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• Ethnic/religious
groups of Habsburg Empire
• Historical
breakup of Yugoslavia ('91-'09)
• Muslim
populations in European countries
• History
of Christianization of Europe
• Soviet
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• Map
of European ethnic groups
• Map of Fascism
in Europe (1922-75)
• History
of Islamic conquest in Europe
• Religions
& ethnic groups in Russia
• Detailed
map of French colonization
• Detailed
map of British colonization
• Napoleon's
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• Ethnic
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• Pecs, Hungary: collision
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• Auschwitz and Birkenau
• Poland's
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• Muhammad
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• Ravenna:
capital of Gothic empire
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• European
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• Inside the Vatican,
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• Croatia's
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• Islamic Mujahidin
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• Libya: Europe
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• Ivan the Terrible
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• Soviet
Propaganda: Defeat of Germany
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• An analysis
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• The disastrous
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• Changing meaning
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• Yugoslavia's independent
break from East and West
• The Galicians: the
Celts of Spain
• The modern
Macedonian Slavs and Alexander the Great
• An argument for
the Romanians' links to ancient Dacians
• Mussolini's
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• The disappeared
Jews of Hungary and the Arrow Cross regime
• The Gypsies in history and today,
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• History
of Jihad in Chechnya vs. Russians
• History
of the Muslim Tatars in Eastern Europe
• Post-WWII expulsion of 10 million
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• Ethnic
& religious history of Serbs, Croats, & Bosnians
• Breakaway
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• The ancient Germanic Runic alphabet
and Runestones
• Teutonic
Order and their 800-year legacy in Eastern Europe
• 460-year
struggle for Albanian homeland, and 540 for Kosovo
• 2,800-year-old white mummies of China,
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• Alexander the
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• Visual History
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Enver Hoxha's project
for a post-modern Communist Albania: liberation, proletarian
rule, atheism, and extreme isolationism
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)
 Print
this Article • About
the Author • Citations • Bibliography/Sources
This is my undergraduate
dissertation documenting the political, economic, and ideological
evolution of Communist Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha.
It argues that Hoxha, a puritical Marxist fundamentalist,
progressively broke from "Communist" Yugoslavia,
the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China (as well
as NATO and the United States) as he increasingly considered
ALL other countries to be imperialistic and ideologically
adulterated. Only by pursuing total isolationism, Hoxha believed,
could Albania truly become a socialistic, liberated, and sovereign
state. To this end, he envisioned a completely new world order
that overcame the present entirely, a type of proto-post-modernism.
Although the ultimate result was total economic ruin (see
my rare travel observations
in Albania), Hoxha's ideology must be understood on its
own terms in order to comprehend how nations evolve. This
tiny nation offers us tremendous insight into appreciating
how truly diverse and divergent "Communism" is,
revealing that "Communist" nations often had bitter
opposition to one another rather than merely being a part
of a uniform "East-West" conflict.
This dissertation may
NOT under ANY circumstances be redistributed without my express
permission.
The early and mid-twentieth
century saw a radical reassessment of constructed identities,
sociopolitical ideologies, ethnic aspirations, progress, and
national modernization. Global geopolitical competition, imperial
hegemony, intensifying ethnic nationalism, and the vacuum
of two devastating World Wars opened the floodgates for new
projects of state formation and nationalist self-determination.
Concomitant with this state-building drive for ethnic sovereignty
was a diverse process of political and economic modernization,
which would not only safeguard these newly-independent national
identities from external intrusion, but prove their cultural
contribution to the global community of nations. Modernity,
however interpreted or attained, became synonymous with the
nationalist glory, utilitarian progress, and right to independent
existence of these post-occupation identities. Few liberated
European peoples experienced so unique and drastic a process
of modernization as the tiny, hitherto-insignificant nation
of Albania. Previously completely bereft of political cohesion
and merely a pawn of predatory imperial empires for centuries,
Albania, now under the authority of Communist partisans led
by Enver Hoxha, rapidly pursued a project towards a respected
and modern nation-state. Arguably the most dogmatic and ideologically-purist
constituent of the Marxist-Leninist pantheon, Hoxha even criticized
“modernity” itself as a nightmare of Cold War imperialism,
bourgeoisie concupiscence, and capitalist exploitation of
the global proletarian community. As a result, the Albanian
modernization project uniquely blended characteristics of
modernity and what would today be called post-modernity, with
the aspiration for a proletarian golden age of complete personal
liberation, the obliteration of obsolescent outlets of economic
and religious exploitation, and total self-determination for
the independent Albanian people. In the Albanian post-modernity,
even the capitalist, nationalist, economic, and religious
strictures of modernity would have to be dismantled if the
Albanian proletarian class were to reach total freedom and
happiness.
Historiographic discourse
has, in general, adopted a deficiently simple and linear methodology
in studying the evolution of the “modern” Albania of the twentieth
century. Most monographs depict the Communist legacy of Enver
Hoxha as a bizarre debauch of a dictator's hysterical isolation
and refusal to allow his power to be compromised, ultimately
driving his nation into the darkest annals of bankruptcy and
smoldering dissatisfaction. Several salient authors on Albanian
history, including Miranda Vickers, William Griffith, and
Harry Hamm, extol the industrial modernization of Hoxhaist
Albania and credit him with the first-time creation of the
Albanian “modern” nation-state. However, no discussion has
actively engaged the profoundly erudite ideological writings
and historiographies written by Enver Hoxha himself, whose
beliefs arguably had a more direct impact on completely reshaping
an isolated nation to his will than in any other state of
the twentieth century. Rather than retrospectively dismissing
Hoxha's political behavior as bizarre and self-defeating,
a thorough analysis of his modes of understanding the world
reveal that Enver Hoxha was pursuing an adaptive course of
early post-modernization in response to a modern world that
he considered an abhorrent creation of the capitalist-imperialists
from whom he sought to protect his nation.
Before the seizure of power
by the modernity-minded Communists militias in late 1944,
Albania was the most economically, politically, and academically
backward (as opposed to “modern”) country on the European
continent.1 The principal European concepts of modernity –
industry, national centralization, economic strength, a codified
legal structure, and personal agency – found their most drastic
contrast with the tribalism and national torpidity of the
Albanian hill clans at its polar apposite. Albania was not
even a “nation,” but a generalized geographic abstraction
of periphery tribes on the Adriatic littoral with no central
governance. Its territory was passively ruled by clan chieftains
from the northern Gheg tribe or the southern Tosks. Albania's
few recent attempts at statehood had failed miserably, relegating
the Albanians to a status of the humiliating un-modern. The
British-imposed German prince Wilhelm von Wied, placed on
the “Albanian throne” after the Balkan War in 1914, left the
country, considering it “ungovernable.” Albania's only native
self-declared king, Ahmet Zogu, was expelled from Albania
after repeated national revolts and the Italian imperial conquest
of 1939 under Benito Mussolini. This perceived instability
and traditionalism obstructed Albania from being accepted
on the map of “civilized” and “modern” Europe.
Albanian tribes, like most
Eastern European ethnic identities abstractly and often inaccurately
lumped together as “Slavs,” were depicted as “barbaric remnants...of
Asiatic origin.”2 These supposed relics of the despotic and
obsolescent Orient were envisioned as unclean, bearded, child-like,
and bereft of rationality, reason, or an urge for education
and modernist centralization. Foreign travelers like Edward
Lear saw the Albanian tribes as “wild and savage...their long
matted hair and brown visage giving them a ferocity which
existed perhaps more in he outward than inner man...dirt and
squalor of the outer and timid wretchedness of the inner man
seemed the characteristics of these pauper beings, who arose
from the ground in their rags and saluted me with looks of
terror.”3 Others on “safari” wrote that “the majority of the
population [is] illiterate, born and bred in an atmosphere
of tradition and custom more appropriate to the Middle Ages
than the twentieth century. Religious superstition [is] universal.”4
Albania was the only country in Europe without a university.5
Others emphasized the tribal “lawlessness” and obsession with
primitive “tribal legalities” and backward traditions.6 Germans
ethnologists extolled their “noble violence” and chivalry,
an analogue of Oriental noble savages.7 Another lampooned,
“I don't know of any other country which is so closed to civilization:
even the Sahara is better known to us, even Tibet I cannot
say is more mysterious...there is no organic connection whatsoever
between the Albanian provinces...The life of a man here has
so little value that if a traveler comes out alive, this happens
more because the man who shoots does not feel like wasting
a bullet just for a passer-by.”8 Others expressed derision
that Albanian tribal 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.”9
As it was understood among
the European modern intelligentsia, Albania was the last frontier
of Europe, rife with enchantment, superstition, honor killing,
tribal wars, and folklore. These characteristics of Albanian
“remoteness,” “magic,” decentralization, and lack of personal
individual agency for men and women emphasized their lack
of “civilized modernity” as a cultural or national identity
in the eyes of European cosmopolitans. They were not “conquered
by Western reason.”10 “Enlightened” Venice, which long maintained
ephemeral influence on the Albanian coastline, framed its
relationship with Albanians as one of educating primitive
subjects: “...it would be necessary to begin by spreading
little by little, with insistence on custom and on thought...which
might prepare the brains, the spirits, and the hearts for
reason and obedience.”11 They were depicted as turncoats and
traitors to the European bulwark of Christianity against the
invading Muslim Turks of the Orient, since Albania fell under
Ottoman rule for over four centuries and became one of the
only identities in Europe to convert to a perfunctory Islam.
European intellectuals claimed that their blood was so “despoiled”
by Turkic and Oriental influence that the Albanians and the
hated Turks were said to not even be distinguishable.12 Their
language was seen as incomprehensible and largely undefined
by the modernists' desire to categorize the world, their people
illiterate with no formal script, and no concept of nation,
paralleled with the Scythian “barbarians” at the gates of
“civilized” Greek states. Albania's people supposedly had
to be “liberated” for them by modern Europe from the despotism
of the Oriental Ottomans, since Albanians were perceived to
be incapable of achieving self-determination by themselves.
They were viewed as naturally servile and ideal for colonization
like Foucaultian docile bodies. Even Joseph Stalin, Enver
Hoxha's nearly deified hero, described the Albanians as “...very
brave and faithful....Yes, they can be faithful as a dog,
that is one of the traits of the primitive.”13 These external
conceptualizations of Albanian backwardness and servility
denied the Albanians their national self-determination and
drive towards modernization, and relegated them to a position
of imperial subjugation. As Enver Hoxha later wrote, “...small
Albania, completely backward, from the social, economic, and
technical point of view, but rich in mineral resources, betrayed
and abandoned by the landowners and the bourgeoisie in power,
was turned into a merchandise to the bartered in the capitalist
market.”14
It was under this context
that, with the Germans and Italians in retreat, Albanian Communist
partisans under Enver Hoxha seized power in late 1944 and
began to assert central governmental authority for the first
time. Under Hoxha's orchestration and the rule of the Albanian
Party of Labor's vanguard state, the Albanian Marxists immediately
began the process of “liberation,” proletarian revolt, and
modernization along the Marxist-Leninist line. Hoxha, who
rapidly developed one of the most extreme cults of personality
of the twentieth century, projected a new worldview (today
called Hoxhaism) that simultaneously aspired for a European
modernity at the same time as it worked to progress beyond
the modern and towards a post-modernist golden age of “true”
Communism. It was believed that Marxist theories of the proletarian
revolution, historical materialism, and the natural historical
progression from Albania's feudal stage to the socialist and
Communist stages of development would convert “backward” Albania
into an inviolable, self-reliant, and self-determinate state
with a liberated working class and a modernized industrial
and agricultural economy. Hoxha's modernization was a signal
to the West and the “imperialists” that supposedly-primitive
Albania was modern, “no longer an international weakling but
on the contrary, a self-confident sovereign state wielding
an unprecedented degree of power.”15 The Albanian people's
liberation itself, it was argued, would modernize Albania.
In the framework of Western European epistemology, Marxist
Albania was aspiring to be modern in its desire to create
a centralized nation-state with the collective involvement
of the people, in its intellectual investigation of social
sciences and socioeconomic theories, in its drive to “improve”
the world and social maladies, and in the quest to free Albanians
from the shackles of feudalism and tribalism and inject the
individual into a world of rational and self-determinate agency.
Early Albanian nationalism under the Communists was characteristically
modern in its investigation of history and ethnicity, which
supposedly mandated the Albanian nation to exist due to its
immortal descent from the ancient kingdom of Illyria in the
early Roman era. Most importantly, Hoxha's belief that, by
nature, the distinct Albanian identity had a right to political
self-determination exemplifies Hoxha's careful attention to
the prevalent political doctrines of modernity.
However, Hoxha's framework
for modernization strongly pursued many traits of what is
today called post-modernism. Under Hoxhaist historiography,
European “modernity” was inherently faulted, a creation of
the self-serving plutocrats, capitalist robber barons, and
imperialist chauvinists of the “modern” European cosmopolitan
hegemons. The “modern” stratified the world into first-world
imperialist belligerents and third-world subjects, supposedly
confining the global proletarian class to slavery for the
modern capitalist machine. In Hoxha's eyes, to be modern –
with a pervasive bureaucracy, governmental hegemony, and stratified
economic system – innately contradicted the Marxist-Leninist
exhortations for a liberated working class and a completely
free individual who shapes his own destiny without the subversion
of economic and governmental elites. European modernity itself
was synonymous with capitalism, oppression, racism, nationalist
chauvinism, and imperialism. Modern “democracy,” despite its
promises of personal involvement, was believed to ultimately
place self-interested rich men back in their warm seats of
power under the guise of popular mandate.
Hoxhaist post-modernism
therefore sought to break completely from nearly all of the
confining modern epistemological strictures of history, racialism,
religion, teleology, tribal bonds, and national or geopolitical
competition. Hoxha wrote that, “...Marxist-Leninist science...[provides]
us with convincing proof that....the proletariat will triumph
by destroying, overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie,
imperialism and all, exploiters, and will build a new society,
a socialist society.”16 He continued, “on this course [towards
liberation], the proletariat was to wrest political and economic
power from its oppressors and exploiters - the capitalist
bourgeoisie, and build the new world.”17 (emphasis added).
The individual and rational agent was to be completely liberated
from any and all traditions and customs that obstructed his
total liberation and individual self-determination. Communist
internationalism and cooperative industry would theoretically
liberate the working people from the modern hierarchies of
racism and imperialism.
The whole framework of “Albanian-ness”
was completely rebuilt as part of this project for the creation
of a new world. The tribal heritage of the Albanians was believed
to have held the Albanian worker and free agent back from
complete liberation and modernization by forcing obeisance
to those in power, and would therefore have to be eliminated
altogether. Albanians would no longer swear loyalty to the
Tosk and Gheg tribes, but to a collectively-serving Albanian
nation (Shqipëria), and would abandon their outmoded tribal
tongues and speak a modern and unified Albanian language (Shqip).
To facilitate this modernization, all traces of tribalism,
blood feuds, and clan law codes like the medieval Kanun of
Lek were ruthlessly abolished as relics of un-modern feudalism.
Even beards and the traditional Islamic greeting “Assalamu-alaykum”
were excoriated as traditional, feudal, and imperial (since
Islam was inherited from Turkish imperialists).18 Religion
and the church altogether allegedly confined the Albanian
cultivated mind to the outdated modes of exploitation, morality,
and obedience, and were to be completely destroyed in 1967
after post-modernist Albanian declared itself the “world's
first Atheist state.” Capitalist economics and class altogether,
perceived by Hoxha to be historical phenomena characteristic
of modernity, were to be vanquished. The individual mind,
in typical post-modernist parlance, was to be completely divorced
from the outside hegemony of God, the employer, the monarchy,
the landlord, and the state. Despite his fervent use of Marxist
teleology and the vocabulary of historical materialism as
a “universal law,”19 the rational free mind, rather than history,
was to shape the post-modernist future of Albania. A new national
university at Tiranë and regular supposedly “fair” elections
would inculcate hitherto-slavish Albanians with this creative
force for self-determination (vetëvendosje) in the same way
they would modernize and protect Albania from foreign intrusion.
Enver Hoxha, whose ideological commitment to his interpretation
of Marxism-Leninism became so fundamentalist that he would
soon embargo even Khrushchev's Soviet Union and Mao's China
as perverters of Leninism, pursued this post-modernist “liberation”
project far more intensively and pervasively than any other
Communist state.
Although ultimately a miserable
failure that rendered Albania a completely isolated and bankrupt
state, the Hoxhaist project of post-modernization rapidly
reformed all characteristics of Albanian labor and social
functions from 1944 until Hoxha's death in 1985. For the first
time, Albania became politically centralized and ideologically
streamlined, with the Party of Labor's surveillance and modernizing
influence quickly charting and categorizing all aspects of
Albanian geology, resources, forestry, linguistic and tribal
divisions, and arable land.20 The wilderness was tamed as
a subject to the state (or the “collective”), and the malarial
swamps were drained.21 The new Albanian vanguard state promised
to guarantee the “dictatorship of the masses” by creating
hitherto non-existent systems of national education, vocation,
health care, literacy, university curricula, transportation,
medical, retirement, and free movement from the shackles of
the farm and clan village. Education became the “property
of the working people” for free,22 and an Albanian was theoretically
able to choose his own profession and future through post-modernist
individualism, giving the worker “...the possibility to decide
[his/her] own future through the right of self-determination
up to succession.”23 Illiteracy was quickly reduced to only
10% compared to the near-total illiteracy of the Albanian
tribes of the pre-Communist, “pre-modern” era.24 Literacy,
it was argued, provided a vehicle for the vocabulary of autonomous
intellectual discourse with which to challenge the hegemony
of other, more educated or more wealthy elites. So too, universal
free health care, which raised the life expectancy from only
38 years in 1938 to 68 in 1974, was intended to create a society
of maximal human happiness and well-being down to the lowest
economic station that transcended the boundaries of history
and tribal origin, a highly post-modernist platform.25
Interestingly, despite Hoxha's
quest to “liberate” the working class from all forms of exploitation,
no working class existed whatsoever because the economic institutions
for organized labor did not exist in 1944. In order to create
a post-modern society of maximal creativity and collective
liberation, an expansive proletarian class with “dictatorial”
power would be required. The creation and preservation of
a new working class would divorce the newly-liberated Albanian
mind from the inequities and bondages of economic disadvantage
and bourgeois exploitation. Hoxha argued 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,” with
freedom and universalist human prosperity being characteristically
modern and post-modern concepts.26
As a result, new state industrial
and agricultural projects supposedly expanded the Albanian
working class to be 27 times larger in 1975 than it was in
1938, with production of electrical power multiplying 177
times over the same period, the coal industry over 235 times,
the chemical market 25 times, cement production 64 times,
inter-urban worker transport 595 times, and foreign investment
over 259 times.27 As presented by dubious government sources,
the working class grew from 15,000 registered proletarians
in 1944 to 370,000 by 1976, of a nation of over a million.28
Massive new cement factories, tobacco farms, Five-Year Plans,
hydroelectric dams, agricultural collectives, water purifying
centers, and textile mills (many named after Stalin) ostensibly
provided workers with a vehicle towards post-modernist liberation
by allowing them to shape their own destiny through their
own merit rather than the inequities of birthright or blood.
All land, farms, corporations, and businesses were confiscated
and redistributed for work, allegedly now the “property of
the people” rather than of the Party of Labor and the increasingly-despotic
Enver Hoxha. By 1959 alone, 85% of arable land had been collectivized,
and all private lands were under the hegemony of the state
regime.29 Buying and selling of land was banned. The Agrarian
Act of 1945 allotted every farmer with a family of five the
use of five state-endowed hectares of land at reduced rates
and no more, and a half-hectare for each additional child.30
All mines were nationalized as modes of production in accordance
with Marxist doctrine, as were all banks and other outlets
of state resources that could be “redirected” from capital
designs towards the post-modernist vision for universal human
liberation.
To the same end, the power
of the wealthier, more tribal, and more Islamic Gheg landowning
tribe of northern Albania was dismantled, with influence over
Albania shifting towards the hitherto disenfranchised Tosk
“proletariat” of the south (to which Hoxha and most party
members belonged).31 The work day was supposedly limited in
order to reverse the previous subjugation that Albanian “workers”
endured under tribal and capitalist “imperialists.” Retirement
plans and compulsory vacations implied that the individual
agent was theoretically working for his own life, his own
future, and his own family, rather than in obeisance to the
capitalist employer or the state. Universal price setting
and salary regulations imposed by the government were intended
to create a new society in which the individual would be completely
free to explore the world fairly in a way of his own choosing,
rather than in competition with others who connive to seize
control of the means of production or of proletarian chattel.32
Food was, as it was questionably claimed on official documents,
distributed fairly and for free to the working people as regulated
by state ration cards.33 To the same end, newly-established
court systems and workers' associations, allegedly administered
by the rotation of average Albanian workers rather than by
the state camarilla, presented a new post-modernist society
in which each individual fairly derived his political and
personal power from his universal human worth as a worker,
rather than from his largess or his origins.
The post-modernist framework
of the Albanian Communist project is staunchly revealed by
the drastically changing position of women. The longstanding
legal and cultural inferiority of Albanian women was radically
dismantled and revolutionized with the belief that in the
post-modern Hoxhaist golden age, the worth of a woman is not
to be determined by discriminatory cultural traditions or
the supposed patriarchy of obsolescent religious dogma, but
with her value as a liberated human being and as a worker
who builds and improves the world around her for the collective
good. Polygamy, an Albanian cultural practice that was reinforced
by Islamic jurisprudence obtained during Ottoman rule, was
banned immediately and posthumously, perceived by Hoxha to
not only subjugate the female to the exploitation of the man,
but engross the wealthy political and tribal elite with even
more family inheritance and disproportionate hegemony over
autonomous human agents.
Hoxha derided that these
religious restrictions must be eliminated if the female mind
were to be truly autonomous, arguing that “the canons of 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.”34 The Islamic hijab (veil)
was forcibly removed and banned, portrayed as an outmoded
tradition that held Albanian women back into the obsolescent
past that Hoxha trying to abolish in the new Communist post-modernity.
All traditional gender roles and patriarchal stratification,
still deeply present in mid-twentieth century “modernity,”
were dismantled, as women rapidly went from being home-dwelling
and veiled servants to possessing personal and political equality
with the male worker. The clothes and hairstyles of female
workers became increasingly androgynous, an effort by Hoxha
to blur the traditional feudal and “modern” divisions that
subsumed the rational individuality of the female sex. Hoxha
took credit that “...a girl is no longer treated as a slave...love
must be the basis of every marriage...All roads have been
opened to the youth [and the woman] 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.”35 The introduction of love and human
emotion into interpersonal relations in Albanian society was
a highly modernist inclination.
All women were forced to
leave the home and enter the collective farm, the factory,
or the university, working alongside men. Soon, women made
up 47% of the work force.36 Whereas before no woman set foot
on the parliament floor, they soon comprised 33.3% of representatives,
25% of the members of the Albanian Party of Labor, 26% of
the supreme court, and 41.2% of the “leaders of the organizations
of the masses.”37 Women went from almost no education to being
over 45.3% of primary school students and 42.5% in gymnasia.38
Women were revered in propaganda as actively throwing off
the veil, fleeing the kitchen, hoisting the Albanian red flag
and rifle, and running to “kill their past, to gain freedom,
and to open the way to a new life.”39 The past, even central
family values and concepts of motherhood, were to be overcome
in the new post-modern Albania. Subsidized daycare services
were intended to prevent mothers from being trapped in the
home to tend for children or their husbands, theoretically
allowing the post-modern Albanian woman to equally define
her own academic and personal destiny without the obstruction
of traditional notions of gender roles. Albanian culture was
meticulously re-engineered by Hoxha's post-modernization project
with the aspiration to attain an illusory golden age were
worth and power lay in the mind and in the scythe-yielding
hand of the worker, rather than in his or her wallet, blood,
or estate.
The organized destruction
of religion under Hoxha's Albania, carried out far more pervasively
and brutally than in any other state espousing Communist rhetoric,
further exemplifies Hoxha's post-modernist drive to obliterate
both the feudal past and the “modern” present. Before Communist
rule, Albania was nominally 70% Muslim, 20% Orthodox, and
10% Catholic.40 With increasing frequency, Hoxha worked to
dismantle what he depicted as an outmoded “opiate” of the
traditional past that obstructed the liberation of the individual
and bound him or her to subservience to concocted moral maxims
and the self-engrossing clerical authority of patriarchs and
imams. Hoxha presaged that, “...we will win them over more
quickly because their religious and backward convictions are
being attacked while in the process of decay....[The Communists]
are the advanced social activists whose consciences are fully
liberated.”41 By 1967, with Albania increasingly pursuing
a bizarre total isolation from the world, all religious institutions,
clerical bodies, Jesuit associations, and worship services
were abolished entirely, with Hoxha declaring Albania the
“world's first Atheist state.” Since religion was still very
strong in “modern” Europe, the death of religion was portrayed
as “spiritual emancipation” from the lies of the past and
modernity. It was depicted as the opening of “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.”42
Religious observation or
possession of Bibles or Qur'ans was punished by imprisonment
or often execution. Virtually every mosque and church, except
those deemed salient in Albanian cultural artwork, were destroyed
or converted into government buildings, classrooms for re-education
under Marxist-Leninist jurisprudence, health care centers,
or labor offices. Whereas before Communist rule there were
over 530 formally established mosques, by the 1960s there
were only a handful, and after 1967, none. The Islamic call
to prayer was metaphorically replaced by the “liberating wisdom”
of Marxist-Leninism.43 All Bektaşı Sufi lodges, including
those dating several centuries as well as from the large exodus
of Sufis fleeing the forced secularization of Atatürk's Turkish
Republic, were abolished, and their constituents were expelled.
A foreign traveler wrote morosely that “Albanian Islam is
in its death throes.”44 All Jesuit missionaries, leading imams,
and church leaders were expelled, stripped of their authority,
or in many cases shot. Whereas before there were at least
two Catholic archbishops and four bishops in Albania, now
there were none; two were shot after staged public trials,
and one died in the cold prison cells of a concentration camp.
17 out of 93 priests were executed by firing squad, 39 were
jailed, and the remainder were expelled immediately. Of 94
itinerant monks, 16 were shot, 35 jailed or sent to forced
labor camps, and 31 expelled outright.45 All the property
and donations held in churches and mosques, paralleled with
a subversive capitalist enterprise under the guise of salvation,
were confiscated to the collective state.
The death of religion revealed
that all traditional constraints of history, culture, or religion
that supposedly obstructed the liberation and self-determination
of the individual were targeted for destruction under Albanian
post-modernism. The government even took a step further and
ordered the invention of new, “Illyrian” family names that
were intended to replace Christian- or Islamic-derived names
like Mehmet (Muhammad), Ali, John, Peter, or Paul. Hoxha argued
that the true “religion of the Albanians is Albanianism,”46
meaning that the Albanian people drew their energy and spiritual
satisfaction not through obeisance to the church, God, or
the Qur'an, but from the temporal Albanian experience and
the drive to improve the world around them. All traces of
the past altogether – including those still strong in the
“modern” era of Cold War Europe – were to melt away in this
romanticized mass revolution. In typical post-modernist fashion,
even the existence of God Himself was now understood in an
increasingly-isolated Albania as being a fundamental obstruction
to the liberation, autonomy, and freedom of the individual
agent and worker.
Interestingly, at the same
time as Hoxha spurned the modern world as an abhorrent creation
of military-industrial complexes, capitalist-imperialist orchestrations
behind the scenes, and chauvinist nationalisms, his nation
also demonstrated a number of often contradictory characteristically
modern (as opposed to post-modern) phenomena as a process
of state building and centralization. Under the forty-one
years of Hoxha's dictatorship, Albania was transformed from
instability and near-anarchy into arguably the most isolated,
repressive, centralized, and surveillant society of the twentieth
century. Equipped with a cult of personality that easily rivaled
Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan and even Kim Il-Sung of
North Korea, every aspect of Albanian society was meticulously
controlled, disciplined, and orchestrated by the whim of Enver
Hoxha and his ultra-purist interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.
The systematic extension of government hegemony over all reaches
of the Albanian territorial space, as well as the sovereign
authority of Enver Hoxha over all channels of Albanian society
also reflect Hoxha's meticulous creation of a somewhat contradictory
modern and post-modern proletarian nation. Albania was by
all accounts a police state, with those abstractly lambasted
as “enemies of the people” either shot outright or shipped
to forced labor concentration camps or prison cells, often
until either their expiration or the fall of the socialist
republic. There were at least fourteen concentration camps
for forced labor that were reported by the few foreign travelers
allowed into an isolating Albania.47 After Albania reached
total isolation and Hoxha's paranoia of “treason” steadily
increased, it has still not been determined how extensive
the Albanian police and surveillance state truly was.
In a strong case of the
highly modern Foucaultian panopticon, Hoxha's dogma, his authority,
and his image manipulated, discouraged, and disciplined the
behavior of the Albanian people. Hoxha insisted that the total
personal and collective liberation of the proletariat can
only be (as Lenin agreed) fulfilled by following the total
authority of the socialist vanguard state under the firm direction
of a charismatic Marxist-minded conductor. Ironically, post-modernity
would be attained through methods of state control that Hoxha
tacitly reviled as creations of the capitalist-imperialist
modernity. The few foreigners who were permitted to enter
isolated Albania emphasized the highly modern centralization
of the nation-state around the personality of Father Enver,
with one West German journalist writing:
“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 Moloch48...It is...the permanent reign
of terror and the pitiless despotism that seems to me the
main reason for a smoldering...dissatisfaction all over Albania49...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...On the public
square or in front of government buildings, his image in bronze
or plaster watches over all activities of his subjects...even
the walls of the cowshed in the collective farms and the windows
of the meagerly-stocked town shops are not spared.”50 (emphasis
added).
Hoxha's creation of a panopticon
to discipline and shape the ideology of his subjects was pervasive
and present in all outlets of Albania communal and daily life.
Hoxha ordered each farming family to build concrete family
pillboxes, mostly facing towards Yugoslavia, totaling as many
as 400,000.51 Equally as important as a bulwark of national
defense against what Hoxha believed to be an imminent Yugoslav
invasion was its psychological panopticon effects on an increasingly
isolated and brainwashed Albanian society. Regular calls to
arms drills in pillboxes, in addition to the Hoxhaist doctrine
of the inherent imperial predation of all outside powers,
disciplined the Albanian people into believing that all Albanians
must work together and obey their beloved leader on whom they
depend for their national self-determination and liberation.
Increasingly over the last
three decades of Hoxha's reign, Albania's foreign policy became
increasingly erratic, bizarrely isolated, and ideologically
hidebound. The admittedly fundamentalist Marxist-Leninist
Enver Hoxha ultimately embargoed Yugoslavia under Jozip Broz
“Tito,” the mighty Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev, the
United States, NATO, and the People's Republic of China under
Mao Zedong despite the fact that Albania was entirely dependent
upon their financial subsidy and industrial expertise for
survival. After 1968, Albania had voluntarily isolated itself
from all trade, withdrew from its benefactors of the Warsaw
Pact, expelled all foreign engineers and shredded all industrial
contracts from Communist nations, and completely closed its
borders. In only a few years, Albania would be desperately
bankrupt, its factories and crucial economic mainstays (provided
by the Communist allies Hoxha had expelled) rusted and collapsed.
Historiography generally interprets this bizarre self-defeating
regression as a symptom of Enver Hoxha's severe paranoia,
lunacy, and self-interested despotism. However, here again
Enver Hoxha interpreted his behavior as necessary for Albania's
project for a completely liberated and self-determinate proletarian
society.
Hoxha rationalized that
Albania's relationship with the “predatory” Communist Bloc
“marked the beginning of a long and very difficult struggle
in which our Party, to its glory and the glory of the people
who gave birth to it and raised it, consistently defended
the interests of its socialist Homeland, persistently defended
Marxism-Leninism and the genuine international Communist movement.”52
As it was portrayed in Hoxhaist academia and ideology, Albania
had to isolate itself in order to be totally liberated from
the imperialism, capitalism, and exploitation of the outside
modern world. As depicted, the post-modern golden age of total
freedom was impossible unless Albania were completely safeguarded
from the innate desire of all outside capitalist hegemons
to prey on weak and dependent nations like Albania that could
provide exploited workers to feed their capitalist machines.
Any “ephemeral” economic consequences that would come from
isolation were trivial, since Hoxha (as he claimed) refused
to sell the ideological purity of his national vision in exchange
for fiscal progress and enslavement to imperial hegemons.53
Hoxha wrote 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.”54
Hoxha believed he had to
create post-modern “world of his own” – completely divorced
from the Communist Bloc and modernity's East-West Cold War
divisions – because he increasingly equated even the beneficent
overtures of Communist countries as proof of their alleged
ulterior imperialist motives. The modern world, as Hoxha saw
it, was not a Cold War struggle between the proletarian revolution
led by the Soviet Union on one side and the oppressive capitalists
led by the United States on the other. Characteristically
of Hoxha's understanding of modernity, all expansionist political
forces (including the Soviet Union and China) were not vanguards
of justice or the working class, but subversive agents of
an imperial agenda that inherently revolved around capital,
power, hegemony, and exploitation. Hoxha depicted his country
as the true lion of the impending Communist paradise, and
placed his national struggle for self-determination in the
context of resistance to all political hegemons of the modern
Cold War world:
“The concept that a small
state must subject itself to a big state, that, in order to
earn the right to exist in this [modern] world, a small state
must blindly follow the policy the big states impose on it...is
unacceptable in the present epoch. The freedom, independence,
sovereignty, self-determination, self-government and political
decisions...of any independent state cannot permit interference...When
these states and the [aforementioned] degenerate chauvinist
leaders...are fighting with all the means at their disposal
against the freedom and independence of other peoples and
states who want to live free...do not we, the small countries,
have the right and duty to fight with the greatest determination
against this state of affairs which threatens us at every
moment of every day?...This is the basis of the unity and
the sincere collaboration of the People's Republic of Albania
with [global Third World] states and governments in struggle
over the major problems which are concerning all mankind,
against world imperialism, against predatory imperialist war,
for a peace in equality and justice.“55
Under this lens, Yugoslavia,
despite providing a full 58% of backward Albania's entire
gross national product,56 was not beneficently interested
in liberating the Albanian working class, but was interpreted
as working to surreptitiously achieve the “gobbling up of
the whole of Albania”57 as a new province with the interests
of engrossing the coffers of Tito at the expense of the subjugated
Albanian worker. The Yugoslav “social-imperialists” sought
to make Albania “forever dependent upon Yugoslavia.”58 Tito's
reputedly unorthodox approach to socialism further demonstrated
his lack of devotion to the Communist vision of the future.
As a result, the Yugoslav “Titoite imperialists” were embargoed
by Albania after 1948, especially after Tito spurned Joseph
Stalin, who Hoxha viewed as an immaculate hero of the global
revolution. Hoxha even accused the Yugoslavs of instigating
the repression of the Hungarian revolt of Imre Nagy in 1956
in order to gain new capital influence.59 Hoxha lampooned
Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and finally China as “social-imperialists”
who masqueraded as Communists but in reality served imperialist-capitalist
designs, and as “revisionists” who distorted pure Marxism-Leninism
for their own modern imperialist aims.
To the same end, Khrushchev's
Soviet Union may have covered the same 58% of the Albanian
budget and provided nearly all of primitive Albania's industrial
projects,60 but was rapidly interpreted by Hoxha as a belligerent
imperial enemy declaring war on his post-modernist vision
for total liberation and an end to imperialist subjugation.
The Soviets' subsidies of over 90% of Albania's oil technology
and equipment, 82% of invaluable tractors for Albania's massive
agricultural projects, and 65% of farming machinery were,
bizarrely, interpreted as a bait to catch the Albanians off-guard
for Soviet conquest.61 As Hoxha saw it, Khrushchev had denounced
the lion of the proletariat, Joseph Stalin, not in the interests
of the people or against his rampant human rights atrocities,
but out of backstage political maneuvering in order to secure
his egoistic control over the Soviet Union and the whole of
the Eastern Bloc. He had adulterated Stalin's self-reliant
“socialism in one country” for his highly unpopular “peaceful
coexistence” campaign not in the interests of peace, but with
the hopes of perverting true socialism and trading with the
West for capital and imperial gain. The Soviet Union's invasion
of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968,62 and Afghanistan
in 1979 proved their inherently un-Communist, imperialist,
crypto-capitalist, and expansionist motives to retain control
with no attention to the fundamental oppression of the struggling
global proletarian class. Hoxha claimed that “Soviet social-imperialism...based
its foreign policy on its expansion and hegemonism by means
of the armaments race [with the capitalist United States]
and blackmail...The aim of this policy was the establishment
of social-imperialist domination over the whole world.”63
The Soviets, as spearheads of modernity's imperialism and
chauvinism, sought to “subject all the revisionists to their
dictate, to force 'a new menu' on them, while binding them
hand and foot...impose their control and domination over them,
check any attempt on their part for even formal independence.”64
Modernity's phenomenon of imperialism had, apparently, subjugated
the un-liberated Albanian people and denied them self-determination:
“the Soviet rats were able to eat whilst the Albanian people
were dying of hunger; were asked to produce gold.”65 In response,
Hoxha embargoed the “Khrushchevite modern revisionists” of
the Soviet Union after 196866 and their satellites in the
Warsaw Pact who were also supposedly subject to modernist
Soviet imperialist expansionism. Again, Hoxha rationalized
his self-defeating isolation from his benefactors as a means
of protecting his people from the supposed malevolence, capitalism,
and imperialism of Cold War modernity.
During the Sino-Soviet ideological
split of the 1960s, in which Maoist rhetoric scorned prominent
Eastern Bloc “Communists” like Nicolae Ceaușescu and Nikita
Khrushchev as self-interested “revisionists” who demanded
that the whole Communist world obey their dictate, Albania
transferred its alliance to the People's Republic of China
as the last vanguard of the proletarian revolution. China
compensated Albania's loss from its embargo of Moscow, and
granted what has today been calculated as being worth five
billion dollars in subsidy,67 or 21.6% of its foreign expenses
in 1957.68 For a delapidated Albania, this was a tremendous
resource. This affiliation quickly degenerated as well, “forcing”
post-modernist Albania to completely cut itself off from all
the potential capacity for the industrial, economic, and technological
innovation that characterize modernity. Mao's flirtation with
the “capitalist-imperialist” West, his cordial meeting with
Richard Nixon, his invasion of fellow Communist Vietnam, and
his occupation of Sikkim and northeastern Kashmir in India
all demonstrated to Hoxha that the People's Republic of China
was yet another modern imperial- and capital-minded hegemon
masquerading its expansionism behind the false vocabulary
of proletarian liberation. Mao's adoption of a new historiographic
and political doctrine called the “Theory of the Three Worlds,”
according to Hoxha, proved China's desire to exploit the “wisdom”
of Marx and Stalin for imperial and chauvinist ambition. According
to the theory, Mao interpreted the global workers' revolution
under three stages of “proletarian development:” the superpowers
of the First World, the developing countries of the Second
World, and the non-independent or un-modern identities of
the Third World. Under the same framework, Mao extolled powerful
and “properly liberated” Communist nations like China as the
natural leaders and guides who would, by example and support,
lead the un-liberated Third World to total proletarian liberation
and self-determination.
Hoxha understood this worldview
as an antithetical and racist perversion of Marxism-Leninism
that justified Chinese imperial and expansionist ambitions,
and elevated the Chinese as a “superior” race that naturally
led the “inferior” races of the Third World. Modernity and
development, as Hoxha saw it, required that growing superpowers
like China, the United States, and the USSR maximize their
authority and mandate for imperial expansionism. Hoxha claimed
that the “Chinese revisionists...are trying to oppose this
glorious scientific revolution and strategy [of Marxist post-modern]
with their theory of 'three worlds,' which is a false, counterrevolutionary,
and chauvinist theory...The Chinese revisionists accept and
preach that the 'master race' [the Chinese] must be preserved
and the 'race of pariahs and plebs' must serve it meekly and
devotedly.69 By nature, this doctrine served the revisionists
and imperialists, and denied the working peoples their “natural
right” to post-modernist liberation and a right to independent
self-determination. State-imposed racism and chauvinism would
have no place in Hoxha's global vision for a post-modern golden
age of liberation from imperial dominance and the modern strictures
of nationalism and race. Albania was thus interpreted by Hoxha
as “China's beachhead” in Europe, a colonial and imperial
springboard for expansionist and capitalist hegemony in Europe
and in collusion with the “hucksters” of the Soviet Union.
In response, by 1970, Albania embargoed its last invaluable
benefactor, and became completely isolated from the modern
world that it considered inherently imperialist and oppressive.
The process of Albanian
state formation and modernization, as orchestrated by the
Communist camarilla of Enver Hoxha, followed a highly sinuous
and often contradictory course during the forty-one years
of the socialist republic's existence. With the simultaneous
platforms of building a new industrialized state from a backward
feudal past and a vision for a completely liberated future
society, Hoxhaist doctrine selectively blended behavioral
traits of both modernity and post-modernity. Through highly
modern vehicles of the state formation process – nationalism,
industrialization, technological innovation, and a hegemonic
panopticon state of discipline – Enver Hoxha professed to
carry the conductor's baton of the proletarian vanguard state
to lead the subjugated working class to a post-modernist dream
of the total liberation of the autonomous human mind from
the confines of religion, history, epistemology, and capital-imperialism.
As Hoxha increasingly perceived all modern political and ideological
factions – including the “Communist Bloc,” East and West,
and China – as inherent agents of global chauvinism and imperialism,
Hoxha identified the modern world altogether as an artifice
to be dismantled by a mass revolution. In response, Hoxha
isolated his hermit state into a world of his own, believing
that a post-modernist “utopia” of autarky that completely
overcame the modern world would be the only guarantor of the
self-determination, individuality, agency, and well-being
of the Albanian worker. Believing that a people “finds its
resources for its economic development at home...in its internal
accumulation and in the creative force of its people,70 Hoxha
asserted that the rational creativity and productive drive
of the liberated post-modern mind would compensate for any
economic calamities that resulted from total isolation. Ironically,
Hoxha's project for a post-modern golden age degenerated into
one of the most bizarre and regressive states in twentieth-century
European history, rendering today's Albania one of the most
bankrupt, undeveloped, un-liberated, and unstable societies
in “modern” Europe, its people a discriminated mockery in
diaspora, the same ethnic chauvinism against the Albanian
identity that Hoxha sought to overcome.
________________________________________
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.
This is my undergraduate
dissertation, and may NOT under ANY circumstances be redistributed
without my express permission.
CITATIONS:
- Miranda Vickers. The Albanians:
A Modern History (London: I.B. Taurus, 2001), 165.
- Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 315.
- Vickers 2001,25-6.
- Harry Hamm, Albania: China's Beachhead
in Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963), 61.
- Vickers 2001, 199.
- Andrew Hammond, The Balkans and
the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Farnham,
Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 17.
- Hammond 2004, 122.
- Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and
Bernd Jürgen-Fischer, Albanian Identities: Myth and History
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 36.
- Hafizullah Emadi. “Women's emancipation
and strategy of development in Albania.” Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 19
(May 9, 1992): 999.
- Wolff 1994, 315.
- Ibid., 323.
- Ibid., 113.
- Vickers 2001, 171.
- J.S. O'Donnell, A Coming of Age:
Albania under Enver Hoxha (Irvington, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1999.153.
- Hammond 2004, 63.
- Communist International, “Imperialism
and Revolution, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
- The Institute of Marxist-Leninist
Studies. “Enver Hoxha with Stalin: Memoirs.” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/withstalin.html
- Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism,
War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (New York: Penguin
Books, 2001), 560.
- The Institute of Marxist-Leninist
Studies, “English abstract of Enver Hoxha's The Theory and
Practice of Revolution,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/tpr71977.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
- Glenny 2001, 563-4.
- 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
- Communist International. “The Titoites,
Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites1.shtml
- Glenny 2001, 564.
- 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, “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
- Glenny 2001, 563.
- Hamm 1963, 39.
- Stavro Skendi, “Albania within
the Slav orbit.” Political Science Quarterly, Vol 63, No.
2 (June, 1948): 266.
- Glenny 2001, 563.
- 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
- Vickers 2001, 176.
- Ibid., 194.
- 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
- 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
- Ibid.
- Emadi 1992, 1001.
- Ibid., 999.
- Hamm 1963, 55.
- Edwin E. Jacques, The Albanians:
An Ethnic History from Prehistoric Times to the Present
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 497.
- Miranda Vickers, Albania: From
Anarchy to Balkan Identity (New York: NYU Press, 1997),
98.
- Hamm 1963, 55.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 56.
- Glenny 2001, 560.
- Hamm 1963, 54.
- Ibid., 56.
- Ibid., 61.
- Ibid., 79.
- Vickers 2001, 193.
- Communist International, “The Khrushchevites,
Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/krushchevites1.html
- Vickers 2001, 209.
- “An open letter to the members
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” Zëri-i-Popullit,
October 5, 1964.
- Communist International, “The Superpowers,
Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers2.html
- Vickers 2001, 174.
- Communist International, “The Titoites,
Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites2.shtml
- Ranko Petković, “Yugoslav-Albanian
Relations,” Review of International Affairs (1984): 274-275.
- Stavro Skendi, “Albania and the
Sino-Soviet Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, April 1962, 472.
- Vickers 2001, 175.
- Hamm 1963, 51.
- Communist International. “The Superpowers,
Part 1.” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/superpowers1.html
- Communist International, “Imperialism
and Revolution, Part 1,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev1.html
- “An open letter to the members
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” Zëri-i-Popullit,
October 5, 1964.
- Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins
of the Cultural Revolution (Irvington, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1999), 125.
- Schwandner-Sievers 2002, 96.
- Arshi Pipa, Albanian Stalinism
(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1990), 122.
- Elez Biberaj, Albania And China:
A Study of an Unequal Alliance (New York: Westview Press,
1969), 27.
- Communist International, “Imperialism
and Revolution, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
- Communist International, “Imperialism
and Revolution, Part 2,” http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES
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Biberaj, Elez. Albania And
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“Imperialism and Revolution, Part 2.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/imp_rev2.html
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“The Khrushchevites, Part 1.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/krushchevites1.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 1.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites1.shtml
Communist International.
“The Titoites, Part 2.”
http://archive.250x.com/hoxha/english/titoites2.shtml
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.
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.
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