Titans of History

HOXHA OF ALBANIA

1908–85

Stalin was not at all what the enemies of communism accused and accuse him of being. On the contrary, he was just and a man of principle … We Albanian communists have successfully applied the teachings of Stalin … His rich and very valuable experience has guided us on our road and in our activity.

Enver Hoxha, Memoirs

Enver Hoxha was intellectually sophisticated, handsome and charming, but a paranoid, rigidly dogmatic and murderous Stalinist tyrant of Albania who in a forty-year reign isolated and impoverished his country, tormented and murdered his own people and ran the government apparatus with sinister, sometimes tragicomic, violence, killing many of his own comrades in faked accidents, suicides and executions. By his death, he had turned his country into a failed state on the brink of collapse.

Hoxha was the son of a well-off cloth merchant, and during the 1920s and 1930s he spent several periods abroad, studying and working in France (he attended philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne) and Belgium, before returning to teach French in a school in the town of Korcë. When Fascist Italy invaded Albania in 1939, Hoxha refused to join the newly established Albanian Fascist Party, and was sacked from his job as a consequence. A year later, he opened a tobacco shop where in 1940 he helped found the Albanian Communist Party, which began an insurgent campaign against Italian occupation, drawing on the assistance of Tito’s Partisans in neighboring Yugoslavia. After liberation in 1944, Enver Hoxha became both the new prime minister and minister of foreign affairs but really ruled as first secretary of the Albanian Party of Labor. Soon after the war, Hoxha married Nexhmije, a fellow communist, who would later wield enormous power, not unlike that of Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing and the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaucescu’s wife, Elena.

Hoxha was a loyal and devoted Stalinist, savagely purging personal and class enemies. Stalin and Hoxha met frequently, enjoying long discussions on history and linguistics, later retold in Hoxha’s surprisingly fascinating memoirs. In 1949, after Marshal Tito’s split with the Soviet Union, Hoxha severed relations with Yugoslavia—even though Albania was much indebted to its far larger neighbor. He also executed his defense minister Koci Xoce for Titoism. Fearful lest his people be “contaminated” by exposure to the Titoist “deviance,” Hoxha ordered the construction of guard posts along the entire length of the country’s border—which became one of the most intensely monitored frontiers in the world. Later he ordered the building of 750,000 one-man concrete bunkers and 700,000 pillboxes to defend the country against invaders, an absurd and bizarre decision that still disfigures the Albanian littoral.

Behind his Balkan curtain, Hoxha embarked on a Stalinist-style exercise in social engineering. He sought the creation of an urban working class worthy of the name (hitherto, Albania had been a clan-based peasant society) and the socialization of national life. Forced industrialization followed, while agriculture was reorganized on the Soviet collective-farm model. At the same time, all of Albania gained access to electricity for the first time, life expectancy rose, and illiteracy rates plummeted. Yet the human cost of this social revolution was enormous.

Hoxha’s secret police, the Sigurimi, were brutal and ubiquitous: hundreds of thousands were tortured and killed. Hoxha’s prime minister Mehmet Shehu spoke openly at a party congress about their methods: “Who disagrees with our leadership in some point, will get a spit into his face, a blow onto his chin, and, if necessary, a bullet into his head.” Out of three million Albanians, one million were at some point either arrested or imprisoned in his perpetual terror.

Hoxha also added his own individual and quixotic touches. Private car ownership was banned, as were beards, which were seen as a rural throwback. Xenophobia was encouraged as the Albanian communists fused their adherence to the strictures of Marxist-Leninism with a glorification of various national myths. The central focus of such propaganda was the man heralded as the greatest Albanian of all time—Hoxha himself. However, Hoxha was careful to share his cult of personality with that of Stalin, who remained an object of forced reverence in Albania for the next four decades.

After the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, Hoxha allied himself with Beijing against Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, which he believed to be abandoning the true path toward socialism laid down by Comrade Stalin. This realignment led to a precipitous decline in Albanian standards of living, as the country had been highly dependent on Soviet grain, and on the USSR as its principal export market. To quell any possible dissent, Hoxha decided to emulate his new Chinese friends and launched an Albanian Cultural Revolution. From 1967, Albania was officially declared an “atheistic” state with all mosques and churches closed and clerics arrested. All private property was confiscated by the state, and the numbers of arrests increased exponentially.

After a brief and highly constrained cultural liberalization during the early 1970s, a further wave of repression and ideological purification followed in 1973. Then, in 1978, two years after Mao’s death and following the rise of the more moderate Deng Xiaoping, Hoxha broke with China, leading his country into yet further seclusion.

Hoxha survived numerous efforts to depose him—by loyalists of the exiled King Zog, by the British government, and by Khrushchev. Awareness of these threats fueled his already considerable paranoia, which manifested itself in a series of internal purges. Those at the apex of the system found themselves under the greatest threat: members of the Politburo and central committee were regularly arrested and executed for allegedly treasonable activities, and the seven successive interior ministers responsible for carrying out his purges were all themselves purged. In 1981 Hoxha’s most trusted henchmen, the long-serving Mehmet Shehu, prime minister since 1954, challenged his plan for the succession and his isolationism. Shehu officially “committed suicide” in the prime minister’s residence after being accused of involvement with “war criminals,” the CIA and the KGB, and suffering a nervous breakdown, itself illegal. Various accounts claimed the aging Hoxha had personally murdered Shehu. In fact, it is almost certain that the sick Hoxha, now aided by his wife, ordered his assassination. Henceforth Hoxha, increasingly ailing, ruled through his terrifying wife, Nexhmije, who joined the Politburo, and their protégé Ramiz Alia.

Hoxha himself died in office in 1985. Embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum, he was later reburied in a humbler grave. Alia, and Nexhmije Hoxha, took over but they were overthrown in 1990. Albania, after a period of chaos, emerged as a democracy—but one still damaged by Hoxha’s tyranny.