Planet Albania (1976)
Planet Albania[1]
Bartolo Pieggi
First photographs after twelve years
Since 1964, no Italian media has published a document like the one we present here: entering "Planet Albania," as the small country ruled with an iron fist by Enver Hoxha has been dubbed, is a challenging feat. We offer you an updated political and social overview.
There are only 300 private cars in the entire country
Tirana. Two views of the Albanian capital. The first photo shows the Statue of Liberty, while the second depicts a square with slow, patriarchal traffic: a few bicycles, a motorcycle, and a horse-drawn cart (private cars in the entire country number just 300). With about 300,000 residents, Tirana is the state's political and cultural center. Traces of Italian rule (Italy occupied Albania on April 7, 1939) are still visible. The last color images of Albania were part of a report by Vittoriano Rastelli published by “Domenica” in issue 38, September 1972.
News and slogans on street billboards, just like in Chinese cities
Tirana. Two more views of the Albanian capital. A central square with a modern building and a street with two cyclists, a donkey-drawn cart, and in the background, a large billboard with posters and announcements in the style of Chinese "foglilampo." The portraits on the board are of the most distinguished workers. Rich with trees, mostly poplars and birches, the city has a major artery running from the square dedicated to the hero Skanderbeg, who fought the Turks victoriously for 25 years in the 15th century, to the university.
What is happening in Albania? This question is often asked but rarely finds an answer or receives complex and contradictory responses, leaving those genuinely interested in knowing almost dry-mouthed. One could easily jest: now we know Mars, 380 million kilometers from Earth, better than we know those “four stones” in Europe, as Vittorio Emanuele III contemptuously called Albania in 1939.
Such irony is partly justified. Thirty years after the official proclamation of the People's Republic of Albania, the latest information from this country, closely tied to Italian people and events, remains scarce and, once again, confused. In the capital, Tirana, a monument was inaugurated for Vasil Laci, who was captured and executed by the fascists for attempting to assassinate Vittorio Emanuele III during his visit to the country in May 1941. Enver Hoxha, secretary of the Labour Party (Communist) and effectively Albania's autocrat since 1944, along with his prime minister, Mehmet Shehu, are reportedly not as gravely ill as rumored.
Rumors had spread that Hoxha suffered from diabetes or was paralyzed, that Shehu had cancer, and that their illnesses were complicating the power struggle at the top, fueled by the apparent cooling of Sino-Albanian friendship. But if this is true, if Hoxha and Shehu are indeed ill, at least politically, they have emerged victorious from the internal conflicts that Albanian mystery decoders have suggested have been ongoing for three years. The Labour Party's Central Committee (the sole leading party) has decided to convene its congress on November 1, where Hoxha and Shehu will present the report on the political situation and the new (fifth) five-year economic plan. This plan once again focuses on significant increases in heavy industry and agriculture at the expense of light industry and less essential consumer goods, affirming the hard and uncompromising stance of the party’s general secretary.
It is hard to talk about Albania without mentioning Hoxha. A tiny nation (only 28,748 square kilometers) with 2,400,000 inhabitants and another 1,500,000 Albanians scattered across neighboring Yugoslavia and the world, Albania was under Turkish rule for 400 years, gained a semblance of independence in 1912, and became a theater of war during the First and then the Second World War after the brief reign of the tyrant Zog I, who declared himself king in 1928 with Italian support and fled with gold and jewels in 1939 when Italian troops arrived. In thirty years, Enver Hoxha has turned his homeland, three-quarters mountainous and the rest swampy, plagued by malaria and illiteracy, with an average life expectancy of 38 years and where being born a woman was a misfortune, into a state that is, in its own way, modern.
This was no easy feat. Born in October 1908 in Gjirokastër, today chubby and balding, passionate about folk music and literature, mysterious, inflexible, and learned like Mao, whom he seems to emulate and who, like Hoxha, is averse to foreign travel.
Kruja (Albania). A panorama of this town of 80,000 residents. With an old castle and a rich museum, Kruja is one of the must-see stops for foreign tourists, who can visit Albania only in organized and carefully selected groups, excluding Americans, Soviets, and British, deemed untrustworthy by authorities.
One of the few escapes: coffee
Tirana. A waitress prepares cups for Turkish coffee in a bar in the capital. It is a local specialty and one of the few consumptive escapes allowed. Life in Albania is autarkic and puritanical. Long hair, jeans, and low-cut dresses are not allowed.
Italian names among the best wines
Tirana. Some wines with Italian names displayed in a shop. Albania produces about 100,000 hectoliters of good wine annually. Among the beverages, a local specialty is a grappa called raki. In addition to wheat, corn, and rice, citrus fruits, olives, and sugar beets are mainly grown.
Durres. Above, a view of the beach frequented by foreign tourists and Albanians, who are entitled to fifteen days of paid leave per year. Below is the Tirana mosque: considered a national relic, it is no longer a place of worship because any religious belief is expressly forbidden by the constitution in Albania.
Hoxha has had to struggle fiercely to achieve this (history will tell if the drastic measures he used were necessary). The son of a wealthy Muslim family of officials and landowners, the only ones in old Albania able to give their children a European education, Hoxha of Tosk origin (in Albania, the cosmopolitan, mercantile Tosk from the south have been opposed to the rough Gheg mountaineers of the north, geographically separated by the Shkumbin River and different in customs and dialects) studied at the French high school in Korçë, a revolutionary hotbed, and earned a degree in natural sciences in France. He founded the Communist Party in 1941 (which later took the name Labour Party) and became a partisan in the following years.
In November 1944, he led the national united front and became the first prime minister of the new state. After the general elections in 1946, he became almost the undisputed leader. From then on, he attempted to make Albania a sovereign nation and impose the absolute leadership of the monolithic and centralizing Communist Party, eliminating moderate tendencies.
Until 1948, Hoxha remained a vassal of Yugoslavia, liberating himself when Tito was expelled from Stalin’s orthodox communist bloc and joining the Soviet orbit. He remained there until 1961, detaching himself when Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin after his death in 1953, cut economic and military aid to Albania and drew closer to Mao’s China, which had similarly freed itself from Soviet tutelage, provoking the great schism in the communist field. Meanwhile, he had disposed of his moderate opponents internally, collectivized national industry and agriculture, and imposed a harsh and severe regime on Albanians. From 1961 to the present, history has repeated itself with ups and downs. Always politically close to China but distant enough geographically to limit its direct influence, despite benefiting from substantial assistance, Hoxha anticipated the convulsions of China’s Cultural Revolution. After a brief period of liberalization in the early 1970s, he tightened the reins to fend off attacks from those pushing internally to ease the people’s hardship and break the isolation into which Albania seemed increasingly confined by the international situation. The power struggle at the top, as it is defined in the West, saw the fall of many of his old party comrades since 1975, whose fates remain unclear. The latest crackdown came last April, with two ministers eliminated and the decision to halve royalties for artists and writers and reduce salaries for officials and bureaucrats by 4 to 25 percent, who were once again forced to alternate managerial duties with manual labor. In recent years, more than a third of the Politburo, the central party body, has been purged, and only two ministers have remained unchanged. Currently, the reins seem to have returned firmly to Hoxha. He considers Americans and Soviets equally imperialistic, labels the leaders of French and Italian communism as megalomaniac petty bourgeois, and has accentuated the Stalinist-style communism model, as demonstrated by the new draft constitution expected to replace the one approved in 1946 and modified in 1950.
An Atheist State by Constitution
The constitution states that power emanates from and belongs to the people, who elect the People’s Assembly, the supreme body of state power, by universal direct suffrage and secret ballot. Still, Article 3 asserts that the Labour Party, the vanguard of the proletarian class, is the sole political force leading the state. Further, it specifies that the party’s general secretary is also the supreme commander of the armed forces. Article 52 guarantees citizens freedom of speech, press, assembly, and demonstration, but Article 54 declares that any fascist, anti-democratic, religious, war-mongering, or antisocialist activity or propaganda, as well as incitement to national and racial hatred, is prohibited. One can imagine how these vague definitions allow for any interpretation. Essentially, Albania is constitutionally the only atheist state in the world (churches and priests disappeared in 1967), the only state where atheistic propaganda is constitutional law, and where the only artistic forms permitted are those of socialist realism.
But what do Albanians think of this state of affairs? They enjoy living conditions that have no point of comparison with the distant past and even with the frequent famines of the 1960s, thanks to the progress made by industry, which did not exist until 1944, and now-exploited mineral wealth (especially chromium, copper, and oil, of which they are self-sufficient). They do not pay taxes, receive free healthcare, attend university with scholarships, pay very little rent, and still ride bicycles (private cars are just 300 and belong to state companies), but at least in theory, they can control and criticize the activities of their leaders on Chinese-style street posters. They are puritanical and austere. Wage differences among workers are at most in a 2:1 ratio. Abortion is allowed only to protect the mother’s life, and divorce is granted after long bureaucratic processes. Contraceptive pills are discussed, but everything is done to prevent their use.
Long hair, Western songs, dances, jeans, and low-cut clothes are not allowed, and in 1973, a Swedish tourist was almost stoned for wearing shorts. Initially permitted in the early 1970s, the possibility of receiving foreign TV broadcasts is now restricted by the authorities, who consider their penetration dangerous for constructing Albanian socialism. Albanians are reserved and distrustful, according to an ancient tradition that the regime has largely intensified, and live in thirty years of isolation that tourism (accepted in recent years for selected groups excluding Soviets, Americans, British, Blacks, and Jews) has barely scratched. Perhaps without realizing it, they are closely monitored by a highly efficient state police that, according to Albanian officials, has eliminated 250 counterrevolutionary organizations and 4,000 revisionist criminals in 30 years. (This would make credible the allegations of some Albanians abroad about the existence of concentration camps in Tepeleni, Lushnje, Kambs, and Fier). Despite this, Albanians seem proud of their state and esteem their leader, even if the 68-year-old Hoxha faces determined and interchangeable opponents internally. Although he has currently subdued some of them, his increasingly isolated and abstract international stance puts him at serious risk. In 1961, he did not bat an eye when the Soviet ambassador left. Today, the prolonged absence of Chinese Ambassador Chen Hua, who left Tirana early this year and whose departure’s motives are unclear, may prove fatal.
[1] Domenica del Corriere, 1976
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