A hypothesis regarding the fall of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania
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This story has been entirely obsoleted by One Flower Doesn’t Mean It’s Summer.
The fall of the PSRA has posed a continuing historical problem for historians as well as communists. The fall of the Soviet Union is really no mystery, in part because it was the natural outcome of events in the 1950s and 60s, and those events are well-understood, largely because Enver was explaining them even then in, for instance, this speech delivered in Moscow in 1960 as well as several books written in the decades afterwards, effectively liveblogging the entire process of liquidation. The fall of the USSR was no surprise to Albania.
As for the fall of Albania, we have mostly legend to go off of. Reconstructing these events is like trying to write a biography of Lalla Ded. People just say whatever, and it has to be weighed for truth value against real historical knowledge that most people don’t have. Almost nothing holds up.
I’ve been living in Albania for the past three years, and spent much of that time trying to piece this together. Something stressed again and again in the museums of the armiqësor is that people wanted very badly to get out of Albania in the late 1980s. There were protests by people attempting to leave, and a family who managed to break through security and into the Italian embassy created a massive media issue for the Party. The Italians at the time were leading the charge against the PSR, publishing intense lies about it in their media as well as propagandising how great life was in Italy to the Albanians who were somehow listening on pirate radios. This eventually culminated in a mass attempt to leave the country on hijacked boats with the assistance of criminal organisations. I wrote about this already in The Albanain Exodus; in real fact, by a couple weeks from arrival practically all of the “escapees” had been returned to Albania, but the museums never mention that part.
The most suspicious part of this story to me is the issue of these criminal organisations. Where did they come from? Contrary to the propaganda, the Party wasn’t generally in the business of pretending everything was fine when there were problems. No government in the history of the world has ever documented its problems so meticulously as the Party of Labour of Albania. Yet there is no hide nor hair of these massive criminal organisations in any record I’ve seen. On one hand, Albania was a hyper-policed hellscape where if you held an opinion or listened to music the Party didn’t like, they’d send you to a mountain torture camp and cut off your ear and place a stigma on your entire family. This is pretty much the biggest thing that people don’t like about the communist era. This is like the single biggest complaint that people have by a pretty big margin. There are multiple museums dedicated to the extremities of the secret police. But on the other hand, there were apparently vast criminal networks the government didn’t know about. Big if true.
The heavy emphasis on the problem of the Sigurimi creates ideological inconveniences for the current traitors’ regime, which holds the Albanian people in some of the greatest poverty found in Europe even by its own economic indicators. In real historical fact, it’s well-known that there were traitors in the party as high up as second-in-command Mehmet Shehu, who was working for foreign powers to undermine the PSR. In addition to Shehu, the secret police were consistently in the hands of traitors, many of whom were held to trial for this and rightly executed by the Communists.
Even though this was the source of the main thing everyone complains about about communism, it must be bad to have held anyone to trial for it — to say otherwise is to say that positive reforms were carried out, and progress made, under the PSR. That would contrast favourably with the current regime. So it is claimed that these trials and executions, actually had nothing to do with creating a better socialist society with a security force that wasn’t being paid by foreign powers to reign abuses on people. It was actually, you are so smart for knowing, an attempt by Enver Hoxha to “consolidate power” by “eliminating strong figures he couldn’t control”. This is true even though the “strong figures” being eliminated were the ones doing the thing they’re complaining about, and the stated reason for their elimination is that they were doing the thing being complained about. The dictator was a big meanie, so it doesn’t count. It should have been done by someone nicer, and with purer motives, like Bill Clinton, or Woodrow Wilson, or some other monster of history.
Sometimes, this act of basic statesmanship is instead attributed to Enver’s wife and the director of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, Nexhmije Hoxha. Nexhmije is a figure of incredible moral value, who held to Marxism until her death at age 99 just three years ago, a time of profound weakness for the communist movement, and as an elderly woman she was imprisoned on fake charges of money laundering — very funny, considering who was making the accusations. From prison she wrote My Life With Enver, in which she upholds Enver and her work with the Party, and she remained a member of the Communist Party until her death. So many stories like this circulate in Albania with ideological, not historical, purposes, to defame her in an irrational manner and with an otherwise bizarre fervour. The study of history is discouraged here, now — it makes the regime look BAD.
If Nexhmije did have selfish motivations, she could have simply gone the Yeonmi Park route, rehabilitated herself, denounced her husband and the Party, gone on Oprah, enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the world press, shaken Hillary Clinton’s hand, and been elected head girlboss of Albania for life. She could have really done this at any point before or after the fall of the PSR. This is a good example of the kind of careful reading required of these end-of-history myths and legends. They are really paper thin, but there are so many of them and they are so pervasive. The scale of destruction of Albania is difficult to fathom, there have not been many serious theoreticians to take eyes to the problem, and the lie pays in USD.
In either case, the end-of-history ideology of the shkattërues demands that the proletarian Party be a simple, self-interested, cartoonish organisation more like Team Galactic than like the government of a country, and it’s not permissible for positive reforms to have happened during the period of its hegemony, which was homogenous and did not consist of people with complex or conflicting motivations or objectives. Ergo, when reforms do happen, and when they do target people that the bourgeois hegemons agree were crimials, they can’t have been for the stated, sympathetic reasons attested to with 100% consistency by all party documents as well as in lengthy and detailed books like The Titoites. Ideologically, the current hegenomy is required to describe all historical events in terms that might inform to a child’s reading of Ganondorf or Simba’s uncle Scar, and they must be so clearly morally condemned as to stigmatise paying them real scrutiny. Because they do not make sense.
If we’re looking for means and motive regarding who set up these massive criminal networks after the death of Enver, it was pretty obviously the Secret Police, who had everything to gain from the success of such an operation and everything to lose for its failure.
When it’s claimed that the current ruling Partia Socialiste are “the communists”, this actually makes a degree of sense when it’s kept in mind that by “communists” is meant the corupt Sigurimi traitors, who in the end-of-history myth are not distinguished from the incorruptable Communists who fought them to the death, because this history is ideologically suppressed by the bourgeois hegemony.
As noted in the title, this is only a hypothesis. But my current working understanding of how Albania was destroyed is that the secret police, known to be in the hands of traitors in foreign employ, established networks which mobilised heavily towards the objective of creating the spectacle of a mass exodus. For this purpose, they organised secretly for years, maintaining the outward appearance of communists loyal to the party and the people up until the late 1980's.
A normal criminal organisation is constituted of lumpen elements who are interested in money. There is no financial gain to be made by rushing a bunch of Albanians onto a boat to be deported from Italy. Criminals who smuggle refugees into Europe charge money for it. Quite a lot, actually, in the neighbourhood of thousands of Euros. I’ve met many people in Greece and Turkey happy to tell me about it.
No such fee seems to have been charged for a space on the Vlora. A traditionally criminal motive, then, doesn’t seem to hold up. As I’ve written a few times now, this bears more resemblance to the mad dash to the airport in Kabul in 2021. This dash is well-known now as it was at the time to have been manufactured by false promises of free western visas, spread by American intelligence. The chaos at the airport served a propaganda value against the Islamic Emirate. As in Albania, there was no petty criminal financial extortion of the transportees.
Furthermore, Albania at this time had no lumpen elements. There was no unemployment in the country. People were socially integrated.
This is an operation that had only political propaganda value. This was a political action, not a financial one. And I have not heard of them committing any other criminal acts, such as the importation and sale of drugs. It also explains an admitted peculiarity of Albania — unlike the other end-of-history regimes of eastern Europe, in Albania, communist officials are allowed to hold political office and other government positions. While the real communists have been killed and exiled, traitors are still in politically important posts in both electoral parties. The allegation that the criminals in government now are covering up the crimes they committed then seems to be true. The message of what was going on inside the party has more ideological importance to the current regime than what was going on outside of it. They rehabilitate the Shehus, portraying them as sympathetic victims of the big meanie dictator, bullied to suicide, just like your grandma who had to eat rocks or whatever.
The fall of the Eastern Bloc was sensationalised as cover for this colour revolution. Although it’s often treated as though Albania’s fall was a domino effect from that of the Eastern BLoc, the relationship should not be so straightforward — Albania was, for example, not financially dependent on the Soviet Union the way the eastern bloc was. On the contrary, the Soviet Union was Albania’s enemy, and held it under a blockade for decades. No other direct causal relation has ever been substantiated either — there was no mass influx of refugees to Albania or anything like that. The countries were not ideologically similar to Albania, and Albania had for decades been aware of the ideological shortcomings of the eastern bloc, as previously mentioned. But colour revolutions take place through a manufactured panic, under the cover of which bad things happen.
And now they’re now following the Assadist economic model of getting rid of as many locals as possible while importing progressively wealthier “expats”.
Happy “Sultan Nevruz”.
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