A childhood in Stalinist Albania

Submitted by AWL on 18 January, 2022 - 4:51 Author: Dan Katz
Enver Hoxha

On a bookshelf in our front room there’s a picture of my partner and me, half-empty glasses raised in the air. It is New Year’s Eve, 1989, and we are drinking to celebrate the death of Stalinism across much of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall had just come down and the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had just been put against a wall and shot, during a brief civil war as Romanian Stalinism crashed.

The bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were liberations, for sure. The new freedom meant elections, new political parties, the ability to form free trade unions and an end to secret-police terror and vast, ubiquitous state surveillance and repression.

Gulags

In her new book Free, Lea Ypi, a young child in the 1980s, describes puzzling, coded conversations as her parents and granny discussed the fates of relatives imprisoned in the Albanian system of gulags. To be at “university”, was to be in jail; “graduation” was to get out; “dropping out of university” was committing suicide; a “strict teacher” was a torturer. Life for a child is often confusing enough without having every word your parents say measured and mangled for fear of the state.

Ypi’s book is not a text book, or history, but a memoir. It is highly personalised, human, nuanced and recommended. In the end it made me feel sad, but maybe that’s just me.

The UK’s right-wing press, which has reviewed Ypi’s book extensively and enthusiastically, has concentrated almost entirely on her description of the weird and ultra-repressive Stalinist variant which she lived under in Albania. But Lea Ypi’s book is in two parts, and the second half deals with what happened next, after Stalinism’s fall. The freedoms that were won — real freedoms — were also bourgeois freedoms. The framework was now being set by the capitalist class and institutions such as the World Bank. Capitalist “structural adjustments” meant mass unemployment in Albania, rising inequality, mass emigration, gangsterism and corruption and, in 1997, a mass uprising following the collapse of wildly popular Ponzi schemes.

Albania, a small, backward state on the Adriatic Sea (current population, 3 million), was occupied by Mussolini and then by the German Nazis, and fell to the Stalinist forces under Enver Hoxha in 1944. Hoxha broke with Tito’s Yugoslavia (which had been attempting to swallow Albania) in 1948 and then with Khrushchev’s USSR in 1961, siding with China in the Sino-Soviet split.

1967

Hoxha broke with China in the 1970s and China cut off all aid to Albania in 1978. That left Albania utterly isolated. The 1967 constitution had attempted to seal-off Albania by banning foreign travel as well as listening to foreign radio. Borders were sealed with electric fences and those who attempted to escape could be executed. Private ownership of cars and even bad language were prohibited.

The legal changes in 1967 also declared Albania “atheist,” meaning all mosques and churches were closed and then reopened as community centres or libraries. Religious worship became a seriously punishable offence.

Beards and long hair were also banned, apparently as symbols of decadent Western culture. In 1970 Ajax football team were told they could not enter the country unless their players were clean-shaven and their hair was no longer than 4cm. Celtic’s squad was banned from the country for having beards.

The Sigurimi secret police force brutally trampled on even mild criticism of the regime and ran an extensive, efficient network of informers. Many buildings were bugged. As an Albanian saying went, “There are 11 spies for every ten people.”

Between 1945 and 1991, when the Albanian Stalinist regime finally fell, at least 43,000 political prisoners had been jailed and 6,000 executed. Many prisoners were forced to dig for copper in the mine at Spac, in the country’s north, the most notorious of 50 internment camps.

Fatos Lubonja was jailed for 17 years for criticising Hoxha in a private diary. Shtjefen Kurti, a Catholic priest, was executed for performing a baptism in 1971. Maks Velo, a painter, was told his paintings were anti-socialist and showed “modernist tendencies”; he was interrogated for six months, tortured, and sentenced to ten years hard labour. Hysen Haxhiaj joined a small book club with six other members and was jailed for 15 years for discussing “pro-Western” poetry.

Maks Velo

Like many who were persecuted, the painter Maks Velo was given a choice: go to a prison camp or become an informer. He chose prison. At the end of her book Lea Ypi makes the point that even in terrible conditions people can and do make choices. Maks Velo did the right thing. That is an easy thing to write from south London in 2021, but he was right nevertheless.

More recently, Velo discovered that up to 20 people informed on him, including a close relative and a good friend. The state destroyed Velo’s paintings, and 4,000 politicals are still listed as missing.

Lea Ypi’s family was at particular risk from persecution as they had come from well-off, educated backgrounds. Ypi’s mother’s family had property seized by the regime.

As a teenager Ypi lived through the first years of post-Stalinist rule in Albania. All the key features of her adolescent years formed opposite poles. Capitalist democracy and Stalinism. Her mum (a northerner, a Gheg, a founder then leader of the opposition Democratic party, who believed people are basically bad) and her dad (a southerner, a Tosk, who was a confused leftist who ran a port and faced laying its workforce off under World Bank-mandated reforms).

Then came the January 1997 collapse of the pyramid schemes in which many thousands of Albanians — perhaps two-thirds of the population — had invested life savings. The schemes were often fronts for money-launderers and mafia organisations and offered interest of 10-25% per month.

These scams were allowed to exist under rules set out by the IMF in 1994 which allowed the unfettered operation of private financial organisations.

A violent protest movement spread from the south where the Stalinists still retained some support. The rebellion became a generalised insurrection by March 1997 with the active participation of criminal gangs. Weapons were looted from army stores and mafias took over whole towns.

Diary

Ypi reprints her teenage diary from March 1997, including conversations with her father, who by then was a Democratic Party MP, and the story of her mother and brother escaping the violence by jumping on a ship bound for Italy. She ends, “I’m not taking Valium any more, I’m taking valerian; it is meant to be milder.”

Perhaps 2000 people died and an international military intervention was required to restore order. Ypi describes the difference between 1990-1 and 1997: “In 1990 we had nothing but hope. In 1997 we lost that too.”

Ypi, now lecturing on Marxism at the LSE, starts her course: “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.”

Which is not a bad place to start a conversation. The reviewers for the right wing press clearly did not note her criticism of capitalism. Or thought it not worth mentioning. Or maybe they didn’t get that far through the book.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.