People's Socialist Republic of Albania

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 10th of January 1946, a small Balkan nation declared itself a people's republic, and began one of the most isolated and doctrinaire communist experiments in twentieth-century history. The People's Socialist Republic of Albania held its ground against Yugoslavia, then against the Soviet Union, then against China, until it stood almost entirely alone. How did a country of barely more than a million people manage to defy the two largest communist powers on earth? How did it become the world's first officially atheist state? And what happened to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Albanians caught inside its borders when the state finally collapsed in 1991?

• 2. Liberation and Seizure

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  On the 29th of November 1944, the National Liberation Movement drove German forces out of Albania, having already established a provisional government in May of that same year. At the head of that government stood Enver Hoxha, the first secretary of the two-year-old Communist Party of Albania, who took the office of prime minister.

  The speed and thoroughness with which the new government consolidated power set it apart from most of the emerging Eastern Bloc. Elsewhere, Communist parties typically participated in coalition governments for a few years before moving to single-party rule. In Albania, the LANC government was, from the start, an undisguised communist regime.

  The internal affairs minister, Koçi Xoxe, described as "an erstwhile pro-Yugoslavia tinsmith", presided over trials of non-communist politicians condemned as "enemies of the people" and "war criminals". Many received death sentences. Those spared spent years in work camps and jails, and survivors were later resettled on state farms built on reclaimed marshlands.

  In December 1944, the provisional government moved to regulate all foreign and domestic trade and nationalized transportation enterprises. Laws sanctioned the confiscation of property belonging to political exiles and enemies of the state, and all German- and Italian-owned holdings were expropriated.

  By August 1945, the government turned to agriculture. The country's hundred largest landowners, who had controlled close to a third of Albania's arable land, had blocked every previous reform attempt. Under the Agrarian Reform Law, roughly half of Albania's arable land was redistributed. Peasants with agricultural machinery could keep up to 40 hectares; those without machinery were limited to 20 hectares; landless peasants received up to 5 hectares, though they paid nominal compensation. By December 1945, voters went to the polls, but the ballot offered only a single list from the Communist-dominated Democratic Front. Official tallies put turnout at 92%, with 93% choosing that list.

  In January 1946, the assembly formally dethroned Zog I, abolished the monarchy, and declared Albania a people's republic. Hoxha, already holding the top party post, simultaneously took on the roles of prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and army commander in chief.

• 3. The Yugoslav Orbit

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  Yugoslavia was the first country to recognize Albania's provisional government, and by July 1946 the two nations had signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. Serbo-Croatian became a required subject in Albanian high schools. About 20,000 tons of Yugoslav grain helped stave off famine, and Albania also received US$26.3 million from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the immediate postwar period.

  Joint Albanian-Yugoslav companies were created for mining, railroad construction, and the production of petroleum and electricity. Yugoslav investments funded a sugar refinery in Korce, a food-processing plant in Elbasan, a hemp factory at Rrogozhine, a fish cannery in Vlore, and a printing press, telephone exchange, and textile mill in Tirana. Belgrade even paid three times the international price for Albanian copper.

  The relationship curdled when Albanians began complaining that the Yugoslavs were actually paying too little for raw materials and exploiting Albania through the joint companies. Hoxha's chief economic planner, Nako Spiru, became the leading voice of opposition to Yugoslav economic domination. Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who distrusted Hoxha and his intellectual allies, worked through Xoxe to unseat them.

  In 1947, Yugoslavia moved against anti-Yugoslav Albanian communists, including Hoxha and Spiru. Belgrade extended Tirana credits worth 40 million USD, an amount equivalent to 58% of Albania's entire 1947 state budget. At a November 1947 meeting of the Albanian Economic Central Committee, Spiru came under intense criticism led by Xoxe. Having failed to win any support inside the party, Spiru was assassinated the following day, his death framed as a suicide.

  When the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia on the 28th of June 1948, Albania performed a rapid reversal. Three days later, Tirana gave Yugoslav advisers just 48 hours to leave the country. Hoxha then pinned all blame on Yugoslavia and Xoxe. He had Xoxe sacked as internal affairs minister in October, replaced by Mehmet Shehu. After a secret trial in May 1949, Xoxe was executed. The subsequent purge liquidated 14 members of the party's 31-person Central Committee and 32 of the 109 People's Assembly deputies. Overall, about 25% of party members were expelled.

• 4. Cold War With the West

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  Albania's relations with the United States and Britain deteriorated sharply after the communist government refused to allow free elections in December 1945. Britain announced in April 1946 that it would not send a diplomatic mission to Tirana; the United States withdrew its mission in November; and both governments opposed Albanian membership in the United Nations.

  A major incident erupted in 1946 when Tirana claimed jurisdiction over the channel between the Albanian mainland and the Greek island of Corfu. Britain challenged this by sailing four destroyers into the channel. Two ships struck mines on the 22nd of October 1946, killing 44 crew members. Britain brought the case before the International Court of Justice, which ruled against Tirana in what was the court's first case ever.

  After 1946, the United States and Britain began an elaborate covert plan to overthrow the Albanian government, recruiting Albanian refugees and emigrants from Egypt, Italy, and Greece, training them in Cyprus, Malta, and West Germany, then infiltrating them into Albania. Guerrilla units entered in 1950 and 1952, but Albanian security forces killed or captured all of them. The operation was fatally compromised by Kim Philby, a Soviet double agent serving as a liaison between British and American intelligence, who had leaked details of the infiltration plan to Moscow. The security breach cost the lives of about 300 infiltrators.

  In September 1952, the assembly enacted a penal code requiring the death penalty for anyone over eleven years old convicted of conspiring against the state, damaging state property, or committing economic sabotage. Political executions were common; between 5,000 and 25,000 people were killed in total during the communist era. These figures sat alongside a declared national population of 1.2 million people in the early 1950s.

• 5. Breaking With Moscow

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  Albania entered the Soviet sphere after its break with Yugoslavia in 1948. In February 1949, it joined Comecon, and Soviet and East European technical advisers took up residence in Tirana. Moscow built a submarine installation on Sazan Island. The Soviet Union provided scholarships for Albanian students, and health indicators improved: hospital beds rose from 1,765 in 1945 to about 5,500 in 1953, and the infant-mortality rate fell from 112.2 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1945 to 99.5 in 1953. Illiteracy dropped from roughly 85% in 1946 to 31% in 1950.

  When Stalin died in March 1953, Hoxha and Shehu declined to travel to Moscow for the funeral, apparently fearing that the Soviet leader's death might embolden rivals within the Albanian party. Khrushchev's subsequent moves toward peaceful coexistence and de-Stalinization alarmed them deeply. Hoxha refused Khrushchev's appeals to posthumously rehabilitate Xoxe as a gesture to Tito.

  In 1955, Albania became a founding member of the Warsaw Pact. The following year, Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in his secret speech. Hoxha defended Stalin and refused to follow the new Soviet line. On an April 1957 trip to Moscow, he won the cancellation of about US$105 million in outstanding loans and about US$7.8 million in additional food assistance.

  By 1958, tensions had re-ignited. On a twelve-day visit to Albania in 1959, Khrushchev reportedly tried to persuade Hoxha and Shehu that Albania should aspire to become "socialism's orchard", an agricultural feeder for the bloc. Hoxha refused. At the APL's Fourth Party Congress in February 1961, the government announced a Third Five-Year Plan for 1961-65 that allocated 54% of all investment to industry, directly rejecting Khrushchev's vision.

  The final break came in December 1961, when Khrushchev lambasted the Albanians for executing Liri Gega, a pro-Soviet Politburo member who was allegedly pregnant at the time, and the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations. Moscow withdrew all Soviet economic advisers, including those building the promised Palace of Culture in Tirana, and halted shipments of supplies and spare parts for equipment already installed in Albania.

• 6. The Chinese Alliance

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  By June 1960, at a Romanian Workers' Party congress, Albania's delegation stood alone among the European delegations in supporting China against Khrushchev. Moscow retaliated immediately, organizing a campaign to oust Hoxha and Shehu that summer, cutting promised grain deliveries during a drought, and apparently involving itself in a plot to unseat the two leaders by force. Four pro-Soviet Albanian leaders, including Teme Sejko and Tahir Demi, were tried and executed. China moved quickly to replace the lost Soviet wheat shipments despite its own economic hardships and shortage of foreign currency.

  China compensated Albania for the loss of Soviet support by supplying about 90% of the parts, foodstuffs, and other goods Moscow had promised. Chinese technicians, unlike Soviet advisers, earned the same pay as Albanian workers and lived in comparable housing. China also gave Albania a powerful radio transmitter from which Tirana broadcast praise of Stalin, Hoxha, and Mao Zedong for decades. In return, Albania served as China's chief spokesman at the United Nations and offered China a foothold in Europe.

  The practical difficulties were considerable. Chinese equipment and technicians were far less sophisticated than the Soviet goods and advisers they replaced. A language barrier even forced Chinese and Albanian technicians to communicate in Russian.

  By August 1968, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia gave Hoxha the pretext he needed. Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact within a month, in September 1968, making it the only member to leave the alliance before 1990. Leonid Brezhnev made no attempt to force Albania to remain.

  Albanian-Chinese relations stagnated by 1970, and when China began rapprochement with the United States, Albania's press and radio ignored President Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972. After Mao's death in 1976, Hoxha criticized the new Chinese leadership's pragmatic approach. China responded by inviting Tito to Beijing in 1977 and ending all assistance programs for Albania in 1978. Albania was left with no foreign benefactor.

• 7. Atheism and the Cultural Revolution

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  After Mao Zedong launched China's Cultural Revolution in 1966, Hoxha launched his own version in Albania. The regime abolished military ranks, reintroduced political commissars into the army, and slashed the salaries of mid- and high-level officials. Six ministries were eliminated outright, including the Ministry of Justice. Officials and specialists were sent from their desk jobs to work in factories and fields.

  Following a speech by Hoxha on the 6th of February 1967, after the 5th Congress of the Party of Labor of Albania, authorities launched a violent campaign against religious life. Student agitators traveled through the countryside forcing Albanians to abandon their faiths. By year's end, all churches, mosques, monasteries, and other religious institutions had been closed or converted into warehouses, gymnasiums, and workshops. A special decree abrogated the charters of the country's main religious communities. The 1976 constitution later enshrined the result in law: Article 37 stated that "The state recognizes no religion whatever" and mandated atheist propaganda.

  On the 1st of November 1977, Hoxha claimed in his report to the 7th Congress that roughly 1,500,000 people, representing practically the entire adult population, had participated in discussions over the new constitution, and that about 300,000 had contributed to the debate. Testimonies from those who suffered religious persecution during this era cast serious doubt on how freely those opinions were aired.

  The campaign against religion coincided with sweeping changes in women's status. Before the war, about 90% of Albanian women were illiterate, and women were regarded as chattel under ancient tribal laws in many areas. The Cultural Revolution encouraged women to work outside the home to compensate for labor shortages. Hoxha declared that anyone who trampled on the party's edict on women's rights should be "hurled into the fire." Traditional clan structures, which had centered on the patriarchal family, were broken apart by collectivization, industrialization, migration to urban centers, and the suppression of religion.

• 8. Collapse and Legacy

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  Hoxha tapped Ramiz Alia to succeed him in 1980, sidelining his longtime comrade Mehmet Shehu. When Shehu refused to step aside voluntarily, Hoxha arranged for the entire Politburo to rebuke him for allowing his son to become engaged to the daughter of a former bourgeois family. Shehu allegedly committed suicide on the 17th of December 1981. Hoxha had Shehu's wife and three sons arrested; one of them killed himself in prison. In November 1982, Hoxha announced that Shehu had been simultaneously working as a spy for the American, British, Soviet, and Yugoslav intelligence agencies. "He was buried like a dog", Hoxha wrote in his book The Titoites.

  Hoxha died on the 11th of April 1985. By then, Albania netted around US$750 in gross national product per capita throughout much of the 1980s, according to the World Bank. Without Chinese or Soviet aid, widespread shortages of machine parts, wheat, and animal feed took hold. Infrastructure and living standards began to collapse.

  When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and communist governments across Eastern Europe collapsed, Alia accelerated his own cautious reforms. After Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu was executed in December 1989, Alia signed the Helsinki Agreement that had been signed by other countries in 1975. On the 11th of December 1990, under pressure from students and workers, Alia announced that the Party of Labor had abandoned its guaranteed right to rule and that free elections would be held.

  Alia's party won the first free elections on the 31st of March 1991, but communist rule could not hold. On the 29th of April 1991, the Republic of Albania was proclaimed. The Communists were defeated by the Democratic Party in national elections on the 22nd of March 1992, and on the 7th of April 1992, all communist symbols were removed. The legal foundation of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania was only formally repealed on the 28th of November 1998, with the adoption of a new constitution.

  A 2016 survey by the Institute for Development Research and Alternatives showed that 42% of Albanians believe Hoxha had a positive impact on history, compared to 45% who view his impact as negative. In southern and southwestern Albania, 55% of respondents held a positive view of Hoxha. Meanwhile, Hoxhaist parties founded in other countries regrouped after 1991 under an international conference and the publication Unity and Struggle, carrying forward an ideology rooted in Hoxha's strict adherence to Marxism-Leninism into a world where the state that gave it birth no longer existed.