Re-Evaluating the 1967 Albanian Iconoclasm
“On 6 February 1967,” claims The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945–1991, ostensibly a serious piece of scholarship of post-communist Albanian authorship, “Enver Hoxha presented his famous ‘Programmatic Discourse against Religion and Backward Habits’. Immediately thereafter, the right to believe in God, to frequent places of worship, or to declare any religious identity, was abolished.”
A strong claim. Immediately you say.
This kind of hyperbole is unfortunately common in post-communist Albanian discourses. Enver Hoxha and “his iron-fisted dictatorship” are a tale that seems to grow taller over time, and even serious academic discussions are peppered with curses of the name of Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije, who are never discussed without reference to alleged traits like their paranoia, iron-fistedness, jealousy, dishonesty, underhandedness, irrationality, and general unpersonability. This practice parallels or surpasses in religious intensity Muawiya’s legendary curses against Ali, and is genuinely a little scary, on and offline. It also makes it pretty hard to talk with some young people about socialism with any intellectual or historical seriousness, which I imagine is the point.
Because of the rampant hyperbole surrounding these events, binding what happened to the plane of historical fact becomes a Marxist duty, lest progressively more hyperbolic accounts gradually cement themselves as political and religious truth. As presented, the above account, which can always get worse, is already problematic not just politically and historically, but actually religiously as well. For example, one of the most important miracles attributed to the Prophet Muhammad is that he was able to dramatically alter the religious landscape in a short period of time. These accomplishments attributed to the whim and word of Enver Hoxha, as above, actually surpass those attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, who was dealing only with a sparsely populated desert with no organised religious institutional presence whatsoever, and for whom a great deal of the work was actually carried out by his immediate successors and those he had trained. Attributing a great miracle of this caliber to Enver Hoxha certainly is a move, but it’s one that’s problematic to me even as a Muslim, let alone as a historian or a Marxist-Leninist.
I believe strongly that the greatest barrier to organising a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement during this era of communist retreat is that we have underemphasised the proper study of recent history. There are overall fewer obstacles to us establishing socialism than there were in 1917, but we have fewer strengths, too. Our greatest weakness is that we have no historical context for the current world situation — we have no real idea what is going on, what forces act upon our lives and how. It is true that the bourgeoisie have a propaganda network previously unimaginable in its volume and intensity. But in the way no rocket scientist can bear an episode of Star Trek, no matter how many they make, the assembled hordes of the bourgeois media empire are powerless to influence anyone who’s really understood the war they are in, before whom it is all clearly comprehensible as the propaganda of a hostile social class. One who understands this cannot be returned to ignorance. The role of the historian is therefore currently much, much more important than that of the theorist. We have all the theories. We don’t need any more. We’ve had them for a hundred years or more and they are timeless and immortal. The issue is we don’t know what we’re applying them to. Our historical context is slippery like rinsed noodles to which the sauce of theory will not bond. We need to read the theories, master them, and then use them as a method of historical analysis, as every great Marxist has done, and the findings need to be communicated clearly to the people. That is the single greatest need of the current historical period.
i. The 6 February Speech
Wankypedia currently claims that the issue of religious persecution in socialist Albania was first brought up at the UN by a delegation from Denmark on 7 March, 1983. What strikes one as most strange immediately is that it took sixteen years for this reign of Pharaonhic religious persecution to be brought up and substantiated before the United Nations. What’s even stranger is that the notes from the meeting that Wikipedia claims this to have happened at are publicly available, and Albania is conspicuously absent from any mention in the lengthy document. A 1984 Amnesty International report on human rights in Albania in fact specifically discusses freedom of religion from pages 12–15, but this passage is full of phrases like “Amnesty International does not have details of the charges”, “has not been able to obtain independent confirmation”, and “he had been executed in 1970 for espionage, economic sabotage and anti state propaganda” and this section on religion concludes with this passage:
Although organized religion has been suppressed in Albania since 1967 [citation needed], the official press has continued to publish articles denouncing the persistence of religious practices and customs. On 26 October 1983, however, an article in Zëri i Popullit denied that religious believers had been persecuted in Albania and said that religion had not been fought “with laws and state decrees or with restrictions and force”. Religious faith had been opposed with arguments, it asserted. It quoted a saying attributed to Enver Hoxha that “to believe or not to believe is each person’s right”. However, the article failed to refer to the fact (sic) that public worship continues to be banned and that all religious communities have been suppressed.
This report also makes on page 13 the earliest claim I have found in an anti-communist source that “In a speech on 6 February 1967, Enver Hoxha encouraged a movement by young people across the country to close down mosques and churches”.
The list of Amnesty International’s concerns in Albania on page 3 doesn’t specifically mention religion, although it does contain vague references to “prisoners of conscience” which is a vague term that can include stuff like liberals, monarchists, spies, etc.
Much of Wikipedia’s article is quoted verbatim from either this Amnesty International report (without, of course, the parts about how the reports are unconfirmed or refuted in official sources, etc) or “country-data.com”, a website from 1992 which claims that it is “Based on the Country Studies Series by Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress”. The Country Studies Series was, emphasis mine,
originally sponsored by the U.S. Army and written by researchers affiliated with the Library’s Federal Research Division. Intended for a general audience, the studies provide descriptions and analyses of lesser-known countries or regions where U.S. military forces might be deployed.
So this can be safely described as a source confessionally hostile to Albanian socialism. In light of that, the site’s section on The Revival of Religion is interesting for its leniency compared to later tellings of the story:
Religious leaders estimated that 95 percent of all mosques and churches had been razed or gutted during the years of communist rule. […] The status of the clergy was equally appalling; the number of Roman Catholic priests, for example, had declined from 300 in 1944, when the communists took to power, to thirty by early 1992.
“Hoxha destroyed the human soul,” an official of Albania’s new noncommunist government observed, adding, “This will take generations to restore.”
The claim of a 95%, not 100%, reduction in mosques and churches, as well as a 90%, not 100%, decline in Roman Catholic priests, is incompatible with later claims that absolutely all of these things were wiped out during this period, indeed “immediately thereafter”, or that you could be sentenced to death for baptising a nephew, etc.
The section on Hoxha’s Antireligious Campaign, meanwhile, claims that “more than 200 clerics of various faiths” were imprisoned, which, while more clergy than one expects to imprison on an average day, is, not actually that many. If that’s a significant portion of your clergy, you were probably in a pretty weak spot before that point, no?
The page recites the claim that “Hoxha called for an aggressive cultural-educational struggle against “religious superstition”” and this time that he “assigned the antireligious mission to Albania’s students”. It also claims that it was only Orthodox personal names, and not all religious names, as is more common in more recent tellings, that were targeted for change.
The plot thickens as one reads the 1982 Second Edition of the History of the Party of Labour of Albania, which, while preceded by a full page of cushioning describing how overzealousness against religion was meticulously avoided, does eventually say that:
After the 5th Congress and Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech of February 6, 1967, this struggle began over a broad front and assumed the character of a major movement with a profound ideological content. […]
The youth and other masses of the people in villages and cities rose to their feet, demanding that the churches and mosques, temples and monasteries, all the “holy places” be closed down, that the clergy give up their parasitic life and become working people living like everyone else, by their own work and sweat.
[…]
These initiatives of the people had the powerful support of the party organizations and the organs of the peoples’ power.
Although I ordinarily put a lot of stock in communist sources, and I do think this is the best source consulted so far, there are navigational hazards in them for historians to be aware of. The most obvious of them in this case is that this is a very simplified telling from a basic history textbook with a very eventful story to tell and only 600 pages to do it in. It’s not very much information, basically. Slightly less obvious is the fact that the Party’s account and analysis of these events seems to have also shifted over time. I believe also that these events remained under-studied during the socialist period itself, and then grossly hyperbolised over the last thirty years by sources openly hostile to communism, like those consulted above.
At this point it is wise to check if Enver delivered a speech on 6 February, 1967. He did in fact, and it begins from page 209 in Volume IV of his Selected Works. Reading it gives us almost no clue about the closure of religious institutions, however. There is no direct reference to religion in it whatsoever. It is a speech about changes to party procedure and the struggle against bureaucracy. If there is anything even close to the closure of religious institutions, it is this passage, and if so, that would explain why bourgeois sources tend not to quote it directly:
Revolutionizing the party means revolutionizing the communists. They must be soldiers, tough as steel, politically clear, courageous, kindly, straightforward and sincere and, when need be, severe as well. They must destroy everything that is bad and support, organize the new and progressive and fight in the forefront for it…¹ The entire party and country ought to rise to eradicate the backward customs and break the neck of anyone who violates the sacred law of the Party in defence of the rights of women and girls. These are moral and political problems of great importance.
As funny as it is to imagine groups of religious clergy, who are not named at all, dissolving to the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West as soon as Enver says womens’ rights, the speech was overall about bureaucratic procedure, not religion and not womens’ rights. The above section is an introductory passage and this brief allusion to backwards customs is not a dramatic stylistic innovation on any of the other speeches Enver ever gave. Furthermore, whenever Enver does directly mention religious clergy in connection with womens’ rights, he usually does so as a part of a wider list of things in Albanian society which violate them.
As one pertinent example, the Selected Works contains a speech delivered four months later, dated June 15, 1967, and said to have been “delivered to the 2nd plenum of the CC of the PLA.” That is, the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania. This speech, actually is centrally about womens’ rights, and religion is not heavily emphasised. Enver quotes the anti-women sentiments of Ecclesiastes, St. John Chrysostom, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Napoleon Bonaparte, a non-religious figure. Shortly after this, he speaks in much harsher terms of “bourgeois theoreticians like Nietzche and Freud” who “likewise uphold the theory that the male is active while the female is passive. This reactionary, anti-scientific theory must lead, as it did, to nazism in politics and to sadism in sexology.”
In keeping with general stylistic trends in Enver’s speeches, something which receives significantly more emphasis than any religious text is the Albanian Kanun, a traditional legal code of the Albanian people which governed various aspects of Albanian tribal society. Enver mentioned the Kanun regularly in his writings and speeches. In concept, it’s something quite similar to the Pashtunwali governing the Pashtuns of Afghanistan in their tribal affairs. Today, Pashtunwali is an important part of the governing philosophy of the Islamic Emirate, and, to quote an Afghan — a western-educated man and a supporter of the Islamic Emirate — who I once shared a Twitter space with, it “does not respect women, period.” To my observation, both men and women who wish to improve the status of women in Afghanistan problematise Pashtunwali heavily, often suggesting it be discarded wholesale. It is not uncommon, in my experience, to meet an Afghan who sees the further implementation of Islam as a viable progressive reform in this direction, and who criticises Pashtunwali as being contrary to religious obligations, especially in terms of womens’ rights.
In interesting parallel with this general sentiment is Enver Hoxha, who says:
We are centuries removed from the integral application of The Canon of Lekë Dukagjini. […] But this does not mean that its spirit and routine do not exist to some extent, of course not so clear-cut as in the past, in many of the customs we encounter, especially in the social life of our mountain regions [in the north of the country].
The trouble with our Party in the North and with our scholars of social theory in general is that they have not turned their attention as they should to the social reality and its development in these regions.
Remarkably enough, Enver then recommends the work of Father Shtjefën Gjeçovi, which “has historical and social importance”, and of whom a study “will help our scholars to make a good diagnosis of the existing state of social relations in the North, in order to see their radical transformation, their evolution, and to strengthen our ideological, organizational, and propaganda work.”
A footnote to the edition in the Selected Works introduces Gjeçovi (1874–1929) as a “patriotic, progressive and anti-Zogite clergyman” and notes that “The Peoples Assembly of the PSRA has decorated him for his valuable contribution to Albanian science and his patriotic activity.”
It’s very possible to oversell this. Enver is here recommending the work of one clergyman, not “Christianity” as a whole. But he does, at this of all times, emphasise the possibility of a clergyman acting in a laudable, progressive direction, and moreover of his contributions being an inexpendable asset to good communist work, who party cadres should read.
Ramiz Alia also delivered a speech on the same subject at that event. There are several remarkable things about this speech. It begins with a reference to Enver’s speech on the 6th of February, and speaks extensively of the problems facing women. It speaks of an impressive number of concrete issues, including rates of womens’ participation in labour, the fact that women were sometimes forbidden to work by their husbands, the fact that women in the workforce tended to work fewer days than men, that women were poorly represented in certain sectors, like construction, machinery repair, and electric, promotion of women to higher posts in the workplace as well as within the party, exclusion of women from party meetings in some areas, exclusion of women from art production as well as from patronage of certain places like theatres, womens’ education being at a significantly lower level and girls graduating from higher education at a lower rate than boys, the persistence of dowry, and the disproportionate gendered burden of household labour. Ramiz discusses all of these issues in some depth, dedicating at least a few paragraphs to each, and, unlike today’s bourgeois electoral politician who may pay lip service to one or two of these issues to thunderous applause, he names concrete governmental and social initiatives to be taken in combating them.
In not a single one of these issues does he mention religion as an important factor. Nearly half of the speech is dedicated to direct criticisms of the party, and like Enver, he pays specific attention to the Kanun, but almost none to religion. Like in most other Albanian communist speeches, religion receives only a passing mention, which does, however, provide a more thorough, and, importantly, correct Marxist understanding of its role. He does this in the section on family custom, where the discussion is utterly inescapable:
Many of the customs, which at our time are considered barbarous and inhumane, spring from other factors, such as the problem of establishing connections and concluding alliances between clans, that of dire poverty and anxiety of parents to provide dresses for their daughters, and so on. A deep insight into customs and their origin, into their blending with religious beliefs, prejudices etc. will enable the Party organizations to undertake a more fruitful campaign to persuade people, and even the most backward, of the futility of these customs and of the necessity of doing away with them in our days.
Backward practices have their origin in the dire poverty of earlier, pre-socialist ages. They are not at this stage “evil”, they are only impoverished. These customs become encoded in religious practices, which, I would add, allows the placement of limits on them, but also allows them to long outlive the conditions which birthed them. The classical example here is Islamic polygamy, which arose in the context of a tribal war in a scorching desert, when, due to the perpetually existing state of tribal warfare resulting in the routine deaths of men in large numbers, there were more women to be cared for than men to care for them. Islamic revelation introduced many important reforms to this practice, such as capping the limit at four, giving all women the right to divorce, giving girls the right to inheritance, etc, but polygamy outlived these conditions by many centuries, and these reforms ceased to be progressive, becoming very well decadent and an overall sore on the social fabric by the time of the conversion of the Albanians in the 17th century and certainly by the time Ramiz said this, a quarter century into socialist construction. Importantly, there is nothing special about Islam here, but also legal codes like the Albanian Kanun, Pashtunwali, and even governmental legal practices do this as well if they are not kept up to date.
Ramiz restates the formulation later on, here:
Setting up the new socialist family, in addition to founding on correct marital relations, requires also the establishment of truly equal relations between the wife, husband and other members of the family. It is a fact that in many families both in the countryside and in cities and even in certain cases, when marriages have been concluded on sound foundations, there exist and are kept intact many survivals of feudal-bourgeois practices, inherited from one generation to another, backward concepts and religious norms which have assumed the force of custom and law and which stifle and enslave the woman in the family.
In spite of their participation in production and the contribution the women render through their work, they do not yet occupy an equal post in the family, especially in the countryside. There still prevails the opinion that “man is the master of the house”, “the head of the family”, there still prevails the complete submission of the wife to the husband, the denial of her most elementary rights, which is legalized also by religion and the “Holy” scriptures.
Emphasis mine — here he does not even attribute to religion the primary role of this legalising. It is merely one of several factors, and one which receives no more attention as he spends the entire second half of the speech focusing on the backwards social attitudes and their abolition, eventually concluding:
Considering that the further emancipation of women has both its ideological and its economic, organizational and administrative aspects, the combination of the ideological work with the economic and administrative measures, giving priority to the former, is of major importance to the method of the work of the Party organizations and committees, of the organizations of the masses and state organs.
As Ramiz elaborates heavily, in 1967 the economic prerequisites to womens’ further emancipation were very much present in Albanian society by this time, necessitating a focus on ideological work, a major barrier at this point in fact being the party cadres themselves who maintained derogatory views on women.
If the closure of churches and mosques were considered an important step in this ideological work, you would never know it from this speech, or from any of Enver’s speeches, for that matter.
The correct Marxist position on religion was known. A thorough agenda for womens’ rights already existed. It is hard, then, to imagine that anyone saw that throwaway line in a speech on 6 February and got “let’s shut down the churches and mosques” from a reading of it. Whatever happened to religion in Albania in 1967, it was not prompted by a speech of Enver Hoxha’s on 6 February, let alone a “Programmatic Discourse Against Religion and Backwards Practices”, and anyone who says otherwise is lying with their whole ass. Absolutely nothing he said on that day can be construed to mean anything like that.
Another version of the story claims that a letter published in Zëri i Popullit, the PLA’s media organ, on 8 February, which was allegedly written by students of a high school in Durrës, launched the movement to close religious institutions. I’ll talk about that claim a little bit later, but for now it is enough to note that 1. I have not been able to actually find this document, despite its purported historical significance, although it could also be noted that I have not been able to find anything from any issue of Zëri i Popullit, and 2. there are numerous problems with that claim as well, which we’ll get to. For now, we need to examine what exactly the interpretive landscape was like for the speech that did take place, so that it can be established beyond certainty that that speech absolutely did not launch a movement to close religious institutions.
ii. The Address to the 4th Congress of the Democratic Front on 14 September, 1967
The 1982 edition of Enver’s address to the 4th Congess of the Democratic Front on 14 September, 1967 can also be found in the Selected Works, shortly after the 6 February speech in Volume IV. It’s notable mostly for the fact that it cuts off somewhat abruptly right before the section that talks about religion. The speech was, however, published in English in full in 1974 and, starting from where the 1982 edition cuts off, religion receives a few pages of emphasis. However, as in all of the above examples, Enver seems to be saying the exact opposite of what is commonly attributed to him.
[The Party] has always subordinated the fight against religious ideology to the struggle to free the workers from social oppression and economic exploitation. In order to attain this objective, it has not allowed the employment of administrative measures, but has set the method of persuading and educating the masses at the base of atheistic work.
[…]
“It is necessary to combat the erroneous concept that religion is only the church, the mosque, the church, the hodja, the icons, etc, and that, once these disappear, religion and its influence over the people would automatically disappear, too.[…] In spite of all the work done, we should bear in mind the recommendation of our Party that we have to do with the people’s feelings, with our men and women who, although closely linked with the Party and ardent patriots, will still keep their old customs, concepts, and religious beliefs in their conscience for a long time to come, may be even till they die. The work with them should be long, persuasive, and patient. The work of the Party and the Front with these people should be like that of a good doctor who tries his best to cure the sick, to bring him back to the joys of life. That is why no arbitrary, hasty, and unconsidered action should be allowed.”
The omission of this section of the speech from the 1982 edition is more significant to me than its actual content. Although the above is both correct and consistent with Enver’s general comments on the subject throughout his life, I believe that this section overall was “redacted”, so to speak, for the following reason. The 1982 edition of Enver Hoxha’s Selected Works was intended as a work of proper and correct Marxist-Leninist writings for a foreign audience, and I believe that this section, as well as the one following it on the international situation, which highly praises China, were not considered acceptable for it. The inclusion of these passages may have led to confusion and revisionism in the international movement, and, throughout its existence and particularly after the Sino-Albanian split three years earlier, the PLA paid a great deal of attention to the international movement. To exclude these passages was the right Marxist decision, and it was the call of either Nexhmije or someone working for her, as Nexhmije was the director of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies.
I believe the passages that caused the segment to be redacted were the following.
“The most significant feature of this movement is that it has started on the initiative of the masses themselves and is evolving and intensifying with the active participation of the masses, which, in the process of their life and struggle, are being persuaded more and more of the vanity and harm of religious beliefs.”
[…]
“[I]t is not a sporadic thing that came by itself. It is the result of great social economic transformations which have been carried out in our country’s life, of the correct line of the Party to separate church from state and school from religion, the result of the work of many years that has been accomplished by the Party, state, Democratic Front and all the social organizations to spread education and culture and to educate the masses in the spirit of atheism.
“The most significant feature of this movement is that it has started on the initiative of the masses themselves and is evolving and intensifying with the active participation of the masses”. That is significant in that it’s a huge ideological problem.
While the parallels to the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China are often overstated, it is a matter of fact that they influenced goings-on in Albania at that time. Even at the time, however, for instance in a work (maybe a journal entry? It doesn’t say) from 28 April, 1967, which is included in the Selected Works, Volume IV, Enver was saying stuff like:
Is this being done correctly, and who is leading it? It is a fact that the party is not doing this, it is not working as an organized force within certain limits, it is paralyzed, if not destroyed. […] In a word, it is not the party as a party which is leading all these activities, but Mao is leading them with a series of comrades whom it is difficult to control all over that great China where, effectively, there is no party, and where the enemy has been working intensively for tens of years. The existing anarchy cannot be combated with anarchy.
I think that the great mistake of Mao and the other comrades lies in the fact that they are not handling the «question of the party», the question of the line and the cadres of the party correctly.
[…]
[I]s there, or is there not a party which leads, sanctions, says: «This is good, or this is bad»? Such a thing has not been seen for a whole year.
This is very much corroborated by his 1979 Imperialism and the Revolution, which I maintain is the most important Marxist-Leninist text today, in which he writes:
When we saw that this Cultural Revolution was not being led by the party but was a chaotic outburst following a call issued by Mao Tsetung, this did not seem to us to be a revolutionary stand. It was Mao’s authority in China that made millions of unorganized youth, students and pupils, rise to their feet and march on Peking, on party and state committees, which they dispersed.
[…]
Thus the working class was left on the sidelines, and there were many instances when it opposed the red guards and even fought them. Our comrades, who were in China at that time, have seen with their own eyes factory workers fighting the youth. The party was disintegrated. It was liquidated, and the communists and the proletariat were totally disregarded. This was a very grave situation.
There are more dissimilarities than similarities between the GPCR and the Albanian Iconoclasm — the latter was a specific contextual action of fairly limited impact, while the GPCR was a protracted state of violence and anarchy during which the ruling order of the country was brought to the brink of collapse. But it is still a principle that revolutionary changes should stem from the party, not the students, not the army or anyone else. The closure of religious institutions was simply not an initiative of the party, did not follow procedure, and seems to not have been carried out in a communist way. Although the party gradually gained control over the iconoclasm, limiting the damage, the event overall was not a teaching moment for a global proletarian movement, and was evidently not considered one in the party’s literature. Ideologically, I believe the whole thing seems to have been considered problematic, even at the time, as it certainly is now, and that these problems have grown and become more important over time.
If any more argument is needed to support this point, there is one more letter which will settle all debate once and for all. It is one which was sent by Enver to the CC of the PLA on 27 February, which as far as I know was not translated into English until today. Since it seems to be a complete historical unknown in the English-speaking world, and because I’ve found no other ideological statements on these events that are anywhere near this concrete, I’ll quote it here at length.
First, though, we can gawk about another piece of post-communist Albanian “journalism” claiming to have unearthed it as some kind of secret document. It definitely wasn’t, it’s from the 35th volume of Enver’s Collected Works in Albanian, which anyone in socialist Albania could, and was even encouraged, to own and read. It was actually so heavily circulated that it’s not even that hard to find now. Even I have a few volumes. The modern manifestation of Enver’s post-communist personality cult, though, requires a certain etiquette for discussing these things. So everything here is like this.
Anyway, if anyone doubts the authenticity of this document, be known that it’s published here by the enemies of communism as well as in Albanian in the provided scans of Vepra 35. Back on topic:
The demolition of churches, mosques, tekkes and monasteries, of course, presents a difficulty, because one should not go into direct contradiction with that part of the people who believe. Therefore, care and tact must be taken in this regard. But many of them have broken down with the initiative of the masses without provoking any reaction, some others have fallen, some of them have been turned into warehouses or left without a hodja or a priest and practically do not work.
[…]
It is interesting that in our villages there is no resistance to these things.
[…]
[W]e as communists and atheists must also be realistic. With all our organized propaganda against religion, rites, dogmas, religious institutions and professional clergy, we must constantly keep in mind not to enter into an open war with people who believe in religion, because there will be honest people, affiliated with the Party of ardent patriots, who will keep their beliefs in their conscience even for a long time, maybe even until they die.
[…] Therefore, without slowing down for a moment the propaganda against religion, let us always keep in mind that we are dealing with the people. Unwise, exalted actions must be avoided, every action must be carefully prepared for the political field.
Many churches and mosques are being abandoned and demolished. We do not have to repair them when we have so many useful constructions to make. Some can be turned into museums, if they are valuable as such, some can be stored, not hesitated, taken, but not by force or without the approval of the people, who must be prepared spiritually and politically.
We see repeated, repeated injunctions to straight up not do these things, and that while in some cases a seizure of buildings which have fallen into disrepair, are not used, etc, is justified, this absolutely cannot be done if it is offensive to the people. It is also interesting to me that, although I don’t actually know how common this idea is in Islamist thought or what the legislative basis for it is, some Sharia schemes also take the policy of disallowing the construction of new religious institutions for pre-Islamic religious groups, but at the same time allowing their seizure in the event that they fall into disuse and disrepair. This then should not be considered a radical communist departure but in fact may very possibly be a continued Ottoman policy.
While making several arguments in favour of his atheist position and not softening them in any way, Enver is here pretty clearly advising slow work and patience with the religious people of Albania, not a strong and sudden state action. Most of his arguments are very contextual to the particular religious situation of Albania. Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam are all criticised as they existed in practice in Albania at that time. It’s a short letter, dedicated almost entirely to these topics, and it was not propaganda meant to be circulated internationally, or anything, but an internal letter to the CC of the PLA.
There’s one other very important historical note from this speech, I think, that we should acknowledge before moving on.
In these revolutionary situations we have learned that the leadership of the Bektashi clergy and that of the Muslim clergy have issued a circular to all imams and dervishes to remove their skullcaps, turbans, and robes and hand over tekkes and mosques. There is no push, no pressure, not even suggestion from the state. This is entirely an initiative of theirs. When the occasion requires, it should be explained that this is the initiative of the clergy themselves, because the enemy elements can use this against the government. Since we know these clerics, we think that, for this zeal they have shown, they have not been driven by any evil intention, because they are connected with the people and with power. Their gesture, however hasty, still serves the general interest.
This goes a long way towards explaining why some accounts only claim persecution for the Christian denominations, and in fact goes some way towards corroborating these accounts: the Sunni and Bektashi clergy self-abolished, which, whether or not this is strictly necessary for a proletarian revolution, is certainly the outcome of decades of successful atheist policy. For a Muslim, this leaves an analytical difficulty. Either
a) the clerics were correct to do this under the conditions at the time, or
b) they were not, in which case their consensus is undermined, which makes them not legitimate religious authorities.
In the latter case, this means that Albania was effectively never a Muslim-majority country at all, however this is very much contradicted by the existence of Albanians across the border in what are now Kosova and Macedonia. In these countries, Islam became very important to Albanian identity as a means of distinguishing the Albanians from their Serbian and Macedonian neighbours, both of whom are Orthodox Christians.
This is a restatement of the classical Salafi‘s Dilemma: according to the guardians of this self-proclaimed Islamic orthodoxy, the radical reforms of the Islamic world generally in the 19th and 20th centuries were necessitated by the Muslims being then mired in superstition (“shirk and bid’ah”), which unlike in Christianity are serious offenses which remove one from the fold of Islam on a theological level. Were the majority of Muslims before the 19th century mushriks and innovators or not? The salafi anarchists tend to disregard the experiences of Muslim communities before they came around, in effect pronouncing takfir on (or excommunicating) most of the Muslims of the world, including the highest and most respected Muslim authorities for the greater stretch of our history.
The only way out of accepting either a or b is to deny forthrightly that these historical events happened. But pretty much everyone agrees that they did, and as far as I know — no argument otherwise has ever arisen. only effective lies of ommission by anti-communist sources.
As Enver warned, enemy elements do weaponise this against the communists, but they do it by ignoring it, turning it into a lie of ommission as they harp on and on about “religious persecution”.
This is not to say, however, that overzealous, ultraleft tendencies did not exist in socialist Albania. An “unearthed secret communist document” from 1965 seems to have been divinely revealed to the same news agency we just got finished making fun of, and it seems, according to them, that there was a case of an anonymous villager who wrote to Enver Hoxha “hoping that the chief leader would intervene with his absolute authority and stop it”. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
I haven’t been able to independently verify the existence of this letter, but there are several reasons I have chosen to accept it as a historical source. First, the complete fabrication of a communist document like this isn’t something I know to happen here in Albania, the post-communist cultural zeitgeist of which seems to be more than content with over-the-top hyperbole and egregious lies of ommission which together present more than can be reasonably unpacked in a single sitting about materials which, however, I have consistently observed to be basically real. Second, the series of letters does not actually back up the claim that the journalist makes of it or the story they want to tell, which is also stylistically ordinary in post-communist Albanian “literature”, so if they were going to fabricate something I feel like they could fabricate something that actually does that.
Third, It is also worth noting that this letter came from Shkodra, which is a state in the northern mountain range about which, remember, Enver said “our Party in the North and our scholars of social theory in general have not turned their attention as they should to the social reality and its development in these regions.” In other words, the fact that this was known about the Party in the North has been independently verified.
The letter, as reported by memorie.al, translated by Google, and edited by me, mostly for grammar and length, but also with some input from an acquaintance of mine who is a native speaker of Albanian, is as follows:
In this letter I am talking about some inappropriate measures that are being taken by the Party Committee.
The enemy and in the first place the Clergy have waged a great war and propaganda against our Party, saying that the communists did not believe in God, destroyed churches and mosques, etc. But at that time their thesis was strongly opposed, moreover measures were taken against those communists who appeared as atheists. What’s happening today?
Unfortunately, today the words of the Clergy are being confirmed, because in fact in our city the church and the mosque have been demolished and some have been turned into state warehouses and what has irritated the people of Shkodra the most is the leadership of the Party Committee of our city with at the head Sula Baholli, who has developed a personality cult, proclaiming that what he says must be done, or else anyone can go to hell.
He has reached the culmination point in my opinion, in religious matters, he today seeks to emerge as a new reformer against religion, using some inappropriate forms and methods of propaganda, which, however, I am convinced that you never commanded him to do.
Here’s what this outstanding personality did: he ordered special forms to be filled out by Party secretaries in the work centers at the following points:
• Who keeps the icons in the house, and will they will keep them or remove them?
• Will any deaths in the family will be buried by a priest or imam?
• Which of the employees or family members celebrates religious holidays like Eid or other holidays?
• Who fasts Ramadan, and who will force their mothers and fathers to stop fasting as well?
• He ordered school principals to ask the child up to the 9th grade if they are circumcised and if they will be circumcised.
• He forced the employees of the state apparatus to go through the neighborhoods and go home to ask them if we were fasting and to give us a glass of water.
• He appointed Muhamet Lahi, who is the President of the Court, to go to the door of the mosque and take the names of those people who go to the mosque.
• He has stopped the ringing of bells not only for religious holidays, but also for timekeeping, which is just ignorant.
Another letter is as follows:
Dear Comrade Enver Hoxha
I wish health for you and the Party. I am old and uneducated, I am a Catholic believer. The army destroyed our church in the village of Gajtan, in the Guri i Zi (Albanian for “Black Stone”) municipality. […] Another problem is that we have been ordered to go to work in the cooperative, without a break for Easter, to earn our bread.
Please send a man to see our condition.
With honors and respect to the Government,
Guri i Zi, Shkodër
The article goes on to quote a response by the District Party Committee in which it is established that, with the permission of the local Bishop, the army entered the village and occupied the church for some time until these matters could be fixed, and the letter also clarifies that
On the issue of going to work on Sundays and religious festivals, this has been voluntarily requested by the cooperatives taking into account the needs of working in the cooperative and it is not true that administrative measures have been taken on this issue.
So while these issues do seem to have existed, the people were aware that overall the party was on their side and this was the doing of a rogue official by the name of Sula Baholli, and a study into who he is and what became of him, if possible, might help clarify these matters further. It can also be noted that this all occurred in 1965, two years before the February 6 speech.
Until now, the most comprehensive English-language history of these events is one which was written by Norberto Steinmeyr, an important member of the UK-based Albanian Society, an important anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist organisation which had access to Albanian documents and could translate them. Being a comprehensive history, this document is quite long, but it puts forward the thesis that the closure of religious institutions was carried out because the Politburo was majority composed of spies and traitors. This would be big if true because it would undermine the precedent of everything accomplished by the party. I have to refute this thesis on the following grounds:
1. It has not been demonstrated that Ramiz Alia was either a spy or a traitor in foreign employ the way that figures like Balluku or Shehu were, although he did embrace revisionism later in his life in response to quite tumultuous political circumstances, this majority cannot be proven unless it is actually proven that he was at this time a spy. If Ramiz was part of a conspiracy to close all the churches to make communism look bad, it is not reflected in his comments at the time on this subject — imagine the damage he could have done by saying something like “and finally, this vital and most important Marxist-Leninist tenet has been brought to its natural and inevitable conclusion, shining the way for all of the countries of the world”. In any case, there are other names on the list who I don’t know about as well, and many of those named as spies by Steinmeyr were, according to Steinmeyr, only candidate, not full, members of the Politburo at this time.
2. As has been conclusively shown, the initiative simply did not come from the party, making it moot even if everyone in the party was a traitor.
3. It was not actually a big deal at the time when it happened — maybe to a Brit, but not an Albanian. As noted, there was practically no resistance in the country to the closure movement, and it was not at the time considered outlandish internationally either. If it was an act of sabotage, it was a remarkably inconsequential one.
It is really quite a serious error which both dramatically misunderstands the events as they unfolded and completely undermines the party and its history. For this reason I would encourage the writings of the Albanian Society and its leaders to be read critically, because although their work as historians is quite important, their perspective is one that very seriously undermines the PLA and its revolutionary experience, leaving a large crack for revisionism to seep in through. There are other issues with the document as well, which are problematic from a Marxist standpoint, but are not why we are here.
As a historical piece, though, it’s very important, especially because it extensively quotes sources which I for one at least do not have access to. Citing its sources for all fact claims, it says:
On 14 May 1966 the youth organisation of the village of Xibrake, in Elbasan district, closed the village mosque. On the following day the youth organisation of village of Mynqan (Cërrik district) did the same. On 10 June the youth of the village of Theth (Dukagjin district) turned the local church into a house of culture. Such actions occurred sporadically during the remainder of 1966.
Together with the above report from Shkodra in 1965, we get a fuller picture that this kind of action was becoming an issue throughout Albania for at least two years before 1967, coming from rogue elements in the party and the students, but not the party itself. Steinmeyr also gives us the only independent corroboration I’ve found in any source that:
On 8 February 1967 the organ of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, Zëri i Popullit (The People’s Voice) carried on its front page a report headlined:
“Revolutionary Initiative of the Pupils and Teachers of the Naim Frashëri School at Durrës: With the Sharp Sword of the Ideology of the Party Against Religious Ideology, Prejudices, Superstitions, and Backward Customs.”
Zeri i Popullit, 8 February 1967, p. 1The report described how the pupils and teachers of this school had carried out an action under the leadership of:
“the Party Committee of Durrës district”, against
“overt manifestations of religious ideology”, and against:
“an attitude of indifference” towards these manifestations.”
Zëri i Popullit, 8 February 1967, p. 2).The action had consisted of the formation of discussion groups on the falsity and social harmfulness of religion, the putting up of posters, slogans and wall-newspapers directed against religion, the creation of a special corner of the school library devoted to atheist literature, etc. The pupils and teachers had also carried the campaign outside the school into their families, in consequence of which “icon-cases were being turned by the families themselves into first-aid boxes”. The campaign was carried into the streets, too. A large-character poster (a term derived from the Chinese “cultural revolution” which was then proceeding) was placed in the shop of a local baker alleged to be selling spells for the cure of mumps (Zëri i Popullit, 8 February 1967, p. 2).
Apparently, the Albanian Society had access to this letter, and has translated only these small excerpts. This is the only real reason I have to believe that this letter actually exists, although its content and impact remains, as far as I am concerned, an open historical question. It feels prima facie weird to me that a letter published by high school students would prompt a nationwide movement to close religious institutions. Even considering the prestige that would be granted by mass education being quite new in Albania at this time, and these being the most educated generation of students in Albania up to that point, it just seems like a little much to put on some kids, especially when we are aware that these tensions between religion and the people of Albania already existed. As well, the only instance of public shaming in at least these excerpts has nothing to do with religion, but simply a quack superstition peddling fake medicine, something which is illegal in all civilised countries, and so any campaign of public shaming of something like praying in a church, as is commonly alleged to have been common in 1967 and thereafter, is not really justified by the letter, at least the parts of it I have access to.
In any case, another observation that Steinmeyr makes is that the letter itself says that it had been worked on for several days by the time of publication, meaning that it is impossible for it to have been written in response to the 6th February speech when we consider that it was probably finished, at the very latest, by the night of 7th February for publication the next day.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that the impact of this letter, much like the impact of the 6th February speech, may have been a myth that the Party furthered to help pull the events under the control of the party, which is a correct Marxist-Leninist response to a problematic situation like this one. By taking control of the movement, it was prevented from becoming an anarchic GPCR situation and causing further problems, and excesses could be prevented.
The conclusions that can be made now, though, are:
- The movement to close religious institutions did not stem from the central leadership of the party, period,
- It was not initiated by a speech of Enver Hoxha’s on 6 February,
- Enver Hoxha was in fact very cautious towards the movement, and therefore
- the Albanian Iconoclasm does not reflect proper Marxist-Leninist theory and practice, but is only a thing that happened during the rule of a communist party,
- its being brought under the control of the party, however, does,
- the iconoclasm itself reflected the conditions in Albania, and is not an all-purpose plan of action for every socialist state, nor was it ever claimed to be so by the Albanian leadership,
- all of this was known and considered to be true by the party leadership of the time, and into the future.
Not eliminated from consideration is that there was an espionage or sabotage element at play in this movement, and in that capacity I particularly suspect Sula Baholli of the leadership in Shkodra, as well as, depending on the contents of that latter and the other actions of the students and teachers, the Party Committee in Durrës. This remains an open historical question. Other questions include what, specifically, was outlawed, when this happened, how this happened, why, what the response of the people was, and to what extent this was actually implemented and enforced, and by whom, as well as what questions arose during all of this. These are all details which are vitally important, and should not be left to hyperbolic guessing games of post-communist kids telling tall tales and vague, inconclusive Amnesty International reports that tell you straight up that they don’t know anything. We should have specifics, if we’re going to go deeper on this, which is something I would support.
Something that should be noted is that even today, Albanians have a generally positive opinion of the closure of religious institutions that happened during the socialist period. This is one of the few things that few people will say anything against. If you say Enver Hoxha lowered the death rate, some will say he was contributing to overcrowding. If you say he taught the people to read, they will say it was only so they could understand propaganda (derogatory). But on religion, even many of those who maintain that level of anti-communist virulence will not hear a second word.
On the national context, Enver himself said in 1967, in an article quoted by Steinmeyr, one I believe is probably not translated elsewhere:
Before the liberation of our country the organisation of various religions in Albania, except for the Catholic one, was almost non-existent. The activity of the institutions of Muslim worship was almost formal, the Orthodox one was limited only to liturgical rites, whereas the Catholic Church strove to develop Catholicism as an ideology and to disseminate it, but it failed to do what it did in Italy, France and other countries. The Muslim and Orthodox clergy were quite unversed in religious matters whereas, unlike them, the clergy of the Catholic Church was well trained.
and I would also recommend a thorough reading of his short letter on the 27th which I quoted extensively above and goes into considerable detail on this.
The global context should also be kept in mind. It’s not only Albania, and not even just the “eastern bloc” where atheist ideas were on the up-and-up and considered more scientifically enlightened. Whether they actually are or not, I personally don’t think so for reasons I’ll elaborate on at another time, but neither Enver Hoxha, nor the PLA represented a set of ideas that were outlandish and foreign to the world by the standards of the late 1960’s. Even in countries like America there’s a number of people who if you ask them if religion has a good impact on society or not, they’ll say no. It’s common in western Europe. It’s common in India and Turkey and everywhere else I’ve lived.
Another thing that’s remarkable is that for a Muslim-majority country in the 20th century, Albania was actually extremely non-violent. It is not just Albania where the clergy were at a low level of religious development, but most of the Islamic world. Attempts to remedy this in many Muslim countries in the 19th and 20th centuries entailed a great deal of religious violence, over the course of which Sufism was wiped out from these countries almost entirely, and this violence is still ongoing today in much of the world, in places like Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iraq, and so forth. Albania is one of the only modern countries where Sufis have any visible presence at all. The Bektashis, who it should be remembered left Turkey because of Mustafa Kemal’s reforms, are alive and well in Albania today, having, like their Sunni brothers, supported the socialist government.
The experience of Albania, then, is clearly exemplary for a 20th century Muslim-majority country in that even in the chaotic circumstances of the 20th century, religious violence was completely prevented. While I do maintain that there’s hope for us, the Muslim world is a violent mess right now, and there is no serious intellectual who sees an imminent end in sight to that. Due to the rule of a Communist Party, Albania became a country where none of it ever happened, and it’s hard to argue that it’s not a better country for it.
Overall, I believe that the problems this raised are more apparent to foreigners now than they were to the Albanians then. There is no imminent end in sight to violence in the Muslim world, because the Muslim world is a part of the capitalist world, and capitalism requires constant warfare. A movement to abolish war in the Islamic world has the same endgame as a movement to do that anywhere else, which is to abolish capitalism and establish a state of the proletariat, through which these contradictions can be resolved. Yet the peoples of the most war-torn regions on the planet have been poisoned against Marxism-Leninism, and they have been led to believe that it is an ideology which disrespects the people and their religion. It is the fault of the historians, because we have not, as Enver told us to, explained that this was the initiative of the clergy themselves, the people themselves, and we have not made it known the deep respect which the party overall showed towards people, however irreconcilable it considered their religious convictions to be with the party’s ideology.
The reactionary nature of religious authorities today is proven in the role they have played in stoking anticommunist, and generally anti-scientific, fervour. Saudi Arabia, for instance, which publishes most Qur’an translations in the world, and which flooded Albania with translations shortly after the collapse, has strict guidelines on what is acceptable in a translation, and forbids for instance the use of what it calls “modern scientific terminology”. Obviously, it is problematic for an arch-reactionary oil monarchy in American employ to circulate propaganda in sovereign countries under any circumstances, especially if they are presenting this propaganda as the literal word of God — it can’t be condoned from a sincere Muslim perspective, either.
But they have been aided in doing so by the lack of proper Marxist-Leninist historicisation, and in the ultra-left, anti-religious tendencies espoused by many “Marxists” that communism means atheism, that no religious person has any role to play in building a socialist country, that decontextualised religious debate is in any way conducive to building socialism, etc. Therefore, the countries with the most revolutionary peoples, which are also the most war-torn countries on the planet, whose greatest asset historically has been the religious fervour which has allowed them to march into war against imperialism making takbir and reciting the shahada, remain mired in the truest, darkest anti-communist idealism, in which it is the obvious goal of their deadly enemies to keep them. The communists themselves have therefore dismissed them as potential agents of revolution because they have accepted the anti-working class position that reaction is when poor people have bad opinions, and not the force which acts upon said poor people to make them have bad opinions. The Muslims therefore remain very well aware that the “communists” hold them in very low regard, and wish to take away from them their strongest weapon because the “communists” think they’re smarter than they are. It is true that it is the aim of a revolutionary party to educate the people. But if the party is not doing that then it is not a party at all and the people are right to avoid it. It is a problem, though, for the revolutionary people, prepared like few others to shed blood in battle against imperialism, to walk away thinking that’s what a Marxist is, because no matter how many brave working mens’ lives you sacrifice towards a solution, none will be arrived at without a proper Marxist-Leninist understanding. Nobody other than Marxist-Leninists offers a serious way out of eternal war for the Muslim people of these regions. Nobody else even claims to.
This failure of the “communists” has left a great many Muslims to believe that liberal states like Turkey are their friend and ally while socialist Albania is their enemy. Enver Hoxha never took this attitude, and he always made it clear that, despite the atheist convictions of the Albanians, he was on the side of the revolutionary peoples of the Islamic world in their struggles against the United States, Israel, the revisionist Soviet Union, and anyone else who would take from them their national sovereignty and dignity. He gave particular attention to the issues of this region of the planet, and he was their truest supporter and friend even though he considered them, fairly I think, to be in a state of ideological confusion in which, however, they were not at all unique. As he wrote in Imperialism and the Revolution:
At no other time have there been so many variants of bourgeois theories, right, middle or “left” decked out in every kind of secular and religious, classical and modern, openly anti-communist and allegedly communist and Marxist cloaks. At no other time has such moral corruption, such a degenerate way of life, or such great spiritual depression been witnessed. The bourgeois and revisionist theories, built up with so much effort and trumpeted so boastfully as guides to salvation from the evils of the old society., such as the theories of the “final stabilization of capitalism”, “people’s capitalism,”, “the consumer society” “post-industrial society”, “averting crises”, “the technical-scientific revolution”, Khrushchvite “peaceful coexistence”, “a world without armies, weapons and wars”, “socialism with a human face”, etc., etc., have now been shaken to their foundations.
As always, religion is in no way unique or particularly reactionary and although there is religious violence in the world and, fair to say I think, an above-average amount overall in the Muslim world, it is neither the only violent thing nor even by a long shot the most violent thing acting upon the exploited people of the world. The reactionary, bourgeois over-emphasis on “religious violence” as opposed to other forms of violence has its origins in the fascist “global war on terror”, not in Marxism-Leninism. Its primary issue from a Marxist perspective right now is that practically existing religious ideologies, having come to development in a “marketplace of ideas”, are based on an idea of ideological pluralism which is incompatible with Marxism-Leninism, and in this sense it is no different from any other bourgeois theory, say “liberalism”, “democracy”, “end of history”, the “war on terror”, “degrowth”, “frugal innovation”, “acche din”, “leftism”, or any of the others listed by Enver in the paragraph above. While Albania knew feudal religion, but had prevented the growth of bourgeois religion, most religion existing today is in fact bourgeois, with centres in India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States, etc, and does not differ significantly in its mode of proliferation from the propaganda of these countries generally except in that each one competes for the attention and identification of the people like brands of soda and floor cleaner — a spiritually impoverished mode of religiosity, problematic not just from a Marxist perspective but also from a spiritual one.
A Marxist re-evaluation of religion overall is something I will argue is necessary. However, it is outside of the scope of this paper, the main purpose of which has been to set the historical record straight on the Albanian Iconoclasm — what was party, what was not, what was correct, what was not, how we are to relate and learn from these events as we groom ourselves for political power, and lastly why it did not receive a greater emphasis in Albanian party literature but suddenly became very important in 1992 as soon as the conflict of interest presented itself for various groups of foreign missionaries to inject themselves into the country like a poison and explain to the people what they were doing there, leading the people to believe it was the dictatorship which banished them, rather than the dictatorship that kept them open as long as they were.
It is, remember, the job of religious authorities to get people to believe goofy and ahistorical things. Sometimes, this power can be used for good — for instance, although the ideological content can be and often is problematic, and the conclusions drawn therefrom even moreso, it is good to keep alive the memory of the people to historical events like genocides. But under a market system when a religion must endear itself to a bourgeois dictatorship, it is also very common for a religious body to manufacture the past memory of an offensive event in ways which become obscuring of historical fact, making it wrong and even offensive to respond to them in a scientific, communist way. This is why it’s important for a historian to be guided by a correct ideology, and not merely to recite facts and figures and dates by rote. It should not be left to the free market whether Enver Hoxha was a great legendary communist leader or a conniving scumbag holding on to power at all costs. Nor should it be a free market concern whether genocides are carried out through the indifference of individuals or through western capitalist governments refusing to enter into a Peace Front with the Soviet Union because they hope that Hitler will destroy socialism as well, because no capitalist country is concerned with the protection of any ethnic or religious group, but rather with the eternal suppression and enslavement of the working class, its history, and its movements.
The world as we understand it is a house of lies, but it can and should be understood through proper scientific Marxist historical method. There is no other intellectual need which is so great, and that is why history should be discussed seriously and carefully, not through memes and social media debates and polemic.
Papers like this are a considerable expenditure of time and effort. It’s not uncommon for me to be cooped up in my house for a week or two or more reading speech after speech, paper after paper, and then sitting down to write for a straight week or more. Writing papers like this is a highly skilled affair, which I am only able to do because of long-term subscriptions on Patreon and one-time donations on ko-fi. If you think the things I do and say are at all important, I would really encourage looking into those options. In particular, I’m in the middle of a really important donation drive to help resolve some of my immigration and residency issues, and tumblr’s actually e-mailed me to threaten me with a ban if I keep spamming people, so please help me move on from that “business model” with a subscription or donation.
¹ I looked into this after discovering the 1972 original of the other speech, and it turns out that the English edition does omit a short passage here, which was present in the original Albanian and does briefly mention icons. It is not the point of the thing, though, it’s just one of several examples of communist misconduct, and it’s clearly a pretty mild one in the list. The entire passage is as follows, having translated it myself via google and touched it up, as usual, for grammar:
Revolutionizing the party means revolutionizing the communists. They must be soldiers, tough as steel, politically clear, courageous, kindly, straightforward and sincere and, when need be, severe as well. They must destroy everything that is bad and support, organize the new and progressive and fight in the forefront for it.
If what I am saying seems like vague principles, then I will say it more concretely. Let me start with the simplest.
How can one be called a communist who walks six times a day past the dung that has filled the stairs of his apartment and does not take the trouble to eliminate such a situation and educate all the inhabitants of the building?
How can a communist be called a revolutionary who participates in the meetings of the neighborhood, the Front or the professional unions only when he is called, even this time he tries to stall it, or if he does speak, there he ties his hands and says that he has no responsibility to speak to the party or fight to put into practice what others say?
How can the party-based organization of the Party in Durrës be called the vanguard and how can the employee of this port be called a revolutionary who works well during the day, is distinguished, even praised, and in the evening at home makes church icons and sells in the morning to believers privately?
I’m going even further. How can the basic organization of the Party be in a revolutionary position in the mountain village of Zgjan in the locality of Hysgjokaj, in the district of Lushnja, where almost all girls from 13–14 years old and below are engaged and some are informally married by their parents illegally?
I’m going even further than that. How can the whole organization of the Party of Lezha district be revolutionary, where the vile habit of selling girls for marriage has been tacitly made law?
The entire party and country ought to rise to eradicate the backward customs and break the neck of anyone who violates the sacred law of the Party in defence of the rights of women and girls. These are moral and political problems of great importance.
I didn’t think it was very important to put this in the article itself, because it’s thematically very much in keeping with everything else I spend the whole article talking about and listing examples of — religion is problematic, but not the biggest problem by a wide margin, etc — but for the record, there you go. It’s still not a speech about religion by any stretch, and while the segment on womens’ rights is lengthened slightly by this, it is still only a preamble to a sixty page discussion on bureaucratic procedure.
There is still the possibility of this omission being for ideological reasons, but truthfully, I suspect that it was a mix of length and the cultural specificities of the provided examples making the passage less relevant to an international audience. The dung thing — I don’t even know what that’s about.
Anyway, there you go.
