2001 the Socialist government of Ilir Meta named the Tirana airport after Mother Teresa. Sure, she was born an Albanian in the Ottoman Empire but she had hardly any connection to Albania. Oddly, her canonization day is a public holiday in what used to be the only officially atheistic country in the world. The Socialists carefully avoided the dangers of the binary by choosing a figure that came from outside Albania. Moreover, they hoped the move would bolster Albania’s and the Socialist Party’s Western bona fides. As a nominally Muslim country, many also felt that the name would bolster Albania’s secular credentials.
Long without a museum to the Communist past, Albania now has two, both designed for foreigners—as, indeed, foreigners make up more than 80 per cent of the visitors. Set up under Socialist Party rule in 2017, the Museum of Secret Surveillance, or the House of Leaves, tells a complicated story of the surveillance state. Privately run Bunk’Art, opened in 2016, is like a funhouse and aimed at foreign fascination with Albania’s exotic Communism, with its bunkers, isolation, prisons, and pervasive police. It startles for certain but nothing a drink in the Blloku can’t fix. The Socialists cleverly used history to launder their image. When in power, the Democrats used history to bludgeon their opponents largely through the use of accusations of collaboration with the old regime and through the selective use of secret police files.
Where does Shehu fit into all of this? Although a top Communist liquidated by his own regime, he was no László Rajk, as in Hungary in the mid-1950s. There were no calls for Shehu’s rehabilitation. He was just another senior Communist who ended up like Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. 18 But Shehu’s story is the story of Communist Albania. Completely written out of history, Albanians were told to remove all references to him in forthcoming books and to destroy photos of him. The same type of thinking, plus never-ending quests for revenge, persists. The case of the former president and prime minister Sali Berisha is telling. Whatever his shortcomings, Berisha was central to the collapse of Communism. Likely his biggest failure was to make his Democratic Party a modern political party. In what was likely a political move, he was arrested on corruption charges.
This essay makes clear that the year 1989 occasioned no earthshaking events in Albania. However, let us end on a positive note. Since 1990, Albanians have travelled further and faster than peoples of any other post-Communist country. One needs to know just what Albania looked like in 1990 and the extent of the economic, moral, and spiritual crisis to understand why this is true. It took decades for Albania to get an election right. In comparison with the situation in 1990, Albania today is hardly recognizable. Who could have ever imagined that Albania would become a mainstream tourist destination, with Mother Teresa Airport’s tarmac covered with the aircraft of discount carriers as people flock to the beaches or mountains to try the country’s legendary hospitality? Despite the constant zig-zagging and often mixed messages from the European Union, in the non-EU Balkans Albanians remain the most enthusiastic supporters of membership in the EU. While a Czech or a Pole could speak of a “return” to Europe, Albanians want to join Europe. It is worth pondering what would have happened the day after Shehu poisoned Hoxha and began the much-awaited counter-revolution.