Eighty years ago today, Albania became the only country to free itself from Nazi occupation without any help from the Allied armies. A communist-led partisan movement spearheaded the drive for national liberation in one of Europe’s poorest states.
Miladin Popović, Liri Gega, and Enver Hoxha in Albania. (Wikimedia Commons)
After the Russian Revolution of October 1917, there were very few places in Europe where the local communist parties explicitly stated that they did not expect a socialist transformation to be possible. Albania was one of those places. Yet it ended up experiencing a socialist revolution during World War II, despite not even having a communist party of its own until 1941.
The small groups of scattered organizers in the country managed to work quickly under conditions of occupation and establish an effective resistance movement. Together with the Yugoslav partisans who served as their self-imposed tutors, they were the only two political forces in Eastern Europe to achieve liberation relatively independently of the Red Army.
This made it possible for the postwar governments in Belgrade and Tirana alike to defy the USSR in the decades that followed. Under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, Albania went on to follow a unique path during the Cold War, breaking with Moscow during the 1960s to ally with Maoist China, before striking out on its own by the end of the 1970s.
Hoxha ruled the country until his death in 1985, but the system he established could not survive the general crisis of the Eastern Bloc in 1989–91. The wartime struggle that gave rise to that system is an important story that deserves to be told and remembered in its own right.
Underdevelopment and Revolution
After the October Revolution, the overarching strategy developed by the Communist International (Comintern) for a worldwide communist revolution had to grapple with the fact that most of the planet was not even capitalist yet. In fact, only about half of Europe and North America had fully developed capitalism.
The Albanian and Yugoslav partisans were the only two political forces in Eastern Europe to achieve liberation relatively independently of the Red Army.
In the other half of Europe (including Russia) as well as Latin America, capitalism was “backward,” in the jargon of the time. Moreover, a lot of countries in Asia and Africa simply did not have capitalist relations of production.
During World War I, Vladimir Lenin thus insisted on the following revolutionary schema:
The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movement, in the undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations.
In the language of orthodox Marxism, the latter group of countries would need to experience a “bourgeois-democratic revolution.” This would mean clearing away the remnants of feudalism to establish a capitalist order with parliamentary rule and civil liberties.
Of course, all the European peripheral societies, from Yugoslavia through Poland to Imperial Russia itself, had feudal remnants. However, the communists gambled that those countries could advance directly from being underdeveloped capitalist states to socialism in the event of a successful communist revolution in Western and Central Europe.
This theory, which provided the rationale for starting the world revolution in underdeveloped Russia in 1917, was known as “permanent revolution.” However, the phrase in question was eventually suppressed following the political marginalization of Leon Trotsky.
In 1924, just after the world revolution had suffered a series of defeats in Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, and most importantly Germany, a dash of hope appeared in the Balkans. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in Albania, a liberal-democratic government was established under an Orthodox priest called Fan Noli.
The Soviet Union quickly established relations with the new government and responded positively to Albania’s bourgeois-democratic transformation. However, the reign of Fan Noli proved to be short-lived, as he was overthrown in a Yugoslav-sponsored coup after just six months.
From Nationalism to Marxism
Most of Fan Noli’s young radical supporters ended up in exile in Vienna. With nowhere else to turn, they received help from the Balkan Communist Federation (BCF), an umbrella organization of the region’s communist parties.
In 1925, Fan Noli and the BCF set up the Revolutionary National Committee (Komiteti Nacional Revolucionar, or KONARE). They worked closely with the Kosovo Committee, an Albanian nationalist organization fighting Yugoslav rule over the region. Both KONARE and the Kosovo Committee began receiving Comintern funding.
The overarching revolutionary plan rested on the idea that nationalism was an expression of the peasantry’s class discontent in the peripheral countries. Therefore, to emerge victorious, the small proletariat needed to form an alliance with the peasant majority on the platform of national self-determination until secession.
The Yugoslav communist theoretician Kosta Novaković proposed a platform of unified class struggle by Kosovo Albanians, Turks, and Serbs against the Yugoslav regime. In this schema, self-determination for Kosovo would not result in the creation of smaller nation-states but rather in the ultimate establishment of a Balkan Federation — an old design of Balkan Marxists.
While both Yugoslav communists and Albanian national liberals struggled to gain a mass following in the wake of state repression during the early 1920s, the Comintern collaboration with KONARE and the Kosovo Committee gave birth to Albania’s own communist tradition. Many of the young radicals were impressed by the emancipatory communist program, which went much further than the meager democratic demands put forward by Fan Noli. In 1925, thirteen of them went to the USSR, where they received a Marxist education and began working for the International.
By 1928, Albania did not have a communist party as such, but it did have a ‘Communist Group’ composed of several fascinating individuals.
By 1928, Albania did not have a communist party as such, but it did have a “Communist Group” composed of several fascinating individuals. Their de facto leader was Ali Kelmendi, a Kosovo Albanian who had been a founding member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
Other important figures were Koço Tashko, the son of Albanian nationalist exiles in Egypt and a Harvard graduate; Sejfulla Malëshova, a poet who translated the Communist Manifesto into Albanian; and Llazar Fundo, party theoretician and organizer of volunteers for the Spanish Civil War, who would later publicly condemn the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. By the time of the Spanish Civil War, this group had been joined by luminaries such as Petro Marko, Albania’s version of Ernest Hemingway, and Skënder Luarasi, another US-educated son of Albanian patriots.
Most of these individuals went on to suffer various forms of repression at the hands of Enver Hoxha. After his break with the party, Fundo joined the pro-British anti-communist resistance during the war and was executed by communist partisans. The others all received prison sentences at various points after 1945, with the sole exception of Kelmendi, who died of an illness in 1939.
Revolt Against Fascism
Weeks after the fascist victory in Spain, Benito Mussolini’s Italian regime occupied Albania in April 1939. By this point, Albanian Marxists had formed study groups and factory cells in several major cities but still lacked a party. It would only be established in November 1941, under the tutelage of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was already conducting a mass anti-fascist uprising at the time.
Koço Tashko, one of Albania’s leading communists, invited a young teacher from Korça named Enver Hoxha to the founding congress. The city of Korça had no Marxists of Muslim origin, and they needed to find someone to fill the gap in order to emphasize the multireligious character of the Albanian anti-fascist struggle. Enver, whose uncle Hysen was a prominent Albanian nationalist, seemed like a good candidate.
The Yugoslav communists, whose influence the Albanians resented, clearly wanted to maintain tight control over the small party. They thought that the politically inexperienced Hoxha would be easier to influence than the communists who had received training in Moscow. By March 1943, Hoxha was officially elected secretary of that party, which he would go on to lead until his death forty-two years later. The man who the Yugoslavs saw as a young cadre to be shaped by them proved to be one of their fiercest opponents after 1948.
Weeks after the fascist victory in Spain, Benito Mussolini’s Italian regime occupied Albania in April 1939.
By early 1942, the Albanian communists had formed small partisan detachments and eventually began liberating mountainous areas in the south of the country. In September of that year, the county surrounding the town of Çorovode became the first liberated territory in Albania.
At roughly the same time, the communists gathered with the representatives of the noncommunist political organizations in Peza, a village outside of the capital Tirana, and established the National Liberation Committee. Modeled after the Greek National Liberation Front (EAM), the committee involved both nationalists and supporters of the dethroned King Zogu. Much like the Yugoslavs, the Albanians sought to create a wide popular front, but on communist terms and under communist leadership.
In the north, the armed bands wrestling control away from the Italian occupiers were mostly nationalist. The situation was the same in Kosovo, which had been annexed into the Italian-controlled Albanian puppet state following the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941.
National oppression of the interwar period had resulted in the Kosovo Albanian population either siding with the Italian occupiers or forming nationalist resistance groups. This made it difficult to establish a physical link between territories liberated by the Yugoslav and Albanian communists throughout the war.
National Conflict and Cooperation
Kosovo and Northern Albania, while being the cause of nationalist conflict between Yugoslavs — especially Serbs — and Albanians, also gave rise to successful cases of internationalist cooperation. One of the main Yugoslav party organizers in Kosovo was Ramiz Sadiku, a young Albanian communist lawyer. He was executed in 1943 and faced death in the arms of his Serbian comrade Boro Vukmirović, as the two refused to separate before being killed by the firing squad. Fadil Hoxha, another Albanian organizer of the resistance, rose to become one of the most powerful politicians in Kosovo during Yugoslavia’s socialist period.
Similarly, in the northern Albanian city of Shkodër, some Serbs and Montenegrins played a prominent role in the resistance, including the brothers Vaso and Branko Kadia/Kadić, as well as Vojo Kushi/Kušić, who posthumously received the prestigious Order of the People’s Hero in both Albania and Yugoslavia.
Of course, this does not mean that ethnic relations were always harmonious among the communists. The Yugoslav communists executed Emrush Myftari, a Kosovar-Albanian Spanish Civil War veteran who supported Kosovo’s postwar unification with Albania, in 1944, having accused him of working for the Gestapo.
Overall, the Kosovo issue was always a potential point of conflict for the two communist parties. The region had an Albanian ethnic majority but had been under Serbian control since 1912. Serbian nationalists — and even some communists — considered it to be the cradle of Serbian statehood, based on nineteenth-century national myths and were thus unwilling to compromise.
The Kosovo issue was always a potential point of conflict for the Albanian and Yugoslav communist parties.
Two separate conferences, one in Mukje in Northern Albania in August 1943 and the other in the Kosovar town of Bujan the following year, called for postwar unification between Kosovo and Albania. These were grassroots initiatives of regional party leaderships, condemned respectively by Hoxha and Tito.
The two leaders sought to postpone the resolution of the issue for after the liberation. Once liberated, Kosovo remained within Yugoslavia, but with extensive autonomy, and there were plans it would become part of Albania within a Balkan Federation. However, the postwar Tito–Stalin split put a halt to these visions, as Hoxha sided with Joseph Stalin and condemned Tito as a “revisionist.”
Meanwhile, in Albania, the communist partisans came into conflict with nationalist militias that called themselves the National Front (Balli Kombëtar). This was in part because of disagreements on Albanian nationalism, and in part because neither side was willing to give up ambitions to play a leading role in the liberation movement — the Mukje Conference revolved precisely around these two issues. The catalyst for a full-blown civil war was the capitulation of Italy to the Allies in September 1943.
Civil War
The fall of Italy resulted in the collapse of Italian central authority over nominally independent Albania. The communists began seizing territory, while the Balli Kombëtar sought to accommodate the Germans and help them reestablish fascist control over the region. The Germans appealed to Albanian nationalism more explicitly than the Italians, promising a greater Albanian state after the war that would include Kosovo as well as parts of Macedonia and Montenegro.
The German propaganda was quite successful, proving that they could maintain relatively stable control over an occupied area if they focused more on the carrot than on the stick — a lesson that they did not take to heart elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. This, of course, did not mean much for Albania’s Jewish population and Jewish refugees from other areas, who were still persecuted by the Nazis and the Albanian SS Division, Skanderbeg. Fortunately, however, the vast majority of Albanian Jews survived, thanks to protection by the local Albanian population.
Hoxha’s communist partisans did not accept the proclamations and promises of a greater Albanian state, but instead continued their anti-fascist struggle. They were joined by Italian defectors, who formed a brigade named after Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist leader who had Albanian ancestry. For their part, released Yugoslav POWs established the Boro Vukmirović Battalion.
The fall of Italy resulted in the collapse of Italian central authority over nominally independent Albania.
By the end of 1943, the communist partisans numbered over twenty thousand fighters. They were led by Mehmet Shehu, Hoxha’s right-hand man, who had studied at a military academy and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
At this point, the Germans and the Balli Kombëtar began a joint offensive against the communists. The National Front still maintained links with the Americans and the British but was increasingly collaborating with the Nazis, whom they consider to be a lesser threat than communism. The nationalists denounced the communists as “non-Albanians,” while the latter issued orders for the nationalists to be treated in the same way as the German occupiers with whom they were collaborating.
The British remained unsure of who to support in the region, while the Soviets were seemingly indifferent, but the Yugoslav communists had a clear strategy. Following a path identical to that followed by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1942–43, the communists organized a congress in the liberated town of Përmet on May 24, 1944. It established the General National Liberation Council, serving as the new Albanian parliament.
At the Second Congress of the General National Liberation Council, which met in the city of Berat in October that same year, the parliament formed a new government. A provisional cabinet that formally contained representatives of several parties was in fact under Hoxha’s firm control, and most ministers were communists.
Liberation
As the General National Liberation Council met in Berat, the Germans were hurriedly retreating from Albania. In August and September, Romania and Bulgaria had switched sides to join the Allies, prompting fears that German troops would be cut off in the Balkans.
As the Germans retreated, the ranks of the communists swelled. The Albanian youth was overwhelmingly left-wing, and over six thousand women joined the partisans, fighting for legal equality and the right to vote with a rifle in hand. By the fall of 1944, Shehu and Hoxha had seventy thousand people under their command.
After nineteen days of fighting, Mehmet Shehu’s troops liberated Tirana on November 17, 1944.
After nineteen days of fighting, Shehu’s troops liberated Tirana on November 17, 1944. While in Yugoslavia, the partisans achieved liberation in coordination with the Red Army, the Albanians liberated their country without Soviet troops, making it the only place in Europe to liberate itself from fascism without any Allied assistance. Nonetheless, Hoxha was undoubtedly inspired by, and loyal to, the teachings of Lenin and Stalin in their contemporary, Stalinist interpretation.
Albania, as one of the most underdeveloped countries in Europe, did not have a great starting point for attempting to build socialism. It was largely agricultural, with high illiteracy rates and few factories. Its mining and petroleum industries had mostly been destroyed during the war, alongside its agricultural capacity.
The Soviets complained that three-quarters of the party members only possessed elementary education. According to Hoxha, the Communist Party renamed itself as the Party of Labor of Albania at Stalin’s suggestion, on the grounds that the overwhelming majority of party members were peasants rather than workers.
A Contradictory Legacy
While internal repression and control of the public sphere are well-known features of the regime that Hoxha established, it is also worth mentioning some of its less talked about successes. Illiteracy was virtually eradicated: by 1990, 73 percent of children finishing elementary school would go on to some form of secondary education.
Swampland by the sea was converted into fertile agricultural land, and Albanian oil reserves, which Italy had controlled since 1926, became state-owned. Before the Italian invasion, Albania had already been considered a de facto Italian colony. The revolution ended this relationship of structural dependence on foreign capital.
The old pattern returned following the complete restoration of capitalism in the 1990s. Albanian politicians now attract foreign capital by bragging that the country has “no trade unions.” The country is once again reduced to subordinate status in the international division of labor characterized by unfettered exploitation of workers.
Women’s emancipation was another great achievement of Hoxha’s Albania, in a country where customary law often considered women to be scarcely more than the personal property of a man. Legal equality, however, was constrained by the conservative policies that Albania copied from Stalin’s Soviet Union, such as the criminalization of abortions and promotion of natalist policies. The life of Liri Gega illustrates both sides of this contradictory legacy: she was the first communist woman on the politburo in 1943, but Hoxha later had her executed in 1956 on false charges of treason and “Titoism.”
Hoxha’s Albania, by the end of his life, was among the poorest countries in Europe, but it had been among the poorest before him as well. The essence of Hoxha’s “socialism,” based on that of his mentor Stalin, was the establishment of a modernizing state that was supposed to abolish the proletariat as a class not through the abolition of wage labor but rather through upward social mobility, offering workers the possibility of white-collar careers.
This required a revision of the once-universally agreed Marxist definition of socialism as a moneyless society in favor of a simple formula that equated socialism with state ownership of industry and agriculture. Once those benefiting from the Stalinist planned economy found it an unnecessary obstacle in the path of wealth accumulation, they did away with the system altogether. Nonetheless, we should look at the totality of Albania’s historical experience of socialism, with its many achievements and flaws.