Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania

By Blendi Fevziu, I.B. Tauris, 312 pages, $45

In 1973, when Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship was at its peak, I slipped into Europe’s most isolated country masquerading as a university lecturer. Journalists were routinely denied visas and subterfuge had to be employed to get across the border. One of the more memorable experiences of our two-week bus tour was a visit to an open-air cinema in the port city of Durrës. The main feature was a crackly version of “Henry V”, starring Laurence Olivier, preceded by a short comedy turn by Norman Wisdom.

With his cloth cap at a jaunty angle, censors for the Party of Labour of Albania assumed he exemplified the uplifting struggles of a typical English working-class lad. The evening’s high point was the newsreel. It showed the opening ceremony of a Congress of the Union of Albanian Women. This consisted of a long line of women, queuing to be greeted by Hoxha. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a light-grey double-breasted suit, he embraced each delegate with prolonged gusto. The scene seemed to combine a Mafia don’s behaviour with medieval droit de seigneur, quite unlike the home life of the puritanical men running other communist states in Europe at the time.

The newsreel offers only the most fleeting insight into Albanian political life. To discover what was really going on in ruling party circles under Hoxha’s sway you must turn to Blendi Fevziu’s well-researched biography. Whether or not he was a philanderer, it provides copious ammunition to prove Hoxha was a tyrant.

For three decades after Stalin died, during an era when unpredictable terror had given way in the Soviet Union to more survivable repression, Hoxha’s Albania continued the worst practices of an autocracy — purges, torture, abject confessions and executions. They affected old comrades in the politburo far more than ordinary citizens. Of the six co-founder members of the party, only one died at home in bed. The rest were killed or jailed.

Fevziu bases his catalogue of horror on the now open party archives as well as interviews with sons, daughters and spouses of Hoxha’s victims conducted on Albanian TV or by himself. One of the grimmest cases is that of Mehmet Shehu, who served for many years as prime minister until he shot himself in 1981 on the eve of a Politburo meeting where he was to be accused. His crime? He had not stopped his son getting engaged to the daughter of a close relative of a US-based anti-communist who regularly denounced Hoxha on Western TV. Shehu’s suicide note to “Comrade Enver” was found in 2003: “You can call me whatever you want, I cannot stop you! But I am giving my life for the party. My last wish is: protect the party and socialism ...”. The marriage was blocked, though Fevziu hints that policy disagreements might have been the true cause of the two men’s split.

In spite of his flamboyance, Hoxha, a fan of Agatha Christie, loved spending time alone with books. He had a huge library and regularly bought books from catalogues sent by French publishers. The dictator’s family once alerted his security people to his “disappearance”; they found him in the library in the small hours of the morning with a book in hand and a blanket round his shoulders. He also wrote prolifically, keeping a diary and writing or dictating more than 60 volumes of memoirs, and had a complex relationship with the internationally renowned novelist, Ismail Kadare, who continued to live in the country under his rule. In her memoirs, Hoxha’s wife says he often lost his temper with Kadare’s writing but came to his defence at critical times.

Outside Albania, Hoxha was admired by some Western radicals for denouncing every kind of imperialism, from Yugoslav to Soviet to Chinese, as well as the US kind. The son of an imam, he was also praised in some quarters for closing all mosques and churches, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. His chutzpah in breaking with powerful allies became legendary. In March 1948 his politburo approved a union between Albania and Yugoslavia, but then the dictator got wind of plans for the Yugoslavs to replace him with a colleague, Koçi Xoxe. When Stalin denounced Yugoslavia a few weeks later for trying to set up a regional power-house linking Albania, Bulgaria and Greece, the Albanian politburo abandoned the union and lambasted Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito. All Yugoslav experts were expelled. Xoxe was executed.

Twelve years later it was Moscow’s turn. Hoxha had repeated Khrushchev’s condemnation of the dictator’s crimes and personality cult in 1956 but did not like the new Soviet leader’s rapprochement with Tito. In 1960, at a meeting of communist parties in Moscow, Hoxha sided with the Chinese. Later, in 1978, he broke with Beijing too, in protest at Deng Xiaoping’s “revisionism” and the restoration of relations with the US.

Fevziu handles these issues well, but on internal Albanian policy debates and Hoxha’s activities during the Second World War he is sadly one-dimensional. His extreme antipathy to Hoxha as a person, and to communists in general, narrows his writing to invective. There is nothing here about Albania’s socioeconomic progress in the first 15 years of communist rule and the country’s transformation from a feudal, clan-based dictatorship into a modern state with the draining of the coastal marshlands, the eradication of malaria, the successful drive against illiteracy, the expansion of health services and the development of the resource extractive industries, albeit with a semi-militarised labour force.

The book barely mentions the destruction caused first by the Italian and then the German occupation which the postwar government inherited. Its handling of the rivalry between communists and supporters of the Balli Kombëtar (National Union) in running wartime resistance is tendentious. Fevziu claims Hoxha held his partisans back so that the Germans would concentrate on killing anti-communist nationalists.

Albanian historiography is a thin field but the weight of opinion, including accounts by Reginald Hibbert, later an eminent diplomat, who was a wartime British liaison officer with the resistance in Albania, supports the opposite line. Many “nationalists” collaborated with the Germans, and it was the communist partisans who conducted most fighting — which is why they were the group that took control of the country on liberation. Hoxha was not the bravest or most efficient of the partisans and it was thanks to luck as well as guile that he emerged as leader. But his popularity was genuine and widespread, at least for a time.

–Guardian News & Media Ltd