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The scholarly contradictions in understanding the history
and legacy of Communist Albania
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Citations    •    Bibliography/Sources

Although this article is primarily focused on the scholarly and academic interpretations of Albanian history, this essay can be far more instructive on how we understand the evolution of nations, Communism, economic isolationism, and why so-called "Third World" nations end up in the state they do (although Albania was not part of the Third World, see essay). It demonstrates that nations that collective society typically identifies as backward, "ex-Communist bloc," and dictatorial actually owe their condition to a far more complicated intersection of historical conditions. See this dissertation for a far more expansive explanation.

The unusually tortuous and extremely complicated events of twentieth-century Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha have been interpreted with incredible historiographic diversity, polarity, and often with contradiction. Monographs, scholarly treatises, and journalist accounts of outside origin written during the Cold War or written retrospectively present a dramatically different historiographic rendition than those written within Albania. Socialist Albania's unparalleled level of complete voluntary political and fiscal isolation further obscured the potential for a cooperative and commensurate historiographic discourse between diverse scholars. The bizarre evolution of Albania implies that historiographic agreement is also muddled by conflicting analytical lenses, including economic theory (emphasizing Albania's long teleological road towards total financial collapse), political science (deriding Enver Hoxha's calculated consolidation of power around his extreme cult of personality), and most importantly Albania's own historiography through the lens of Marxism-Leninism and historical materialism. The profoundly negative assessment of Albanian Communism (1944-1992), as common to virtually all monographs, finds its most polar interpretation in the highly erudite historiographic analysis written by Enver Hoxha himself. Did Hoxha's dictatorial platform guide Albania into a nightmare of anarchy, Atheism, starvation, and poverty from which Albanians are still struggling to recover nearly two decades later as one of Europe's poorest nations? Did Hoxha's uncompromising Marxist-Leninist dogma knowingly lead Albania down a self-defeating course of futile war with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the People's Republic of China? And did Hoxhaist ideological theory result in the subjugation of the Albanian mind to Hoxha's bizarre despotism, or did it liberate it from the confines of capitalist, imperialist, traditional, gender, and clerical exploitation?

The normative historiographic depiction of twentieth-century Albania follows a backwards, traditional, and chronically un-modernized land of divided tribes towards a prospering centralized socialist state, and again to its squalid ruin by its own hand. According to the linear narrative, with the occupying German and Italian armies in withdrawal in 1944, Communist partisans led by Enver Hoxha united diverse national and tribal aspirations behind a singular socialist vanguard state, forging the first fully self-determinate nation-state for the Albanian people. Brainwashing his new society with admittedly fundamentalist Marxist-Leninist ideology, Enver Hoxha rapidly reconstructed all aspects of Albanian culture, identity, industry, economics, and foreign policy in order to create an increasingly isolated despotate with a nearly unprecedented cult of personality, police state, Foucaultian disciplining surveillance, and a virtually psychotic world based upon fear. All traditional markers of Albanian culture, including religion, gender roles, tribalism, and economic stratification were forcibly dismantled, depicted by Hoxha as exploitative modes of oppression orchestrated by the capitalist-imperialist demagogues of a miserable past.

According to this linear historiographic narrative, Albanian society increasingly became a pawn to the dictatorial whim of “Father Enver” until the end of his dictatorship upon his death in 1985. As his ultra-purist ideological commitment to the wisdom of “true” Marxism-Leninism strengthened and he degenerated into increasingly paranoid lunacy, Enver Hoxha improvidently orchestrated his total monopoly over an isolated Albania by embargoing fellow socialist Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union by 1968, and the People's Republic of China by 1974, despite the fact that his economic survival was entirely dependent upon their direct subsidy. In an isolated “world of his own,”1 Albania's Soviet-developed factories, agricultural collectives, and industrial projects rusted and dilapidated, its roads crumbling along with the hopes and dreams of the Albanian peasants who were promised socialist liberation and utilitarian happiness. After Hoxha's death, Albania fell into complete anarchy, as unscrupulous opportunists and pyramid scheme speculators abandoned the doctrinal purity of their national founder and succumbed to the capital and individualist concupiscence that Hoxha fought so tirelessly to abolish. As Communism suddenly “fell” by 1992, Albania made its turbulent road towards democracy and “stabilization,” and has still only begun to attain a semblance of modernization and economic development over twenty years later, all thanks to Enver Hoxha's despotic and paranoid hegemony.

The oversimplified and linear nature of this prevailing historiographic narrative exemplifies the deficiency of “national histories” in thoroughly analyzing the diverse ideological, social, and political factors within Albania and the mind of Enver Hoxha that shaped Albania's sinuous decline. By selectively choosing largely polemical, one-sided, and exaggerated interpretations on the isolated legacy of Hoxhaist rule, historians documenting the Albanian case have demonstrated the general problem of linear historiography as a modus for understanding the evolution of nation-states. A comparison of monographs written during different stages of Albanian Communism with the profound historiographies written by Enver Hoxha himself reveals the polarity with which this singular “national history” is understood from diverse perspectives. From these divergences, the historiography on modern Albania can be classified into two academic schools. The first, the highly negative majority, explains the Communist legacy as a bizarre disaster of ruthless dictatorship and improvident foreign policies that led to total collapse. The second, which can be called the apologetic school, includes Albanian government historiography and the writings of Enver Hoxha himself, which frame their analysis of the Albanian dictatorship as the spearhead of modernization whose “excesses” were unavoidable prerequisites towards this modernity. Hoxha's writings are not merely political rants and speeches, but a highly researched and analytical historiography on the evolving situation in Albania.

The first blatant polarities in historiographic interpretation between these two schools appear in the assessment of Enver Hoxha's programs of collectivization, modernization, acculturation, and industrialization immediately after his ascent in late 1944. As nearly all monographs depict it, the Albanian pursuit of socialist equality and the obliteration of the “bourgeoisie” was ruthless, uncompromising, and hidebound. The first school emphasizes that the proletarian militias brutally confiscated and redistributed all property and businesses from tribal landlords, from foreign entrepreneurs who settled during Italian and Axis rule, and from the nascent aristocracy, transferring all of Albania's arable land to state ownership and to collective farms for compulsory mass labor. Portraying it as oppressive, the first school emphasizes consistently that the buying and selling of land and property was banned, and the Agrarian Act of 1945 “only” allotted farming families a maximum of five hectares of arable or semi-arable land at reduced rates, and a half-hectare for additional children.2 Predictably, Albanian government historiography (the second school) is highly optimistic and contradictory on his historical shift. As it was depicted, massive collective farms and pastures, textile mills, hydroelectric dams, and factories created a new proletarian class that had not previously existed, imbuing the state ideology with a popular mandate and the vocabulary for collective progress. State statistics bureaus took credit that the proletarian working class was raised from a mere 15,000 in 1944 to 370,000 by 1976.3 The Albanian labor force was claimed to be 27 times larger in 1975 than in 1938, and over the same historical period of Communist “liberation,” electrical power improved 177 times, coal production 235 times, chemical exports over 25 times, cement and infrastructure 65 times, inter-urban public transport over 595 times, and foreign investment over 259 times. Capital construction and gross national product development improved over 118 times.4 The official historiography took pride that liberated families would not be disenfranchised by opportunistic and entrepreneurial exploitation by imposing universal price ceilings on all public goods.5 Hoxha's government, as it was depicted, was so beneficent and non-dictatorial that it was willing to even hinder its economic prosperity that could come through stimulated trade, all in the interests of universal human liberation. Official sources averred that starvation – supposedly inflicted previously by wealthy landowners on the Albanian proletariat – was eliminated altogether due to the public distribution of sustenance to all Albanian workers as regulated by equal ration cards.6 An expansive universal health care system, child labor restrictions, work day limitations, and obligatory pension programs ostensibly boosted the average life expectancy from only 38 years in 1938 to 68 in 1974.7 Illiteracy, in a country that had no standardized language and almost no class of educated literati, was reduced to only 10%.8 A national university was established in the capital of Tiranë, with free mandatory primary and gymnasia education subsidized by the state. Official historiography on the development of Albanian academia emphasized that the Albanians – previously mere proletarian subjects to oppressive tribal chieftains and bourgeoisie exploiters – were now equipped with the intellectual weaponry with which to challenge the hegemony of the disproportionately educated and powerful reactionary elites. As a result, Albanian historiography interprets the radical historical transformations imposed by Enver Hoxha as universally positive, liberating, and modernizing for the collective well-being.

Most modern monographs blatantly contradict the government's historiographic sources on the eclectic “liberation” of Albanian society. The foremost scholar on Albania, Miranda Vickers, writing in 2001, assessed that, “although the country benefited from improved agriculture, industry, and in particular health and education, initiatives were overshadowed by a horrific legacy of brutal repression, the full story of which has yet to be told.”9 Others like the Yugoslav Slavenka Draculić, writing in 1949 and again reaffirmed in 1993, sneered at the Albanian sources' insistence of a happy and well-fed Albanian people by noting that the “monthly ration for a whole family was [only] two pounds of meat, two pounds of cheese, ten pounds of flour, and less than half a pound each of coffee and butter,”10 thus depicting a dismally deficient historical experience. Stavro Skendi, writing only in 1948, insisted that the Hoxhaist propaganda of an impending golden age of liberation was a concocted artifice designed to engross Hoxha's own power, arguing that “the Communist army was betrayed by despotic liars and crooks, bringing only a change in masters: Albania has passed from Axis to Slavic domination...It is natural to ask, then, in what lies the strength of Hoxha's government. One answer is the terror”11 (emphasis added). Skendi concluded that the nation that the apologetic historiography claimed was approaching “liberation,” self-sufficiency, and universal improvement was “interested only in having its appearance democratic...the government levied taxes so excessive that, even if they sold everything they possessed, they could not pay. If any merchants miraculously were able to pay their taxes, the government imposed a second tax.”12 In a striking example of the common polarity and uncertainty in historiographic analysis, Skendi's derision of exorbitant taxes by the Albanian government is directly contradicted by the official apologetic historiography altogether, which proudly extolled that there were no taxes in Albania at all!13

Enver Hoxha's own historiographic rendition on the process of Albanian collectivization and modernization is in stark contrast to the negative imagery rampant in most monographs. According to Hoxhaist ideology, Albania's modernizing project of liberation was not excessive and brutal, but was “a signal to the West and the imperialists that primitive Albania was modern, no longer an international weakling but on the contrary, a self-confident sovereign state wielding an unprecedented degree of power.”14 Hoxha espoused that, “by implementing a correct policy for the industrialization of the country, it was possible to transform Albania quickly, from a backward agricultural country into a country with developed industry and agriculture, with advanced education and culture, a country in which the people live in true freedom and happiness.”15 By forcibly dismantling what he perceived as the bourgeoisie and creating the means of production for an expanded proletarian class – even in the most brutal means – Enver Hoxha was inculcating the Albanian worker with the ability to freely determine his own economic and personal destiny free from the exploitation of the capitalist employer, the kleptocratic aristocracy, and the imperialist hegemons, who now would think twice before subjugating the newly-industrialized and self-determinate nation of Albania.

As Hoxhaist historiography interpreted the process of Albanian modernization, “the ceaseless raising of the material well-being and the cultural level of the broad working masses is the supreme aim of the socialist state...The establishment of the political power of the workers and peasants and the socialist social ownership over the means of production led to the establishment of equality among the working people...”16 Any tumult or radical re-orchestration of Albanian society or economics inflicted by the Albanian Communist government was, Hoxha rationalized, necessary for the liberation of his people and the independence of the Albanian nation-state. Rather than being the result of Enver Hoxha's improvident and ruthless policies, any “ephemeral” starvation or droughts inflicted by the collectivization and socialization programs were portrayed as unavoidable consequences of a faulty capitalist system that were only a legacy of self-interested bourgeois corruption. Hoxha interpreted the consequences of Albanian “liberation” from bourgeois exploitation as an inevitable teleological process, proudly writing that, “the Albanian people and their Party of Labor will live even on grass, if need be, but they will never sell themselves for 30 pieces of silver, for they prefer to die standing and with honour rather than live with shame and knelt down.”17 The vast historiographic polarity between Hoxha's interpretation and current monographs on Albanian modernization reveal the problematic faults in the discipline of history in finding a commensurate assessment of a national experience.

The sole aspect of the Albanian “people's revolution” that is broadly accepted and extolled by virtually all monographs is the drastically changing social position of women. Before 1944, Albanian women endured easily the lowest legal and cultural station in all of Europe. Foreign historians and travelers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as emphasized by historian Larry Wolff in 1994, were stunned to see the complete inability for Albanian women to inject themselves into a personal or economic future of their own, recording in their historiographies that women played “no role at all outside their house, but even there they were denied the most elementary rights. As girls, they were considered a heavy burden on the shoulders of their parents and brothers...people viewed women a little better than a dog and a little worse than a horse.”18 All dissertations from both schools assert that within only a few years of Albanian Communist rule, women reached near economic and political equality in the collective utopian “golden age” of Marxism-Leninism. As monographs and government sources alike positively lauded, “women [now] make up 47% of the workforce; before they were a commodity...In the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the entire state power emanates from and belongs to the people...”19 Muslim polygamy, gender roles, and all traditional boundaries were derided as obsolescent “medieval laws,” and were abolished altogether as obstructions to the modernization and socialist progress of women.20 Whereas before, no women ever set foot in parliament, women now comprised 33.3% of the People's Assembly, 25% of the Party of Labor, 26% of the supreme court, and 41.2% of the “leaders of the organizations of the masses,” with Hoxha's historiography concluding that “a girl is no longer treated as a slave...All roads have been opened to the youth to guide themselves by lofty socialist motives in the creation of the family and not by material interests, careerism and other motives which humiliate the woman.”21 Recent scholarly research, published near the fall of the socialist republic in 1992 by Hafizullah Emadi, acknowledged official government historiography by documenting that Hoxha's modernization project took women from the bondage of the kitchen and illiteracy to the classroom or factory floor in full equality with men, being 45.3% of primary school students and 42.5% of gymnasia.22 Women were portrayed in propaganda, as well as by most retrospective monographs on Albania, as throwing off the veil of feudalism and running out to contribute to the nascent national economy, ready to “kill their past, to gain freedom, and to open the way to a new life.”23 The equalization of women and the obliteration of traditional cultural strictures were, Hoxha and nearly all scholarly monographs insisted, not only necessary for Albania's modernization and economic self-determination, but a prerequisite for reaching the Marxist-Leninist golden age of collective well-being.

By contrast, the historiographic assessment of the near-complete destruction of organized religion in the Socialist Republic of Albania again reveals a highly polarized division between the two historiographic schools. Depicted as an outmoded and exploitative remnant of a pre-modern, pre-liberated past, religion was persecuted and obliterated far more intensively and completely in Hoxha's Albania than in any other state that employed Marxist rhetoric. Before Communist rule, Albania was nominally 70% Muslim, 20% Orthodox, and 10% Catholic.24 By 1967, Albania, rapidly approaching complete isolation and ensconced in an admittedly fundamentalist Marxist-Leninist Weltanschauung, largely without exaggeration, declared itself the “world's first Atheist state.” Nearly all scholarly discourse recorded during the socialist republic's existence or written retrospectively depict this historical process as disastrously negative and despotic, leaving Albania in a state of cultural paralysis, fear, and malevolence against political “Others” abstractly proscribed by Enver Hoxha as “enemies of the people.” The well-researched Harry Hamm, one of the few journalists and foreigners allowed to enter an increasingly isolated Albania in 1963, framed his historiography as an unmitigated assault against any social functions that challenged Hoxha's absolute primacy. Hamm reflected morosely that the more than 530 mosques that operated before 1944 had been reduced to only a handful by 1960 and, by 1967, there were none, having been either immolated or converted to government offices or public schools for re-education in Marxist-Leninist jurisprudence.25 All Sufi lodges, Jesuit assemblies, monasteries, and missionary charities were abolished, their constituents being either shot, jailed, subjected to compulsory labor, or expelled. Hamm concluded that “Albanian Islam is in its death throes,” citing in his historiography that 17 out of 93 priests and imams were executed by firing squad, 39 were jailed, and the remainder expelled. Of the 94 monks operating in Albania, 16 were shot, 35 jailed in labor camps, and 31 were deported outright.26 The otherwise erudite Yugoslav journalist Misha Glenny, writing in 2001, similarly framed his historiography on Albania as one of excess and a bizarre campaign of engrossing Enver Hoxha's extreme cult of personality against all limitations to his total authority. Glenny lampooned Hoxha for taking his secularization project to “an absurd conclusion,” even banning traditional names associated with Christendom or Islam like Mehmet and John, ultimately to be replaced by completely invented socialist names like “Marenglen” (a composite of Marx, Engels, Lenin).27 He facetiously depicted Hoxha's anti-religious policy as characteristic of “...a Balkan regime that seemed stranger than the fiction of Bram Stoker...Its very isolation gave rise to a kind of cultish logging of craziness.”28

Predictably, the difficulty often inherent in historiography is greatly illustrated by the tremendously polar interpretation in Hoxha's own analysis. In accordance with hard-line Marxist-Leninist parlance, Hoxha insisted that the destruction of religious and traditional institutions was not an aggrandizement of his “dictatorship,” nor a symptom of unrestrained bedlam, but again an inevitable prerequisite of modernization and liberation from the reactionary confines of tradition, the church, and bourgeois moral maxims. Enver Hoxha's historiographic worldview interpreted religion in the same way as he considered traditional gender roles an obstruction to female equality, writing that “the canons of [Islamic] Sharia and of the church, closely connected to the laws of the bourgeoisie, treated women as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold by the male...just as the bourgeoisie has made the worker into its proletarian, so had the ancient canons of the Sharia, the church, feudalism, and the bourgeoisie, reduced women to the proletariat of the man.”29 Religion was an “opiate” to be expunged from the chained mind of the liberated Albanian worker. Any temporary human suffering, guilt, or executed priests would, as Vladimir Lenin acknowledged, not result from the excesses of the proletarian dictatorship, but from an unavoidable teleological process towards the modernization of a utopian socialist future. Hoxha's historiographic discourse argued that Albanian Communism would “...win them over more quickly [to liberation] because their religious and backward convictions are being attacked while [already] in the process of decay...[The Communists] are the advanced social activists whose consciences are fully liberated.”30 Hoxha's obliteration of religion was, as he interpreted, not an encroachment on human freedom or the private realm, but “spiritual emancipation” from the reactionaries lies of the feudal past. It was understood as a historical process of correction that opened “broad vistas to the people to master a new advanced culture imbued with a scientific world outlook and to adopt a new way of life and new customs.”31 The new spiritual worldview of the modernized Albanian nation was to be “Albanianism” and Marxism-Leninism,32 devoting the nation and its people not to recondite myths that serve the clerical elites, but to the temporal human needs of the liberated Albanian people. The polar dichotomy in the interpretation on Albanian Atheism between the two schools reinforces the problematic nature of isolating a “legitimate” and dispassionate historiography of an evolving nation-state.

A common theme present in all historiographic monographs and scholarly journals, bitterly refuted by Enver Hoxha's school, is the portrayal of Hoxha's government as an ever-increasing despotism that oppressed, surveilled, and dominated every aspect of Albanian freedom and daily life. This tremendously negative image is in diametric contrast to Hoxha's analytical interpretation of his own role as the charismatic and beneficent conductor of the people's mental and physical liberation. Misha Glenny, whose inordinately dispassionate analysis of Balkan history only falters into sarcasm and incendiary negativity when documenting Communist Albania, went as far as to argue that Enver Hoxha implemented severe repression not as a means to a liberating end, but to distract society from the horrendous fiscal decline that he had caused.33 As his historiography depicts it, only during Hoxha's illness or absence was Albanian society granted a temporary “gentle ferment of ideas,” only to be immediately suppressed upon Hoxha's oppressive return.34 Hoxha's policies of forced labor, imprisonment at the first suspicion, and extreme surveillance were, Glenny argued, examples of the “surreal insanity of Hoxhaism.” Hoxha's absurdity was exemplified by the bizarre capital penalty of being sentenced to death by firing squad and a five-year suspension from voting.35 As Glenny's historiography frames it, Hoxhaist policies and “modernization” were only intended to glorify Hoxha's cult of personality and his control over the Albanians. Massive collectives and huge buildings were interpreted by Glenny as “rusting, Dickensian monstrosities – great monuments to Hoxha's twisted vision.”36 As this school sees it, this historical trend was not modernization, but regression.

Other, more dispassionate and less facetious scholars, especially Miranda Vickers writing in 2001, similarly analyzed that the “Albanian people had been cowed into a fearful state of submission, which led them...to withdraw into themselves with their thoughts kept secret, paranoid, and suspicious of all around them...37 She continued that, “Enver Hoxha's regime was haunted by fears of external intervention and internal subversion. Albania thus became a fortress state”38 (emphasis added). Other monographs, like that of political scientist Christopher Deliso, satirized the construction of over 400,000 concrete pillboxes on family farms as examples of Hoxha's “paranoiac fears of foreign invasion...His 'experiment' subjected his people to poverty, neglect, and the authoritarian behavior of the Communist state.”39 West German journalist Harry Hamm, as early as 1963, expounded on the destruction of religion by portraying Albania as an unparalleled world of its own, an isolated prison state ruled by the absurd whim of a dictator:

" In no other Iron Curtain country is there so extreme a police and surveillance machine as in Albania...Fear is written on the faces of the people...Nobody knows for certain how many people have already been sacrificed to the totalitarian Moloch40...It is...the permanent reign of terror and the pitiless despotism that seems to me the main reason for a smoldering...dissatisfaction all over Albania41..In no other Eastern European state has one man molded the national Communist Party so definitely [to his will]...as in Albania. The slogan 'Enver Hoxha is the Party and the Party is Enver Hoxha' is confirmed wherever one goes. Hoxha is everywhere. Nobody can escape his ubiquitous presence...even the walls of the cowshed in the collective farms and the windows of the meagerly-stocked town shops are not spared.”42

Hamm negatively continued that “the reign of terror and malevolence employed against all potential opposition serve the purposes of the Party. But the Party is nothing more than a small clique that Enver Hoxha has gathered around himself...”43 As this school almost universally frames its arguments, Albanian Communism was the opposite of what the apologetic school averred with equal certainty: a factitious state of rampant illiberality dominated by a paranoid God-king.

The most drastic dichotomies between these two historiographic schools appear during analysis of the last three decades of Hoxha's dictatorship, when Albania increasingly pursued a bizarre course of total fiscal and political isolation. As the global Cold War geopolitical situation evolved, Enver Hoxha progressively transferred its affiliation between Jozip “Tito” Broz's socialist Yugoslavia, Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China by severing all economic and political ties through a series of bombast denunciations and trade embargoes. By 1975, Hoxha's Albania had ended its trade with all nations, closed its borders, barred foreign travel, and had either expelled, jailed, or shot all foreign nationals, even those from Communist Bloc nations. The ultimate result of this bizarre and self-defeating foreign policy was complete financial ruin, as backwards Albania was entirely dependent upon these foreign socialist benefactors for technological expertise and economic subsidy. The two historiographic schools interpret this historical fate with incredibly polarity, with the dominant school continuing to explain Albania's collapse by emphasizing the hidebound dogmatic paranoia of Enver Hoxha's cult of personality. For Hoxha to so foolishly dismiss his benefactors could only be proof of his “lunacy.” The apologetic school of Albanian Communist historians and Hoxha himself analyze Albania's extreme isolation as an unavoidable response to the predatory imperialist designs of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China, which sought to subsume Albania to the status of economic dependency and revoke its self-determination. Albania's financial calamities resulting from total autarky were not the result of Enver Hoxha's improvident economic policies, but a product of surreptitious intrusion and expansionist manipulation by imperialist hegemons who masqueraded their belligerence under a cloak of propitiatory socialist rhetoric. The sheer contrast between the two schools in assessing Hoxha's economic ruin demonstrates the failure of monographs to adequately engage the apologetic historiography. This further inhibits the accuracy of a uniform “national history.”

In analyzing the degeneration of Albanian-Yugoslav relations from mutual socialist partnership to bitter rivalry, most monographs emphasizes Yugoslavia's positive financial beneficence, subsidy, and cooperative development towards Albania as proof that Hoxha's retreat into isolation resulted from his sheer improvidence and dictatorial arrogance. Miranda Vickers emphasized that Yugoslavia provided over US$40,000,000 to Albania in subsidy in 1947 alone, comprising over 58% of Albania's entire annual budget.44 A fair-trade customs union tied the Albanian currency (the lek) to the Yugoslav dinar, allowing the torpidly developing Albanian industrial economy to ride on the explosive progress of wealthier socialist Yugoslavia. As most historians note, Yugoslavia freely sent agronomists, engineers, and industrial experts to Albania to contribute to the development of their neighboring socialist partner in the Warsaw Pact. The cultural, economic, and political contribution by Yugoslavia to Albania was so extensive that Serbocroatian became compulsory in Albanian schools, cementing a beneficent relationship that profited Albanian society tremendously and even drained the Yugoslav economy through dead-end investments and subsidies into such a backward country. As most monographs claim, the Soviet Union had even privately advised Belgrade that Yugoslavia can “swallow Albania” as a political exclave or a new federal province, but Yugoslavia declined to invade Albania due to their mutual partnership and friendship.45 As dominant historiography presents it, for Enver Hoxha to so foolishly spurn and embargo a “beneficent” Yugoslavia and expel all of its foreign experts despite his nation's complete financial dependency could only derive from his obscene paranoia and short-sighted authority.

The apologetic school's historiographic interpretation again dictates the exact opposite. According to the analytical framework espoused by Albanian nationalists, the Communist government, and Enver Hoxha, Yugoslavia's outward generosity and investment were not intended to augment the prosperity of Albanian society, stimulate its economic growth, or liberate its proletarian class, but to gradually expand the Yugoslav monopoly over the Balkans and engross their own economy at the expense of Albanian farmers. As Hoxha saw it, Yugoslav diplomatic designs were inherently expansionist, imperialist, and capitalist, rather than cooperative and beneficent. Albania was forced to withdraw from their economic partnership and incur the concomitant financial calamities in order to defend the autonomy and self-determination of Albanian statehood. Perhaps most importantly, the ideologically-purist Enver Hoxha interpreted Tito's interests as proof of Yugoslavia's betrayal and revisionism of Marxist-Leninist doctrine which Hoxha claimed to represent as its foremost fundamental conductor. Apologists argue that it is these geopolitical factors, rather than Hoxha's “twisted vision,” that shaped the historical and diplomatic evolution of Communist Albania. Hoxha insisted that “...the aim of the Yugoslavs was...to prevent [Albania] from developing either its industry or its working class, and to make it forever dependent upon Yugoslavia.”46 The official interpretation among apologetics abhorred the “...the all-round hostile efforts of the Titoite leadership...[and] its ultimate aim: the gobbling up of the whole of Albania.”47 Hoxha's historiography even framed the entire evolution of political events in Eastern Europe under this same analytical modus, writing that even the Hungarian revolt of 1956 was catalyzed by the Yugoslavs. The Yugoslavs' “social-imperialism” (socialist in words but capitalist-imperialist in deeds) caused Hungarian opportunists to succumb to the “aroma of capitalism” that the Yugoslavs had wafted under their noses.48 Enver Hoxha explained his “forced” isolation by arguing that:

...The Albanian state is a small state, but it has never harmed anyone, while many others have done it harm, have invaded it...but have never achieved their diabolical aim of physically and spiritually oppressing or enslaving, and eliminating the Albanian people, because they fought, resisted, and were not afraid even in the gravest moments of their history49...We tore the mask from them and told them bluntly that Albania was not for sale for a handful of rubles, dinars, or yuan.50

As the apologetics interpreted these events, Albania's path towards isolation was only self-defense, radically challenging the dominant historiography on Albania of a foolish tumbling towards total collapse that was orchestrated by a delusional dictator. The same dichotomy between the two schools is present during analysis of Albania's subsequent rejection of the Soviet Union after the it did the same to the crucial Yugoslav investment. Most monographs laud the beneficent Soviets for covering the same 58% of Albania's budget that had been provided by Yugoslavia in 1947.51 Most scholars emphasize that “even Hoxha” acknowledged that were it not for Soviet aid to cover Albania's massive debt, Albania would not have survived, and would have been annexed by Yugoslav “social-imperialism.”52 They emphasize that the Soviets provided 90% of Albania's oil technology and equipment, 82% of its crucial tractors for its agricultural development during its series of droughts of the 1950s, and 65% of agricultural technology and machinery.53 The extremely thorough scholar William Griffith, writing In 1963, averred that Albania was stricken with severe unemployment, economic recession, and a horrendous shortage in supplies and foodstuffs because of the eventual rejection of Soviet subsidy.54 Harry Hamm argued that “everything that has been done and created in this once-poor and backward land is entirely due to the assistance it has received from its Communist allies.”55 He even claimed that Moscow, Romania, and East Germany tried to offer Hoxha increased subsidy and investment until they were blue in the face, thereby proving Soviet beneficence and Hoxha's absurd improvidence.56 Elez Biberaj, writing in 1969, argued that the Albanian economy was crippled as “Russian experts packed their bags for Belgrade,” implying that the Soviets were stunned with surprise at Hoxha's self-defeating political policies.57 Here again, as it is interpreted by the dominant school, for Hoxha to ultimately embargo such an invaluable trading partner must be proof of his insanity and foolhardy arrogance.

Predictably, Hoxhaist and apologetic historiography projects its own rendition as the exact opposite interpretation. It was not the Albanians who seeded this Soviet-Albanian schism, but the Soviet belligerents. Hoxha reflected that the Soviets were “unmasking themselves in the eyes of the whole world by breaking off diplomatic relations with a friendly, allied country of people's democracy, a socialist country, while they maintain relations with and embrace the imperialists, the fascists, the Titoites, and others.”58 The Soviet Union's interest in Albania was only intended to maintain economic and political hegemony over its strategically crucial position, adjacent to the “capitalist” orbit of NATO, Greece, and Italy. Nikita Khrushchev's USSR merely sought to exploit the Albanian proletariat and diminish its self-determination by using the bait of economic and technological growth.59 Khrushchev's highest aspirations were not the liberation of the workers of the world or the maximal prosperity of the Albanian nation, but expansion and capital profit. His deployment of missiles in Cuba and his invasion of Hungary proved this thesis to the Hoxhaist school.

Khrushchev was depicted by the ever-fundamentalist Enver Hoxha as a “revisionist” and a “huckster traitor” who revised and distorted true Marxism-Leninism to ensure Soviet imperial hegemony over independent nations. Hoxha was “forced” to withdrawal Albania from the Soviets' invaluable economic subsidies and endure the resultant hardships in the interests of Albania's true liberation and autonomy. Hoxha's historiography insists that “having seized state power in the Soviet Union...the Khrushchevites set themselves as their main objective the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the restoration of capitalism and the transformation of the Soviet Union into an imperialist superpower.60 He interpreted further that “Soviet social-imperialism...based its foreign policy on its expansionism and hegemonism by means of the armaments race [with the United States] and blackmail, and military, economic, and ideological aggression. The aim of this policy was the establishment of social-imperialist domination over the whole world.”61 This historiographic theorem was again exemplified in Hoxha's mind by the obliteration of “fellow socialist” Czechoslovakia's self-determination by Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, Khrushchev's successor.62 After this event, Albania formally withdrew from the socialist Warsaw Pact confederacy, expelled or shot all Soviet citizens in Albania, and formally ended all relations with the USSR.63 Rather than the Albanians being dependent upon the Soviets as the opposing school insists, the Soviets were depicted as a drain: “when the Albanian people were in danger of being left without bread, Khrushchev preferred to feed the mice and not the Albanians...There were only two roads for us: either submit or die...These actions of Khrushchev's are scandalous and dangerous not only for our socialist countries, but also for all mankind.”64 Clearly, the diametric contrast between these two interpretative schools is a microcosm for the general problems of historical research.

These scholarly divisions are again true to the interpretation of Hoxha's final divorce from the People's Republic of China and thus into complete isolation from both East and West. During the Sino-Soviet political split of the 1960's, Hoxha's Albania conveniently transferred its alliance to China and Mao Zedong, who Hoxha considered the last pure embodiment of true Marxism-Leninism of the great Cold War powers. Most monographs assert that China's subsequent economic support helped assuage – or delay – Albania's total financial ruin until Hoxha foolishly spat in the face of his last chance for a diplomatic ally. Most argue that Chinese overtures were inordinately beneficent and selfless, since China even exported crucial food to Albania when China was enduring one of the worst famines in history during the “Great Leap Forward.” Harry Hamm insisted on Albania's total fiscal dependency on China, citing that China completely funded the construction of over 25 large industrial plants in tiny Albania almost for free, as well as assuming nearly all of the same 58% of the annual GDP previously provided by the USSR and Yugoslavia.65 Hoxha's cession of trade with China could only have resulted from Hoxha's despotism. Most prove this by demonstrating how the Albanian economy completely collapsed after Hoxha spurned Mao, citing that whereas Albania was supposedly self-sufficient in the early 1970's (thanks to foreign support and expertise), Hoxha's short-sighted policies rapidly brought Albanian food output down to only 40%, some 400,000 tonnes short of an isolated Albania's basic requirements.66 Misha Glenny yet again blamed Hoxha's cult of personality for all of Albania's historical calamities, writing that “every time Hoxha rejected a father figure, he replaced him with one whose ideological credentials were more extreme but whose economy was even less well attuned to meet Albania's requirements. When the Chinese left, there was nobody left to meet Hoxha's esoteric ideological criteria”67 (emphasis added).

Hoxha's apologetic discourse again deflects blame for Albania's ruin onto the Chinese “revisionists” and “social-imperialists” themselves. Hoxha eventually concluded in his historiography that Mao's initial faith in true Marxism-Leninism had degenerated into expansionism and imperial hegemony as soon as Mao's China grew into a superpower with opportunities for foreign capital and political influence. The betrayal and inherent imperial designs of Mao were proven to Hoxha when China invaded fellow socialist Vietnam in 1979, when it even embraced the “capitalist war criminal” Richard Nixon in 1972, and when it developed a “chauvinistic” and “anti-Marxist” worldview called the “Theory of the Three Worlds.” Under this framework, China divided the world into three spheres: the developed First World, the developing Second World, and the undeveloped or the colonized Third World. Mao extolled the People's Republic of China as the natural leader and guide of the global revolution, implying that all “un-liberated” peoples should follow the authority and example of China towards the proletarian revolution. In Hoxha's interpretation, this theory was merely a concocted political doctrine intended to give “imperialist China” the mandate to subjugate sovereign nations and expand its capital hegemony. Hoxha wrote that “in its strategic plan, the social-imperialist China aims to extend its influence and hegemony to the countries of what it calls the 'Third World'...Mao Tsetung did not proclaim this 'theory' as a dreamer, but with definite hegemonic aims that China should dominate the world.68 He continued that “the theory of 'three worlds' advocates social peace, class conciliation, and tries to create alliances between implacable enemies...It is [a reactionary] attempt to prolong the life of the old world, the capitalist world, to keep it on its feet precisely by seeking to extinguish the class struggle...[The Three Worlds theory] is a false, counterrevolutionary, and chauvinist theory...”69 Dominant historiography has failed to engage this incredibly erudite and distinct – although extremely biased – epistemological interpretation on the evolution of Albanian foreign policy.

The final theme of analytical divergence in the historiography of Albanian Communism is the dire situation after the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 and the fall of the socialist republic to a mass uprising in 1992. As most monographs present it, Hoxha's more than three decades of bizarrely improvident policies had created an enduring legacy of complete economic collapse and political corruption that continues even today. Hoxha's successors, the Communist Ramiz Alia and then the democrat Sali Berisha, brought a previously hard-line Leninist autocracy into a nightmare of cronyism, crippling pyramid schemes, and economic stagnation that has relegated most Albanians into diaspora. Scholars like Christopher Deliso, writing in 2007, even argue that Hoxha's “insanity” provided the “key ingredients to the anarchy and Islamic incursions” of the post-Communist era, as Albanians abandoned the failure of Marx and democracy and turned to radical Islam.70 Deliso described the death of Hoxha and its “liberation” from Communism as a “sudden reintroduction to the light of day,” supposedly a brief offset from the teleological historical tract towards modernity, liberality, and human rights.71 Albania's bankruptcy that Hoxha had supposedly created forced Hoxha's successors to abandon the quest for maximum well-being and work with drug peddlers, mafia dons, prostitution rings, and even with Usama bin Laden out of sheer financial desperation.72 Pyramid schemes left thousands of families completely homeless and bereft of their life savings, losing a total of more than two billion dollars, all because Albanians were desperate to survive. This was all thanks to Hoxha's dictatorial terror.73

Here again, Communists and Albanian nationalists interpreted the events after Hoxha's death from the exact opposite approach. Enver Hoxha may have isolated his country from economic opportunity, but he had refused to sell out Albanian self-determination and the purity of his Marxism-Leninism in exchange for capital investment. It was his crooked democratic successors who had fed their countrymen to the lions of foreign imperial predation, having been exposed to the “opium” of capitalism, religion (Islam), and international overtures by “businessmen in disguise” (human rights groups!). Communist journalists and historians now saw this era of Albanian history as being “prey to imperialists” like before 1944 when Hoxha took power.74 They contradicted the dominant historiographic assessment of Albania today by writing that, “there are two fundamental causes for the tragedy which Albania is experiencing today: ...the treason of the [Communists of] Albania and on the other there is external pressure...[Sali Berisha] is a puppet. All the politics are directed by the American ambassador posted to [the capital of] Tiranë.”75 They interpreted Communist rebels not as reactionary criminals as the opposing school does, but as citizens merely trying to “show the power of the people and the rottenness of the Fascist regime [of Alia and Berisha's democracy].”76 The apologetic school concluded morosely that the legacy of Albanian Communism had been betrayed, writing that the democrats “destroyed everything that had been constructed [by Enver Hoxha] during the socialist period, and thereby brought the entire economy to ruin.”77 Hoxha's own wife assessed that “these forces have completely ruined our industry as well as all the wealth that the Albanian people had created at the cost of great sacrifices during the fifty years of popular power under the leadership of...Enver Hoxha.”78

The drastic interpretative polarity between the two schools of Albanian historiography clearly exemplify the problems of historical research. They demonstrate the complicated, controversial, and highly biased theoretical nature of different scholars. Most saliently, they prove the inherent deficiency of a linear “national history” in explaining the tremendously complex political, economic, and ideological factors that shape the historical evolution of modern nations.

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

I also have a tremendous academic and historiographic interest in Albanian history and culture. I wrote my baccalaureate research dissertation on the Albanian struggle against foreign domination. I have also traveled to Albania. I wrote a highly unique semester dissertation on Enver Hoxha's project towards a post-modern Albanian state, affording me an understanding of both the dominant perspectives on Kosovo and Albania and the Albanian perspective.

CITATIONS:

1. Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 599.
2. Stavro Skendi, “Albania within the Slav orbit,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol 63, No. 2 (June, 1948): 266.
3. Glenny 2001, 563.
4. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1,”
   http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html
5. Ibid.
6. Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London: I.B. Taurus, 2001), 176.
7. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1,”
   http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html
8. Glenny 2001, 564.
9. Vickers 2001, 209.
10. Slavenka Draculić, How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 18.
11. Stavro Skendi 1948, 271.
12. Ibid., 265.
13. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html
14. Andrew Hammond, The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 63.
15. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “Eurocommunism is anti-Communism,”
    http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/eurocommunism.html
16. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html
17. “The working class in revisionist countries must take the field and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Zëri-i-Popullit, March 24, 1968.
18. Hafizullah Emadi, “Women's emancipation and strategy of development in Albania,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 19 (May 9, 1992): 999.
19. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html
20. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline1.html
21. Ibid.
22. Emadi 1992, 1001.
23. Ibid.
24. Harry Hamm, Albania: China's Beachhead in Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963), 55.
25. Hamm 1963, 55.
26. Ibid., 56.
27. Glenny 2001, 566.
28. Ibid., 560.
29. Vickers 2001, 194.
30. Edwin E. Jacques, The Albanians: An Ethnic History from Prehistoric Times to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 497.
31. Miranda Vickers, Albania: From Anarchy to Balkan Identity (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 98.
32. Glenny 2001, 560.
33. Glenny 2001, 565.
34. Ibid., 567.
35. Ibid., 568.
36. Ibid., 569.
37. Vickers 2001, 209.
38. Vickers 1997, 2.
39. Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2007), 29.
40. Hamm 1963, 56.
41. Ibid., 61.
42. Ibid., 79.
43. Hamm 1963, 59.
44. Vickers 2001, 174.
45. Vickers 2001, 173.
46. Ranko Petković, “Yugoslav-Albanian Relations,” Review of International Affairs (1984): 274-275.
47. Communist International, “The Titoites, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites2.shtml
48. Stavro Skendi, “Albania and the Sino-Soviet Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, April 1962, 472.
49. Communist International, “The Superpowers, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers2.html
50. Vickers 2001, 209.
51. Vickers 2001, 175.
52. Skendi 1962, 1.
53. Hamm 1963, 51.
54. William Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 23.
55. Hamm 1963, 37.
56. Ibid., 20.
57. Elez Biberaj, Albania And China: A Study of an Unequal Alliance (New York: Westview Press, 1969), 36.
58. Communist International, “The Superpowers, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers1.html
59. Hamm 1963, 20.
60. Communist International, “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
61. Communist International, “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev1.html
62. Ibid.
63. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jürgen-Fischer, Albanian Identities: Myth and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 96.
64. Communist International, “The Superpowers, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers1.html
65. Hamm 1963, 48.
66. Europa Publications ltd., “Albania.” Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (1999): 114.
67. Glenny 2001, 569.
68. Communist International, “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev1.html
69. Communist International, “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
70. Deliso 2007, 28.
71. Ibid., 29.
72. Ibid., 31.
73. Deliso 2007, 36.
74. Campaign for Marxist-Leninist Unity, “Interview with the Community Party of Albania,” http://www.oneparty.co.uk/compass/compass/com12902.html
75. Marxist-Leninist Translations, “The Albanian Tragedy,” http://www.mltranslations.org/Albania/tragfrg.htm
76. Marxist-Leninist Translations, “About the political situation in Albania,” http://www.mltranslations.org/Albania/politsit.htm
77. Marxist-Leninist Translations, “The people in Albania have not given up!,” http://www.mltranslations.org/Albania/emek.htm
78. Marxist-Leninist Translation, “Speech at the seminar in Brussels,” http://www.mltranslations.org/Albania/NHoxhaPTB.htm
    
    
    

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

Biberaj, Elez. Albania And China: A Study of an Unequal Alliance. New York:
Westview Press, 1969.

Communist International. “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 1.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev1.html.

Communist International. “Imperialism and Revolution, Part 2.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html

Communist International. “The Superpowers, Part 1.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers1.html

Communist International. “The Superpowers, Part 2.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers2.html

Communist International. “The Titoites, Part 2.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites2.shtml

Deliso, Christopher. The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to
Europe and the West. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2007.
Draculić, Slavenka. How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed.
New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Emadi, Hafizullah. “Women's emancipation and strategy of development in Albania.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 19 (May 9, 1992): 999-1002.

Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Griffith, William. Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964.

Hamm, Harry. Albania: China's Beachhead in Europe. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963.

Hammond, Andrew. The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004.

The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies. “Eurocommunism is anti-Communism.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/eurocommunism.html

The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies. “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 1.” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline.html

The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies. “An outline of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Part 2.” http://archive.250x.com/pla/psroutline1.html

Petković, Ranko. “Yugoslav-Albanian Relations.” Review of International Affairs (1984): 274-275.

Schwandner-Sievers, Stephanie, and Bernd Jürgen-Fischer. Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Skendi, Stavro. “Albania and the Sino-Soviet Conflict.” Foreign Affairs, April, 1962.Skendi, Stavro. “Albania within the Slav orbit.” Political Science Quarterly, Vol 63, No. 2 (June, 1948): 257-274.Vickers, Miranda. The Albanians: A Modern History. London: I.B. Taurus, 2001.

Vickers, Miranda, and James Pettifer. Albania: From Anarchy to Balkan Identity. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2000.

Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

“The working class in revisionist countries must take the field and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Zëri-i-Popullit, March 24, 1968.