As a teenager in the late 1970s, who was very into politics, I met somebody who had been to Albania, then a communist country. What a strange place! Young people were forbidden to wear jeans and grow their hair long. The Albanian police enforced this with a pair of scissors, hacking at hair and jeans. What on earth did this have to do with socialism – let alone Marxism?
Enver Hoxha – Stalinist dictator
The Stalinist dictator in charge of Albania from the end of the Second World War to his death in 1985 was Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) who transformed his country into a one-party communist state after the monarchy was abolished and private property abolished. A policy of nationalisation and collectivisation saw both industry and land taken into state hands.
In 1967, Hoxha declared Albania the first completely atheist state. Churches and mosques were demolished or turned into cinemas, warehouses, and gyms. Children were not to have religious names and ownership of the Christian bible or Muslim Qur’an was forbidden.
Hoxha – opportunist and wily operator
Hoxha may have been ideologically a Marxist-Leninist but he also wanted to be king of his own castle: Albania. From 1939, Albania was occupied by fascist Italy and then in 1943, Nazi Germany took over the country.
Hoxha led the Albanian National Liberation Army, fighting to drive the Germans out, and the United States and Britain for assistance. Impressed by his courage, the Allies against Hitler obliged. They regarded Hoxha as a plucky liberation fighter who deserved a helping hand. However, Hoxha used the military supplies to slaughter non-communist rivals. By the time the Second World War ended, he had an iron grip on his homeland.
As Stalin’s Russia took over central and eastern Europe, neighbouring Yugoslavia baulked at Moscow’s interference. That country’s leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, embraced communism but not subservience to the Kremlin. As Tito rebelled against Stalin, Hoxha pledged his undying loyalty. Why?
Small country syndrome is the reason. Even the now exiled King Zog of Albania had gone through similar moves, first allying with Yugoslavia then embracing Mussolini’s Italy to stop the Yugoslavs absorbing his kingdom. Only Mussolini showed his gratitude to Zog by invading.
Hoxha faced the same dilemma only as a communist dealing with another communist power. To keep Tito at bay, Hoxha became Stalin’s most loyal comrade in eastern Europe. Tito was so furious that he began funding anti-communist, even monarchist, forces within Albania. Hoxha reacted by brutally purging pro-Yugoslav elements within the Albanian Communist Party.
For the next few years Hoxha needled Tito. Posing as Stalin’s most adoring lapdog, he wrote articles in the communist press making snide references to a certain person who had deviated from the one, true Soviet path to socialism. His incessant grovelling ensured Moscow’s support against Tito’s territorial ambitions – real or imagined.
Hoxha breaks with the Soviet Union
In 1953, Stalin died. Nikita Kruschev took power and in 1956 announced a programme of de-Stalinisation. At the Communist Party congress that year, Kruschev launched a blistering attack on his predecessor, revealing documents which showed that Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Russian revolution, held Stalin in low regard and was concerned about his personal shortcomings.
This speech electrified and mortified the Left around the world in equal measure. Many Communists refused to believe this onslaught by Kruschev against Stalin. While for others it confirmed what they had long suspected.
Hoxha fell firmly into the mortified camp. If this was the direction of ideological travel in Moscow, he didn’t want to be part of it. Visiting Russia in 1960, he accused Kruschev of “revisionism”, a major crime in Stalinist circles. For his part, Kruschev – using his familiar peasant turn of phrase – responded: “Comrade, you have covered me in dung. You will wash it away.”
Hoxha had no intention of removing the dung. So, in 1960, he broke with the USSR. In a daring move, he turned to China. This was a very risky move as the Soviets, and their eastern European client states, had subsidised Albania’s five year plan and their tourists had sunbathed on Albanian beaches. Now all that revenue disappeared.
The loss of tourist income was why Hoxha was prepared to encourage some western travellers into Albania. But as the 1960s progressed, it became clear that western tourists brought social and cultural values that Hoxha believed were bourgeois and decadent. He was especially offended by the flared jeans and shoulder length hair.
Hoxha breaks with China
Albania moved into the Chinese orbit with Hoxha declaring that Mao Zedong was the true standard bearer of international socialism. China paid back the compliment with significant investment into Albania. Mao had parted company with the post-Stalin Soviet Union and so seemed an ideal partner for Albania.
That was until the 1970s when Mao sought a rapprochement with the United States. In 1972, the unthinkable happened when US President Richard Nixon visited China in a bid to normalise relations between the two countries. For Hoxha, this was tantamount to heresy. Mao was getting into bed with capitalism’s world leader.
China, in Hoxha’s view, was behaving like an old-fashioned great power and not a socialist state. So, he denounced the Chinese and broke with Beijing. To ram home the point, he purged alleged pro-Chinese elements from within the Albanian Communist Party, much as he had wiped out pro-Yugoslav comrades in the 1940s.
Hoxha’s paranoia went far beyond anything Stalin experienced. His purges became nonsensical with friends and family members murdered. More bizarre, he ringed the country with thousands of concrete bunkers and built tunnels under Tirana where the party elite could shelter in the event of a war – even a nuclear war.
In the end, Hoxha had burned all his bridges. Some in the west feared that he would ally with Libya or Algeria but having demolished mosques and arrested imams, his religious policy posed a problem. Instead, Hoxha declared that only Albania represented true socialism and would happily go it alone.
Never going abroad and living, with other party cronies, in a semi-fortified part of Tirana, he became an autocrat out of touch with global realities. Like Stalin, he was occasionally seen hurtling through the city in his black limousine with curtained windows. Also like Stalin, he enjoyed being pictured with smiling children, posing as the benevolent father of the nation.
When a western journalist asked the secretary of the Communist Party in 1983 whether they were still looking to attract tourists from capitalist countries, he responded angrily:
“Why should we turn our land into an inn with doors flung open to sows and pigs, to girls and boys with pants on or not pants at all? Why should the long-haired hippies supplant with their wild orgies the graceful dances of our people?”
Hoxha died in 1985. The People’s Socialist Republic of Albania was dissolved in 1991 as communism collapsed across the eastern bloc countries.
Categories: History
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