Something to Declare

September 8, 2024: Albania Then and Now

Some of my subscribers particularly enjoy historical perspective. This is for them. If that’s not your thing, then just delete this. No offense will be taken. (I’ll never know anyway, and there will be no quiz.)

Albania had a history that was not terribly different from the other Balkan countries. It followed the usual pattern of being the home of an ancient culture, the Illyrians, was thereafter part of the empires of Alexander the Great, then the Romans, then the Byzantines. It became an independent kingdom in 13th century, in the orbit of the Venetian Republic. In the 15th century the area was swallowed by the Ottomans. Albania declared independence from the Ottomans in 1912, and was a separate kingdom under the rule of the man who eventually became King Zog, until the Italian and German occupations in the 1940s.

At the end of the Second World War, Albania flirted with the idea of being a part of communist Yugoslavia, but rejected it when Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshall Tito, refused to hew to the Stalinist line.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

The leader of the Albanian communists, Enver Hoxha (pronounced “How-Ja”), was a hard-liner and true believer, and he stayed loyal to the Soviets until the death of Stalin. After Stalin, under Kruschchev and his successors, the Soviet Union began to move slowly away from its former rigidity. This appalled Hoxha. Even the Chinese communists were viewed as too liberal for Hoxha’s Partia Komuniste e Shqipërisë (the Albanian communist party).

As a practical matter, Hoxha was out-Stalin-ing Stalin. Under his rule, Albania was wholly cut off from the rest of the world, and became the most inflexible and controlling communist dictatorship on the planet. In the words of Lea Ypi, a contemporary Albanian author, the country was turned by Hoxha and his successors into an “open-air prison.”

All of this changed in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union ended, and Yugoslavia broke up into its component parts. Albania had a sort of glasnost of its own and became a constitutional republic and a free-market economy. For anyone interested, I highly recommend Ypi’s book, Free, which tells the story of these changes from a personal perspective.

Can’t wait to see how things turned out.