On Enver Hoxha's Birthday: From the War Against Fascism to Today's Albania

From Darkness to Light, from Light to Plunder: A People's Hundred-Year Class Account

October 16, 2026 at 01:11 PM97 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

On Enver Hoxha's Birthday: From the War Against Fascism to Today's Albania

16 October 2026 — the 118th anniversary of Enver Hoxha's birth

SUMMARY

This piece looks at Enver Hoxha, born on 16 October 1908 in Gjirokastër, through the eyes of the Marxist-Leninist line that claims his struggle against revisionism; but it puts first that line's duty to be honest with itself and with the reader. In short, this is what we say:

The anti-fascist war: Albania, occupied by Italian fascism in 1939 and, after 1943, by Nazi Germany, liberated itself by its own strength on 29 November 1944, under the National Liberation Movement led by Hoxha. It is one of the rare European countries to be liberated without the Red Army entering the country. Albania is also the only European country to emerge from the war with a larger Jewish population than before the war. That honour belongs first to the Albanian people (the besa tradition), not to Hoxha; but it cannot be thought apart from the climate the resistance created.
Socialist construction — from darkness to light: In 1946 about 85 per cent of the population could not read or write, the country had not a single university or a standard-gauge railway, and malaria was the fate of the plains. In forty years Albania:
- in effect wiped out illiteracy; raised the number of pupils from 60,000 in 1939 to more than 750,000 in 1987; founded its first university in 1957;
- cut the population per doctor from 8,154 (1950) to 577 (1987), made health care free, defeated malaria (the last indigenous case in 1966), and raised average life expectancy to 71.8 years in 1990;
- in 1970 brought electricity to the most remote mountain village, and, with the hydroelectric plants it built on the Drin, came to export electricity to its neighbours;
- built an economy without foreign debt, without income tax, and officially without unemployment; limited by law the wage gap between worker and manager to 1 to 1.7, and brought rent down to 2 per cent of income;
- gave women six months of paid maternity leave; women reached 47 per cent of those in work, half of university students, and 30 per cent of members of parliament; it almost extinguished the blood feud;
- with the 1972 Orthography Congress it established a common written language embracing all Albanians, and by protecting Gjirokastër and Berat as museum cities it saved what is today a UNESCO heritage;
- by raising its population from 1.1 million to 3.2 million it became Europe's youngest country.
Some of the figures are official statistics, but independent sources confirm the direction and the scale. The value of these gains was understood better when they were plundered after 1991.
The exposure of revisionism: Hoxha broke with the great powers three times: with Tito in 1948, with Khrushchev in 1960–61, and with China in 1978. His speech at the 1960 Moscow meeting is the emblem of a small party's outspoken stand against Soviet revisionism. The Marxist-Leninist tradition on this line defines itself largely through this ideological struggle.
The shadows — and we do not hide them: The same period is also the period of the political police, the Sigurimi; of camps such as Spaç, Burrel and Tepelena; of 5,500–6,000 political executions according to Albanian institutions; of 30–34 thousand political prisoners; of tens of thousands of internal exiles; of the party repeatedly purging its own cadres; of the banning of religion in 1967; of about a thousand citizens killed at the border; and of the cult of the person. These are not "enemy propaganda"; they happened. At each heading the piece also relays the defences given in Hoxha's own texts and by Marxist-Leninist writers who defend this line. Part of those defences rests on fact: the CIA and MI6 really did infiltrate agents into the country in 1949–53, Greece lifted the state of war only in 1987, Yugoslavia's plan of annexation was real, and in 1966 the wage gap was reduced to 2.5 to 1. But the defences cannot explain the children who died at Tepelena, the secret mass graves, the executions for "espionage" without evidence, or the breach of Hoxha's own principle of "without violence, with the people's consent".
Why did it fall? The founding declaration published in Quito in 1994 by the parties and organisations on the Albanian line, and their later documents, tie the fall largely to revisionism, under way since 1956, taking power under Ramiz Alia after Hoxha's death, and to imperialist pressure: socialism was not defeated, it was betrayed. But the same declaration also contains a self-criticism that is usually missed: "the underestimation of the internal contradictions of socialist society", "the isolation of the communist party from the workers and the masses", and "the absence of theoretical development". After relaying this line's documents, the piece compares the other explanations as well (anti-revisionists critical of Hoxha, the state-capitalism thesis, the liberal narrative, Lea Ypi). Our proposal is to apply the declaration's own self-criticism to Albania. What brought the system down in 1990–91 was not only a betrayal from above, but a discontent from below: students pulled down Hoxha's statue, miners went on hunger strike, independent unions brought down the government with a general strike. There were also people who took to the streets to defend the system, but they remained a minority; the decisive sections of the working class did not defend the state that was said to have been founded in their name. The reasons are the absence of workers' democracy, rule based on fear, the handling of internal contradictions by purge rather than by debate, and the poverty that autarky produced.
Capitalist restoration: After 1991 Albania was dragged into "shock therapy", the collapse of industry, the pyramid-company disaster of 1997 that robbed about two-thirds of the population, and civil war, a narco-economy, human trafficking, and one of history's largest waves of emigration. Between 1990 and 2025 a net 1.8 million people left the country; between 2011 and 2023 the population fell by 429,000, to 2.4 million. Today the average gross wage is around 90,000 lek, and about half of those in work take home less than 60,000 lek.
Today's streets: Since November 2025 Albania has been shaken by protests. First the Molotov demonstrations of the right-wing opposition (Berisha's Democratic Party); then, beginning in May 2026 against a luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner, the Flamingo Revolution, which brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets shouting "Rama to prison, Berisha to prison"; the strikes of oil and mine workers; and this week (13–15 October 2026) the student uprising in which the Ministry of Education was set on fire. The irony of history: in July protesters pulled down Rama's bust; the agencies likened it to the Hoxha statue pulled down in 1991.
Conclusion: What is to be taken from Hoxha's legacy is anti-fascist resolve, the refusal to bow to imperialism and to the tutelage of the great powers, ideological clarity, and the will to develop. What is to be left behind is the practice that treats the working class as an object rather than a subject, that rules by fear, and that equates criticism with betrayal. Albania's youth today is drawing up, in the street, the balance sheet of thirty-five years of capitalism; but an anger that is unorganised, without a programme and without class consciousness ends either in a change of hands inside the order, or in capture by the right. What falls to us is to draw the lesson of both the past and the present with the same honesty.

Dear young comrades,

Today is 16 October. Enver Hoxha's birthday. Some of the Marxist-Leninist parties that come from the Albanian line will publish a short memorial text today, and will salute Hoxha's "unyielding struggle against revisionism". This piece is also written from inside that tradition. But with a difference: I will not draw you a portrait of a saint.

Why? Because your generation reaches information far more easily than mine. When you search for "Enver Hoxha", the first things you meet will be photographs of the Spaç camp, 173,000 bunkers, the ban on religion, and the headlines of "Europe's most closed dictatorship". If we tell you only a story of heroism, the day you see those photographs your trust in us, and your trust in socialism, will be shaken. It is better that you hear the truth from us than from the enemy.

The saying Marx loved was this: De omnibus dubitandum — doubt everything. Lenin said that a party which openly admits its mistake, analyses its causes and looks for the way to correct it is a serious party. This piece has been written in an attempt at that seriousness. We will speak first of Hoxha's contributions to the world, then of the shadows, then of why the system fell, and at the end of today's Albania.

1. From Gjirokastër to Korçë: A Teacher's Journey

Enver Hoxha was born on 16 October 1908 in the stone city of Gjirokastër, in southern Albania, into the family of a cloth merchant of middling means. He studied at the French lycée in Korçë; in 1930 he went on a scholarship to France, to Montpellier. When the scholarship was cut he moved to Paris; there he met the milieu of the French Communist Party, and L'Humanité. For a time he worked at the Albanian consulate in Brussels, and in 1936 he returned to his country and taught at the lycée in Korçë.

On 7 April 1939 Mussolini's Italy occupied Albania. Hoxha was dismissed from teaching because he refused to join the party organisation of the fascist administration. In Tirana he opened a small tobacco shop called "Flora". This shop soon became the meeting place of the scattered communist groups.

I care about this detail, young comrades: Hoxha did not come from a military academy, from an aristocratic family, or from a party bureaucracy. He was a teacher. The occupation carried him from a shop counter to the centre of the resistance.

2. The War Against Fascism (1939–1944)

2.1. From scattered groups to a party

Before the occupation the communist movement in Albania consisted of small groups quarrelling with one another, such as those of Korçë, Shkodër and the "Youth". On 8 November 1941 these groups united and founded the Communist Party of Albania; Hoxha was elected provisional secretary. To be honest: in this unification the representatives sent by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Miladin Popović and Dušan Mugoša) played a decisive role. Albanian official historiography later diminished this role; we will not diminish it.

2.2. The National Liberation Front and the army

The Peza Conference, which met on 16 September 1942, founded the National Liberation Movement, uniting different political tendencies in a single front against fascism. The communists were the organising core of this front. On 10 July 1943, in the village of Labinot Mal near Elbasan, the General Headquarters of the National Liberation Army was established. Keep the name of this village in mind; towards the end of the piece we will return to it.

When Italy surrendered in September 1943, Nazi Germany occupied the country. The Germans set up a collaborationist administration under the cover of an "independent Albania". At this point the Albanian resistance had to fight not only the occupier, but the collaborators as well.

2.3. Mukje, and the dimension of civil war

In August 1943, in the village of Mukje, an agreement was signed between representatives of the National Liberation Movement and the nationalist Balli Kombëtar. The agreement included the aim of a "Greater Albania" (including Kosovo). The Communist Party, under pressure from the Yugoslav comrades as well, rejected the agreement. After that a substantial part of Balli Kombëtar slid into collaboration with the Germans, and the war of liberation also took on the dimension of a civil war.

To ignore this dimension of civil war makes it impossible to understand the harshness of the later years. The people's courts set up in 1944–45 tried not only collaborators, but many political rivals as well. Anti-fascist legitimacy turned, in a short time, into the legitimacy of a power without rivals.

2.4. Liberation

At the Përmet Congress in May 1944 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation was founded; in October, in Berat, a provisional government was proclaimed under Hoxha's presidency. Tirana was liberated on 17 November, and the whole of the country on 29 November 1944.

Date	Event
7 April 1939	The Italian fascist occupation
8 November 1941	The founding of the Communist Party of Albania
16 September 1942	The Peza Conference, the National Liberation Front
10 July 1943	The General Headquarters of the National Liberation Army
August 1943	The Mukje agreement, and its rejection
September 1943	Italy's surrender, the German occupation
May 1944	The Përmet Congress
October 1944	The provisional government in Berat
29 November 1944	The complete liberation of the country

According to official figures, about 28,000 partisans lost their lives in the war; at the end of the war the National Liberation Army had reached around 70,000 fighters. For a country of one million people, this is an extraordinary mobilisation. Albania is one of the rare examples in Europe of a country liberated largely by its own partisans, without the Red Army or the Western Allied armies entering the country. (The Yugoslav partisans also liberated most of their own territory; but the Red Army took a direct part in the liberation of Belgrade.)

2.5. The protection of the Jews

Before the war a few hundred Jews lived in Albania. At the end of the war this number was around two thousand. Albania is the only European country to emerge from the Holocaust with a larger Jewish population than before the war. Albanian families, by the tradition of besa (fidelity to a word given), hid Jewish refugees in their homes and did not hand them over to the occupier. This honour is first the honour of the ordinary Albanian peasant and town-dweller; the common honour of Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic families. To write it into the account of a single leader is an injustice both to history and to those people. But it is also clear that the anti-fascist climate the resistance created strengthened this solidarity.

2.6. The lesson of anti-fascism for today

Young comrades, the first lesson to be drawn from Albanian anti-fascism is this: a small, poor, left-behind people, when it is organised, can win its own liberation against the most powerful military machines of the age. The second lesson is spoken of less: when the anti-fascist front, the moment the war ends, turns into one-party power, the plurality inside the front has also been destroyed. While we defend the importance of building a broad front against fascism today, we must keep this second lesson in mind as well.

3. From Darkness to Light: The Gains of Socialist Construction

Young comrades, we will speak below, without hiding them, of the shadows of socialist Albania. But first you need to know in detail what was achieved in that country in forty years. Because the anti-communist narrative either never mentions these achievements, or passes over them in a sentence. Yet what we will tell here is a transformation that changed the lives of millions of people at the root, that carried a people from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century.

3.1. The starting point: Albania in 1944

On the day of liberation Albania was Europe's poorest and most left-behind country:

About 85 per cent of the population could not read or write. The country had not a single university; the few privileged young people who wanted higher education went to Italy. In 1934 primary school had been declared compulsory, but in the countryside this remained on paper.
There was not a single standard-gauge railway; those that existed were narrow-gauge lines serving the mines and the army.
Even in 1950 there was one doctor for 8,000 people.
The plains were marsh, and malaria was the fate of the peasants from Myzeqe to Maliq.
The land was in the hands of a handful of agas and beys; the great majority of the peasants were landless.
In the mountains of the north, life was ruled by the centuries-old Kanun: the blood feud, the bride price, the counting of the woman as the man's property.
On top of this had been added the destruction of five years of occupation and war.

Keep this picture in mind. Every achievement below must be measured from this starting point.

3.2. The land to the peasant

In August 1945 a land reform was carried out; the lands of the agas, the beys and the religious foundations were distributed to the peasants who worked them. Then, step by step, collectivisation was undertaken. The peasant who for centuries had sharecropped on someone else's land became, for the first time, the owner of the land. Feudal landlordism was erased from history as a class. Industry, the mines and the banks were nationalised; a planned economy was established.

3.3. The great literacy campaign

Perhaps the most lasting achievement of socialist Albania is education.

The Education Reform Law of 1946 declared the struggle against illiteracy the first aim of the new school system; seven years of free and compulsory primary education were introduced.
The law of September 1949 made it compulsory for every citizen between the ages of 12 and 40 who could not read or write to attend literacy courses. The education sections of the people's councils opened courses for peasants, and the army's political units opened them for soldiers. Compressed programmes were set up for adults, so that they could study while they worked.
In 1951 the first higher-education institutions (the Higher Pedagogical, Higher Polytechnic and Higher Agricultural Institutes) were opened; in 1957 the University of Tirana was founded. Higher education was free.
Compulsory education was raised to eight years, and the age of starting school was lowered to six.

The results are striking:

Indicator	Starting point	The end of the 1980s
Those who could not read or write	about 85 per cent in 1946	"in effect eliminated"
Number of pupils at every level	fewer than 60,000 in 1939	more than 750,000 in 1987
Number of teachers	a few thousand	more than 40,000 in 1987
Girls among the pupils	a very small minority	about 47 per cent
Continuation to lycée after the eighth grade	—	39 per cent in 1980, 73 per cent in 1990; in no village below 56 per cent

While the population roughly tripled in this period, the number of pupils increased more than twelvefold. I want to underline the last line: that the rate of continuation to lycée fell below 56 per cent in no village is proof that education was carried not only to the cities, but to the most remote mountain villages. When we think of the education gulf, even in Turkey today, between village and city, between East and West, we grasp better what this means.

An honest note: education was at the same time an intense ideological education; the textbooks were written according to Marxist-Leninist principles and were rearranged first according to the Soviet, then according to the Albanian official line. But a people's learning to read is more lasting than the regime that dictates to it what it will read. A people that reads, in the end, also asks its own questions.

3.4. Health: the defeat of malaria, and a life twenty years longer

Free health care: All health services were free.
The number of doctors: While in 1950 there was one doctor for 8,154 people, in 1987 this number fell to one doctor for 577 people. That is, the population per doctor fell fourteenfold. The population per hospital bed also fell, from 229 to 168.
The defeat of malaria: With mass vaccination, the fight against pests and the draining of the marshes, malaria was pushed back. According to Malaria Journal data examining the elimination of malaria in Europe, the last indigenous malaria case in Albania was seen in 1966, and by 1970 the disease had been wiped from the country. A disease that had once set people shivering the length of the villages became, within a generation, history.
Life expectancy: According to official statistics, average life expectancy lengthened by about twenty years up to 1988. Data from the UN Population Division confirm this: average life expectancy, 62.3 years in 1960, rose to 66.9 in 1970, to 70.2 in 1980, and to 71.8 in 1990.

An honest note: the infant mortality rate in 1991 was around 50 per thousand and was higher than in the other Balkan countries; at the end of the 1980s hospitals suffered a serious shortage of medicines and equipment. The gains were real, but the economic blockage of the 1980s was reflected in health as well.

3.5. Light to every village

Before the war electricity was the privilege of only a few cities. In 1970 electricity reached even Albania's most remote mountain village.

Then large hydroelectric plants were built on the river Drin: Vau i Dejës (250 MW), built in 1971–1973, then Fierza, and in the 1980s Koman. Koman, even if some of its turbines were imported, was built without foreign aid. At the end of the 1980s Albania had become a country exporting electricity to its Balkan neighbours and to Austria. The export of electricity, together with chrome and oil, was one of the country's principal sources of foreign currency. In those years Albania was the world's third-largest producer of chrome.

Think that in 1970 the great majority of Turkey's villages were still without electricity. The peasants of this country know very well the difference between the world of a village child doing homework by a gas lamp and the world of a child reading in electric light.

3.6. From marsh to field, from mountain to railway

The draining of the marshes: In 1946 the draining of the Maliq marsh on the Korçë plain was begun. The aim was both to dry up the source of malaria and to gain new agricultural land. Extensive drainage works were also carried out on the Myzeqe plain. Behind the defeat of malaria lie these works. (An honest note: sources state that prison labour was also used in the Maliq drainage works.)
Agriculture: With terracing and irrigation, agricultural land was expanded. From the mid-1970s Albania met about 85 per cent of its basic food need itself.
The railway: In 1947 the country's first standard-gauge railway, the Durrës–Peqin line, was opened; in 1949 the Durrës–Tirana line entered service. Then came lines reaching Elbasan, Vlorë and Shkodër. Official history identifies these lines with the voluntary youth actions in which thousands of young people took part; the youth that built the railway became one of the emblems of the new Albania.

3.7. A country without debt, without tax, without unemployment

Looked at from today's world sunk in debt, the following features of socialist Albania seem almost unbelievable:

There was no foreign debt. The 1976 Constitution forbade taking foreign credit and granting concessions to foreign capital. In 1988 Ramiz Alia was saying "Albanians consume without owing anyone". The debt crises that struck Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s did not touch Albania.
There was no income tax. At the end of the 1960s the income tax was abolished.
The wage gap was among the world's lowest. With the measures of 1966 the ratio between the highest and the lowest wage was reduced to about 2.5 to 1. In 1988 the law limited the ratio between the wage of a worker and of a manager, with a few exceptions, to 1 to 1.7. Think that today, in large companies, the gap between manager and worker runs to hundreds of times.
Rent was about 2 per cent of income.
Officially there was no unemployment; every citizen had the right and the duty to work.

3.8. Social security

Retirement: The full retirement pension was 70 per cent of the average earnings of the best three years within the last ten. For workers the retirement age, according to the type of work, was between 50 and 60 for men and between 45 and 55 for women. From 1972 cooperative peasants were also included in the retirement system.
Disability: 85 per cent of average earnings; 95 per cent for disability arising from a workplace accident, 100 per cent for miners.
Maternity: Women were given six months of maternity leave, paid at 75–95 per cent of their wages according to seniority; on return to work, shortened working hours were recognised; for children older than six months, state-supported nurseries were set up. A mother looking after her sick child was paid 60 per cent of her wage.
Social-insurance spending rose from 13 million lek in 1950 to about 1.8 billion lek in 1987. The system was financed not by a premium deduction, but directly from the state budget.

3.9. The liberation of women

The condition of women is perhaps the most striking indicator of this transformation. According to Albanian official data relayed by a piece published in Turkey in 1991, in the first forty years of the twentieth century the number of women working for a wage in the whole country was 668, and 94 out of every 100 women could not read or write. From 1938 to 1978 the number of girl students in secondary education increased 175-fold.

According to the data of 1988–1990, women made up:

47 per cent of all those in work,
50 per cent of students in higher education,
42 per cent of those in work who had higher education,
54 per cent of those working in scientific research institutes,
30 per cent of the deputies of the People's Assembly,
40 per cent of the members of the local people's councils.

The bride price, forced marriage, and the Kanun tradition that counted the woman as the man's property were pushed back legally and socially. The blood feud, together with the socialist legal order and migration to the city, was "almost extinguished". The proof is bitter: blood feuds returned, with thousands of deaths, in the chaos of 1997, when the state collapsed.

An honest note: women's participation in public life was revolutionary, but the patriarchal division of labour inside the home largely continued; women often worked both in the factory and at home. This was a limit seen in most socialist countries.

3.10. Language, culture and historical heritage

A common literary language: The Orthography Congress, which met in Tirana in November 1972, with the participation of 87 delegates from Albania, from Kosovo, from Macedonia and from the Arbëresh in Italy, set the common writing standard of Albanian. A language written for centuries with different alphabets and dialects attained, for the first time, a single written language embracing all Albanians. This standard is still used today, with very little change. (There are also criticisms that the Tosk-based standard pushed Gheg into the background.)
Cinema: On 10 July 1952 the "New Albania" Film Studio was founded. In the socialist period 286 films were produced. The co-production The Great Warrior Skanderbeg won an international award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954; Albanian films for a time reached millions of viewers in China. In 1975 the first Albanian animated feature was made.
Museum cities: Gjirokastër, where Hoxha was born, and Berat, "the city of a thousand windows", were declared museum cities in the socialist period and placed under protection. These two cities, saved by this means from the concrete plunder that has swallowed many of Europe's historic cities, entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2005 and 2008.
Opera and ballet, folk-music festivals, the national theatre and archaeology were developed by the hand of the state as the institutions of a new national culture.

3.11. A people's increase

The population, about 1.1 million at liberation, reached about 3.2 million in the 1989 census. Albania became the country with Europe's youngest population. Compare this with today's Albania, which after the capitalist restoration lost a quarter of its population to emigration (section 8).

3.12. The balance-sheet table

Field	1944–1950	The end of the 1980s
Population unable to read or write	about 85 per cent	in effect zero
Number of pupils	fewer than 60,000 (1939)	more than 750,000 (1987)
University	none	University of Tirana (1957) and higher institutes
Population per doctor	8,154 (1950)	577 (1987)
Average life expectancy	62.3 (1960, UN)	71.8 (1990, UN)
Malaria	a widespread epidemic	last indigenous case 1966
Electricity in the villages	none	in every village from 1970
Railway (standard gauge)	none	from Durrës to Tirana, Elbasan, Vlorë, Shkodër
Foreign debt	—	none
Income tax	—	none
Worker–manager wage gap	—	legal upper limit 1 to 1.7 (1988)
Maternity leave	none	six months, 75–95 per cent of the wage
Women among those in work	668 women working for a wage	47 per cent
Population	about 1.1 million	about 3.2 million

Every line of this table corresponds to a real change in the real life of a generation. A girl whose mother could not read or write becoming an engineer, a boy whose father died young of malaria living to see seventy, a village that grew up by gas lamp coming to light. An important source of the respect that still lives today in the memory of the Albanian people for the Hoxha period is this.

3.13. The limits of these gains, and their fate

While telling of these gains we also have to say three things:

It began with outside support. Development was financed first by the aid and credits of Yugoslavia, then of the Soviet Union, and between 1961 and 1978 of China. Every break was a shock; after 1978 Albania was left entirely to its own resources.
In the 1980s it blocked. Technological renewal stopped, and food shortage and rationing appeared (see 6.9).
The value of the gains was understood when they were lost. In the collapse of 1991 almost a third of the 2,500 schools in the country were plundered, fifteen school buildings were razed, and about 2,000 teachers fled the country. In 1997 the blood feuds returned. The country that exported electricity came, in the following years, to be known for power cuts. What had been built in forty years was plundered in a few years.

Young comrades, the lesson of this section is this: a planned economy, social property and the mobilisation of the working people can, even in the most backward conditions, achieve in a few decades what capitalism could not achieve in centuries. Albania is the proof of this. But the way to make these gains lasting is to entrust them to the people's own control and democracy. In the sections below we will speak of why this second condition remained missing.

4. The Exposure of Revisionism: Three Breaks

The Marxist-Leninist tradition on the Albanian line remembers Enver Hoxha above all as the leader of the ideological struggle against revisionism. This struggle takes concrete form in three great breaks.

4.1. Against Tito (1948)

After the war Yugoslavia turned towards swallowing Albania in effect as a unit of a federation. A common currency, a customs union, the coordination of planning were on the agenda. When in June 1948 the Cominform condemned Tito, Hoxha used this opportunity to break from Yugoslav tutelage. A small country's defence of its sovereignty against its large neighbour's attempt at annexation is an understandable stance from the point of view of national independence.

But this break also has an honest footnote: Koçi Xoxe, the Minister of the Interior, accused of being pro-Yugoslav, was tried and executed in 1949. This was the first great link in a long process in which the party physically purged its own leading cadres.

4.2. Against Khrushchev (1960–1961)

At the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 Khrushchev made his "secret speech" criticising Stalin, and put forward theses such as "peaceful coexistence" and "the peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism". Hoxha saw these theses as a compromise with imperialism and a giving up of the class struggle.

On 16 November 1960, at the Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers' Parties gathered in Moscow, Hoxha made a speech that criticised Khrushchev openly, to his face. The leader of a small party was challenging, at the centre of the world communist movement, the leader of the most powerful party. The price of this was heavy: the Soviet Union cut its aid to Albania, withdrew from the naval base at Vlorë, and in December 1961 diplomatic relations were broken. After the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Albania formally withdrew from the pact.

The memoir-analysis book Hoxha wrote in this process, "The Khrushchevites", became one of the most widely read texts of the Marxist-Leninist criticism of Soviet revisionism.

4.3. Against China (1978)

After breaking from the Soviets, Albania formed an alliance with China and for about seventeen years continued its development with Chinese aid. But China's drawing close to the United States in the 1970s (the Nixon visit of 1972) and the "three worlds theory", which became official at the end of the Mao period, drew Hoxha's sharp criticism. The three worlds theory, by declaring the Soviet Union the "principal enemy", legitimised alliance with US imperialism and with the capitalist states of the "second world". In the book "Imperialism and the Revolution", published in 1978, Hoxha analysed this theory as the abandonment of proletarian internationalism and of the class struggle. In July 1978 China cut all aid.

An introductory piece published in Özgürlük Dünyası in February 1991, that is, in the month the Hoxha statue was pulled down in Tirana, and reprinted in 2015, sums up well why the book is a basic reference text for this line (in Turkish). According to the book, US imperialism, which emerged strengthened from the Second World War, followed two paths in order to protect the shaken capitalist system and to destroy the socialist camp. The first was blocs such as NATO and SEATO, bases, and armed interventions stretching from Greece to Korea and to Vietnam. The second was ideological subversion directed at the socialist states and the communist parties, that is, securing their "bourgeois decay" from within. Hoxha defines the greatest success of this second path as follows: "The emergence of Khrushchev's revisionist group is the greatest political and ideological victory of imperialism's strategy after the Second World War." The book also applies Lenin's theory of imperialism to post-war conditions: the financial oligarchy, monopoly state capitalism, multinational companies "belonging essentially to a single country" and reaching for the sovereignty of the countries where they are, credits given under the name of "aid" as an export of capital and an instrument of subjugation, and neo-colonialism.

These last headings are also useful when reading today's Albania. International capital consortiums that seize protected areas and coasts with the status of "strategic investor" (we will see them in section 9), or a country's taking on the function of a prison and a migrant camp, are the concrete forms in 2026 of Hoxha's analysis of credit, the multinational company and neo-colonialism. (A small note: the introductory piece says the book was written "some time before" Hoxha's death; the book was in fact published in 1978, seven years before his death.)

Hoxha also wrote texts criticising the "Eurocommunism" orientation of the Western European communist parties ("Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism", 1980) and some aspects of Mao's thought ("Reflections on China"). As Kavel Alpaslan recalled in Evrensel, Hoxha's criticisms of the large communist parties of Spain, France and Italy are still of the nature of a lesson today: all three parties, by a reformist ideological erosion, largely lost their historical strength. Hoxha's comments in 1980 on the future of these tendencies are of value when looked at from the point reached today.

4.4. Why does the Marxist-Leninist movement claim this legacy?

In the 1960s and 70s, in many countries of the world, Marxist-Leninists who found the Soviet line revisionist turned first to China. The China–Albania split of 1978 divided this movement in two. The parties that rejected the three worlds theory gathered on the Albanian line. After the fall of socialist Albania these parties continued, from 1994, to come together at the international level; today there are parties and organisations from this tradition in many countries, from Latin America to Europe and to North Africa. In Turkey too, a section that took a stand against the three worlds theory at the end of the 1970s was influenced by this line.

From the point of view of this tradition, Hoxha's contribution can be summed up in this sentence: to defend, as the administrator of a state, paying great prices, that compromise with imperialism in the name of socialism is the denial of socialism. We do not underestimate the ideological value of this stance. We have seen how Khrushchev's thesis of "peaceful transition" social-democratised the European communist parties, and how China's "three worlds" theory legitimised relations with Pinochet in Chile and with Mobutu in Zaire. On these matters Hoxha was proved right.

But young comrades, we also have to ask this: Hoxha's being right in each of the three great breaks made Albania an ever more lonely, poorer and more besieged country. The feeling that "everyone is a revisionist, only we are on the right road" turned, after a point, from ideological clarity into a psychology of siege. We will speak below of what this psychology led to inside.

5. Its Importance for the Socialist Bloc and the World Revolutionary Movement

Albania's population never passed three million. Despite this, from the 1960s to the 1980s it carried an ideological weight inside the world revolutionary movement out of proportion to its population. The reasons:

An independent socialist focus: It offered a model of a socialist state trying to stand on its own feet, outside the Soviet and Chinese centres.
Publication and propaganda: Radio Tirana broadcast in dozens of languages; the "8 Nëntori" publishing house translated Hoxha's works and the Marxist classics into many languages. Turkish publications were among these.
The birth of new parties: In Latin America, in Europe, in Africa and in Asia many Marxist-Leninist parties took shape through relations with the Party of Labour of Albania.
Sovereignty against foreign debt: The article of the 1976 Constitution forbidding foreign credit and foreign concessions was a striking stance in a period when indebtedness to the IMF and the World Bank was delivering up the Third World.

We grant these contributions. But the question that has to be asked is this: can a country be ideologically right against the whole world, and wrong against its own people? The answer is yes. Now let us come to those errors.

6. The Shadows: Facts We Do Not Hide, and the Defences on the Marxist Front

Young comrades, this section is the hardest section of this piece. But it is also the most important.

Here I will try to avoid both of the easy roads. The first easy road is to dismiss the whole of the repression of the socialist period as "imperialist propaganda". The second easy road is to accept without question every figure and every interpretation of the anti-communist literature. Both are laziness.

For this reason I will take up each heading in the same order:

What happened? Documented facts and figures, together with their source.
What does the defence say? The answer given to these facts in Enver Hoxha's own texts, in the documents of the Party of Labour of Albania, and by Marxist-Leninist writers who defend this line (for example in Bill Bland, the English Marxist-Leninist who served for about thirty years as secretary of the Albania Society in Britain).
Assessment: The true side of the defence, and where it falls short.

6.1. First the figures: what do we know, what do we not know?

The figures of repression belonging to the socialist period come from Albanian state institutions set up after 1991. An important part of these institutions was set up in a political climate in which anti-communism had become the official ideology. For this reason the figures must be approached with caution. But caution does not mean denial: these figures have been sought to be cross-checked with court decisions, execution lists, Ministry of the Interior archives and witness statements, and the numbers given by different institutions are close to one another.

Category	Figure	Source
Execution after a political conviction	6,027 (5,577 men, 450 women)	Institute for the Study of the Crimes and Consequences of Communism (ISKK), 2016
Execution after a political conviction (official count)	5,501	Institute for the Integration of the Former Politically Persecuted (IIPP)
Political prisoner	34,135 (26,768 men, 7,367 women)	ISKK, 2016
Political prisoner (archive)	about 25,000 sentences up to 1990; researchers' estimate 30–34 thousand	Ministry of the Interior archive
Internal exile (internment)	59,009 people; 12,500 exile decisions in official compensation records (excluding children)	ISKK, 2016; government data
Death in prison	984 (and 308 people who lost their mental health)	ISKK, 2016
Death in conditions of exile	7,022	ISKK, 2016
Missing (body not given to the family)	about 6,000	International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP)
Killed at the border	about 1,000 from 1949	Figure announced by the Ministry of the Interior in 1990

While reading these figures, keep three things in mind:

No distinction of period has been made. These totals stretch from 29 November 1944 to 1991. That is, they are understood to include also the collaborators and war criminals tried in the Special Court of 1945, immediately after the war. A separated breakdown showing which execution belonged to a fascist collaborator, and which to a peasant or a communist, has not been presented to the public. The defence's objection on this point is justified.
Some figures are Cold War propaganda. For example the claim the US government submitted to the UN in 1955, that "80,000 people passed through the camps, 16,000 disappeared", is not the UN's own verification, but one side's claim. We do not use figures of this kind.
But the scale is beyond dispute. Even the most cautious official figures show that, in a country whose population was a little over one million in 1945 and under three million in 1990, there were more than five thousand political executions and around thirty thousand political prisoners. This is a scale at which every family had an acquaintance, a relative, who touched this apparatus.

6.2. The Sigurimi: the Directorate of State Security

What happened? The Sigurimi was born from the "People's Defence Sections" set up during the war; it began work officially on 14 December 1944 and was active until July 1991. With its centre in Tirana and its units in 26 districts it spread over the whole country. According to the handbook the OSCE published in 2025 together with Albanian institutions, its methods included political trials, psychological and physical torture, enforced disappearance, the deliberate destruction of careers, the making of citizens into informers by pressure and blackmail, and the fabrication of files. In the last period a large number of files were destroyed. Today more than 13 million pages of documents have been inventoried in the archive.

What does the defence say? The strongest basis of the defence is that the external threat was real, and this threat really was real:

"Operation Valuable" (1949–1953): British MI6 and the American CIA tried to overthrow the regime by infiltrating armed teams made up of Albanian émigrés into Albania by sea and by air. This was the West's first paramilitary operation behind the "Iron Curtain". Hundreds of agents were infiltrated; most were caught or killed. It was later understood that the Soviet agent in British intelligence, Kim Philby, had a role in the failure of the operation. That is, the words "imperialism is infiltrating agents into the country" were not a paranoia, but a documented fact.
The official state of war with Greece: Greece formally lifted the state of war that had continued since 1940 only on 28 August 1987, and throughout the Cold War it maintained a territorial claim over southern Albania ("Northern Epirus").
Yugoslav plans of annexation: At the beginning of 1948 Tito tried, despite the objection of the Albanian government, to send two divisions of soldiers to Albania. According to Milovan Djilas's account, even Stalin spoke of Yugoslavia's "swallowing" Albania.
The theoretical justification: According to Hoxha, the class struggle continues under socialism too; the overthrown exploiting classes and the imperialism outside look for a foothold inside for restoration. The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore has to be vigilant. Bill Bland argues that the Albanian constitution defined the state as "the dictatorship of the working class", that this was the power of the class and not of a single person, and says that the real dictatorship is the Western democracies in which big capital rules.

The defence's last argument on this line is also this: that the system was overthrown in 1990–91 proves that the vigilance was insufficient, not excessive.

Assessment: It is true that the external threat was real, and we should not shrink from saying so. But there are three problems:

Proportion. After 1953 the West's attempts at armed infiltration in effect ended. The Sigurimi, however, worked for another thirty-eight years, growing, and its target became increasingly not agents but ordinary citizens, and in the end the party's own leaders.
The inflation of the threat. According to the study by the historian Idrit Idrizi, who examined Hoxha's last purge from the Albanian archives, published in 2022 in the journal East European Politics and Societies, the event presented in September 1982 as a "landing of an enemy band" was a group of four people, and one of them was a secret agent of the Sigurimi. This event was used as part of the atmosphere of "extraordinary conditions" that prepared the ground for the purge inside.
The defence's own logic. If a security apparatus of forty-five years failed to protect the system, the problem is not "not being harsh enough", but protecting the wrong thing. The Sigurimi protected the state from the people; but it took the state out of being, in the people's eyes, a thing worth defending.

6.3. The camps and the prisons: Spaç, Burrel, Tepelena

What happened?

Burrel (from 1946): A "super-prison" for political prisoners. Many intellectuals, clerics and former party cadres were held here.
Spaç (1968–1990): A forced-labour camp in a copper and pyrite mine in the mountains of Mirdita. Prisoners were worked in shifts, with heavy norms, insufficient tools and no safety measures. In May 1973 the prisoners staged a short-lived revolt and raised an Albanian flag without the star; the revolt was crushed in two days, and those counted as ringleaders were executed.
Tepelena (1949–1954): The camp to which the families of political prisoners and families counted as "class enemies" were exiled collectively. Of the 3–5 thousand people held here, it is estimated that about 600 died, about half of them children under the age of five. There are serious differences between the archive records and the witness statements; but high child deaths have passed even into the official documents as one of the reasons the camp was closed. The camp also served the settling of regime supporters in the families' homes.

What does the defence say? According to the official history of the Party of Labour of Albania and to Hoxha's texts, those who lay in these institutions were "enemies of the people": war criminals, collaborators, saboteurs, foreign agents and their networks. Forced labour was presented as the re-education, by labour, of the "parasitic" classes. The Spaç revolt of 1973 was characterised as a fascist attempt by the remnants of Balli Kombëtar. The exile of families was justified as cutting the social footholds of the enemy networks.

Assessment: Here the ground the defence can hold to is very narrow.

It is true that a part of the prisoners really were collaborators or armed opponents. But the children under the age of five who died at Tepelena cannot be counted "class enemies" by any doctrine.
The individuality of guilt is a gain not of bourgeois law, but of the Enlightenment and of the workers' movement as well. To send into exile the child, the sibling, the grandchild because of the father's "crime" is not class struggle, but the continuation, by the hand of the state, of tribal revenge. That a regime fighting the blood feud established, in the political field, a "state blood feud" lasting for generations is perhaps the bitterest contradiction of this period.
The idea of "re-education by labour", in the conditions of Spaç, took labour out of being an activity that frees the human being and turned it into an instrument of punishment. This is the exact opposite of Marx's concept of labour.

6.4. The party's purge of its own cadres

What happened?

Year	Person	Fate
1947	Nako Spiru (the administrator responsible for the economy)	Found dead by gunshot, in suspicious circumstances
1949	Koçi Xoxe (Minister of the Interior, Organisational Secretary)	Arrested in November 1948, executed on 11 June 1949
1956	Liri Gega and her husband, General Dali Ndreu	Executed in December 1956 as "Titoite agents"; Khrushchev claimed that Gega was pregnant when she was executed
1974–75	Defence Minister Beqir Balluku, generals Petrit Dume, Hito Çako, Rrahman Perrllaku	Shot on 5 November 1975; the remains of Dume and Çako were found in 2000 in a secret mass grave at Vranisht, near Vlorë
1975–77	Abdyl Këllezi, Koço Theodhosi and the economic administrators	They were executed
1974	Josif Zagali (the designer of the bunkers, an engineer colonel)	Eight years in prison on a fabricated charge of "sabotage"
1981	Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu	Found dead on 18 December 1981 (official explanation: suicide); after his death he was declared an agent who had "for forty years worked for many enemy intelligence services"; his family was imprisoned, and his son and his brother also died by suicide
1983	Kadri Hazbiu (former Interior, then Defence Minister) and Feçor Shehu	Shot in September 1983

What does the defence say? In the books The Titoites (1982) and The Khrushchevites (1980), Hoxha ties each of these purges to a real struggle of line that the party faced:

The Xoxe period: Yugoslavia's attempt to annex Albania was real, and Xoxe supported the merging of the Albanian economy and army with Yugoslavia. At the trial he confessed that he had conspired with Tito.
1956: It is claimed that, after the Soviet 20th Congress, Moscow and Belgrade tried to organise an opposition to Hoxha inside the Albanian party. This overlaps with the period in which the Soviets had the "Stalinist" leaderships purged in Eastern Europe.
The Balluku group: The army leadership was defending a conventional understanding of defence instead of Hoxha's doctrine of "people's war", and wanted to reduce the party's control over the army. In his memoirs of 1979 Hoxha accused this group of acting in line with the proposals of the Chinese leadership (Zhou Enlai). A US diplomatic cable relays that Beijing wanted Balluku removed from his post. That is, there was a real debate of doctrine and of direction inside the army.
Shehu: According to the text Hoxha submitted to the Central Committee on 24 September 1982, Shehu was a "masked enemy" who had for decades worked for foreign services.
Bill Bland defines these conflicts not as "personal struggles for power, but struggles of principle", that is, as struggles waged against those who defended capitalist degeneration.

Assessment: The true side of the defence is this: behind these purges there were, most of the time, real political differences. The Yugoslav plan of annexation was real. There were real debates on the position of the army, on relations with China, and on economic policy. To sum these up as "Hoxha's personal paranoia" also simplifies history.

But:

Equating a difference of line with espionage. In a Marxist party, political differences are resolved by debate, by voting, and if necessary by removal from office. To rename the difference as "the agency of enemy services" makes debate impossible. According to research that has examined the archives, arrest decisions most of the time contain only the phrase "treason to the homeland", and no evidence is presented. The claim that Shehu was at the same time the agent of more than one enemy service is a claim that strains credibility.
The secret graves. Why does a revolutionary power bury in a secret mass grave the remains of the former defence minister it has executed? A power sure of its own cause conducts both its trials and its punishments in the open.
The result. These purges did not protect socialism. In every wave the party's most able and most independently thinking cadres were destroyed. The leadership that remained in 1985 was the leadership that liquidated the system in 1990. The greatest winner of the purges was Ramiz Alia, the successor Hoxha chose.
The theoretical root. Hoxha's mechanical application, inside the party, of the thesis that "as socialism advances, the class struggle sharpens" led to the reading of every different view as "the extension, inside the party, of the class enemy". The result: criticism and debate inside the party died, and their place was taken by fear and obedience.

6.5. The ban on religion (1967)

What happened? Pressure on religious institutions began long before 1967: the land reform of 1945–46 nationalised the properties of religious foundations, in 1946 foreign Catholic clerics were expelled, and the decree of 1949 tied religious communities to state approval and removed them from education, from property, from hospitals and from charitable institutions. Between 1945 and 1953 the number of Catholic churches fell from 253 to 100.

During the "Cultural and Ideological Revolution" of 1966–67, by a campaign conducted in the form of student and youth actions, 2,169 mosques, churches, monasteries and tekkes were closed by May 1967; a part of them were turned into youth and culture centres, a part were demolished. The decree of 22 November 1967 banned all religious activity. The 1976 Constitution (article 37) declared the state atheist and banned "religious propaganda". The Penal Code of 1977 provided for 3 to 10 years of imprisonment for religious propaganda and for possessing religious publications. More than two hundred clerics were imprisoned, and a part were executed or died in prison. In 1980 a Jesuit priest was sentenced to life imprisonment for baptising twins. In 2016 the Catholic Church beatified, as "martyrs" in Shkodër, 38 clerics and believers killed in this period.

What does the defence say? Here Hoxha's own text is very instructive. In the party circular of 27 February 1967 he writes the following:

Religion is "the opium of the people", and if it is left to spontaneity it gathers strength again; a conscious and systematic struggle is needed.
In Albania every religion is connected to a foreign domination: Islam with Ottoman and Arab rule, Orthodoxy with Greek chauvinism, Catholicism with the interests of the Vatican, of Italy and of Austria. For this reason the struggle must be waged "in a patriotic and revolutionary spirit". This line rests on the famous line of Pashko Vasa, the poet of the nineteenth-century Albanian national awakening: "The Albanian's religion is Albania."
The closures were carried out not by a decree from above, but by the initiative coming from below of the youth, and "with very little resistance". The Bektashi leadership and some Muslim clerics voluntarily handed over their robes and the keys of the mosques.
A part of the Catholic clergy had collaborated with fascist Italy.

And the most striking sentences of the circular are these:

"It is easy to close the mosques and the churches by decrees or by administrative measures. What is hard is to prepare the believers ideologically and spiritually."

"Every measure of this kind must be taken without resorting to violence, and always with the people's consent."

"We must not open an open war against believing people. The party must approach them like a self-sacrificing doctor trying to cure a patient."

Assessment: Hoxha's own words are the strongest criticism of the practice. In the period of a leader who wrote "without resorting to violence", "with the people's consent", "without opening an open war against believers", ten years later baptising a child came to be punished with up to ten years in prison. This gulf between word and practice is the problem itself.

The defence also has true sides: it is true that in Albania religious divisions were historically intertwined with national division and with the influence of foreign powers. It is also true that a part of the Catholic hierarchy collaborated with the Italian occupation; but this was a minority, and it cannot be the justification for punishing all believers. Indeed some historians argue that behind Hoxha's policy on religion there was, more than Marxism, an Albanian nationalism that saw religion as an obstacle to national unity.

The Marxist classics are clear on this matter: Engels, criticising the Blanquists who wanted to ban religion, wrote that persecution is the best way to strengthen attachment to religion. Lenin too, while defending the party's making anti-religious propaganda, put forward not pushing believers out of the workers' movement, and removing the social roots of the religious question. The Albanian experience showed how right these warnings were.

6.6. Those killed at the border

What happened? According to figures the Ministry of the Interior announced in 1990, from 1949 about 1,000 Albanians were killed by the border forces while trying to cross the border by unlawful means. In 1990 alone 54 people were killed; the last was in Shkodër on 20 December 1990. Trying to flee the country was a crime that could require the death penalty. In the periods 1953–1961, 1962–1967 and 1983–1989 the principal reason for political arrests was the attempt to flee. From 1945, families counted as "unreliable" were exiled from the border regions.

What does the defence say? Albania's borders were not ordinary borders: the official state of war with Greece continued until 1987, relations with Yugoslavia were hostile after 1948, and the West had infiltrated armed teams across these borders between 1949 and 53. A person who fled across the border, took refuge in the enemy state and gave information to its intelligence was, according to the defence, no different from a soldier who had betrayed the homeland. Besides, the leaving of the country by people educated with the people's labour was a loss of resources from socialist construction.

Assessment: It is legitimate to protect the border against armed teams infiltrating the country. But look at the figures: the overwhelming majority of those who died were not people entering from outside, but Albanian citizens who wanted to go out. And one of the years in which the number of deaths peaked was 1990, when the Western threat was at its weakest. If a border is being used not to separate the country from the outside, but to separate its citizens from their own state, something there has broken. A socialism that can hold its own people only by force has lost the struggle to convince. The renewed increase of attempts to flee in the 1980s was also one of the clearest indicators of the system's approaching crisis.

6.7. The cult of the person, and the bunkers

What happened? Hoxha's name, words and portraits were placed everywhere, down to factories, schools and mountainsides; on the slope of Mount Shpirag at Berat, "ENVER" was written in giant letters. His memoirs and works were rearranged according to the political needs of the period in which they were written: critics note, for example, that after Mehmet Shehu's fall his role was changed retrospectively in new editions of the memoirs.

Between 1967 and 1986 the country was fitted out with concrete bunkers. Estimates of the total number vary, according to the source, from 170,000 to 750,000. According to the engineer Josif Zagali, the designer of the bunkers, 70–100 people lost their lives every year during these constructions; it is estimated that the cost of the production of prefabricated bunkers alone was about 2 per cent of net material product. Zagali himself, in 1974, served eight years in prison on a fabricated charge of "sabotage".

What does the defence say? The bunkers were the product of the doctrine of "people's war", which took concrete form after the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. A small country left entirely alone against both NATO and the Warsaw Pact tried, relying on the experience of partisan war, to organise the armed defence of the whole people. On the cult of the person, Bland argues that the leadership was collective, and that Hoxha was the person who "stood out" only because of his abilities and his services.

Assessment: After 1968 a fear of invasion was realistic. But the burying of scarce resources in concrete to this extent was the sacrifice of a generation's standard of living for a war that never came. The bunkers were an instrument, as much as of defence, of keeping the whole society in a permanent psychology of siege.

As for the cult of the person: in his letter of 1877 to Wilhelm Blos, Marx speaks of the antipathy he and Engels felt towards every kind of cult of the person, and recounts that in the period of the International they did not make public the messages of praise directed at themselves. Where a leader is accepted as infallible, there also remains no mechanism that will correct his errors. In Albania this is exactly what happened.

6.8. The defence's strongest card: "revolutionising" against the bureaucracy

To be honest requires showing the strong sides of the defence as well. The least known but most interesting side of the Hoxha period is the campaigns waged against the bureaucracy. The "revolutionising" measures of 1966–67 were these:

On 4 March 1966 the "Open Letter" the party published condemned bureaucratisation; about 15,000 state posts were abolished, and six ministries, including the Ministry of Justice, were dissolved.
The wages of middle and upper administrators were lowered; the ratio between the highest and the lowest wage was reduced to about 2.5 to 1; the income tax was abolished.
Office workers and intellectuals were obliged to work one month a year in a factory or in the field.
In the army ranks were abolished, and the political commissariat was brought back.
A campaign was waged for women's participation in social life: the share of women in the local people's councils passed 40 per cent, and in the People's Assembly 30 per cent.

The defence's thesis is this: Albania was the socialist country that noticed the formation of the "new bourgeoisie" lived through in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, and that took the most serious measures against it. This was the practical counterpart, turned inward, of the criticism of revisionism.

Assessment: These measures are real, and they are noteworthy. The narrowing of wage gaps to this extent is a radical step when compared with the practices in the Soviet bloc. But all of these campaigns were conducted from above, on the party's initiative and under the party's control. Sources state that the highest party leadership was exempted from the wage cuts; the leadership lived in Tirana, in the "Blloku" quarter closed to the people. Without an independent union, the right to strike, a free press, and administrators whom the workers can elect and recall, "workers' control" remained in effect party control. A campaign waged against the bureaucracy by the bureaucracy's own hand can go only so far. This is one of the keys of the fall we will speak of in the next section.

6.9. Autarky and economic blockage

After 1978 Albania, together with the ban on foreign credit, tried to develop entirely with its own resources. By the 1980s technological renewal had stopped, the factories had aged, foreign trade had narrowed. Excessive collectivisation practices, such as the tying to the cooperatives in 1981 of the small number of animals the peasants kept in their homes, deepened the food shortage. Queues, the ration system and scarcity became part of daily life at the end of the 1980s.

The defence says that development without debt protected Albania from the Latin American and Eastern European debt crises of the 1980s; this is true. But avoiding the debt trap and breaking from the whole world are not the same thing. The second devalued, in the people's eyes, the sovereignty that the first had secured.

6.10. Summary table: the defence, its true side, and where it falls short

Subject	The defence's thesis	Its true side	Where it falls short
The Sigurimi	The vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat against imperialist infiltration	The MI6/CIA infiltrations, the Greek state of war and the Yugoslav plan of annexation were real	Armed infiltration ended in 1953, the apparatus grew until 1991; its target became the citizens and the party
The camps	The re-education by labour of the enemies of the people	A part of the prisoners really were collaborators or armed opponents	Family exile, the deaths of children, punishment lasting for generations
The purges	A struggle of line, of principle, not a personal one	There were real political differences	The difference was equated with espionage; executions without evidence, secret graves
Religion	A patriotic struggle against foreign influence and backward consciousness; initiative from below	Religious division, and the fascist collaboration of some clerics, were real	Hoxha's own principle of "without violence, with the people's consent" was breached; Engels's warning was proved right
The border	The prevention of treason on a border in a state of war	The borders really were enemy borders	Those who died were mostly citizens who wanted to leave; one of the peaks was 1990
The cult of the person, and the bunkers	Collective leadership; the people's war of a country left alone	The fear of invasion after 1968 was realistic	Marx's opposition to the cult of the person; the burying of resources in concrete
The bureaucracy	The country that took the most serious measures against the new bourgeoisie	The narrowing of the wage gap, and the rotation of cadres, were real	A campaign from above; without workers' democracy, workers' control remained party control

Young comrades, the last column of this table is not a list of accusations, but a list of tasks. Every socialism to be built in the future has to give an answer to every line in this column.

7. Why Did It Fall? Different Explanations, and a Sincere Assessment

Enver Hoxha died on 11 April 1985. Ramiz Alia, who succeeded him, at the beginning declared that he was "on Hoxha's road"; but after the regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989 he moved step by step towards an opening. In January 1990 the first risings were seen in Shkodër. In July 1990 thousands of people took refuge in the foreign embassies in Tirana. After the actions that began in December 1990 in the student dormitories in Tirana, on 11 December the Central Committee allowed political pluralism and the party gave up its "leading role"; the next day the Democratic Party was founded. On 20 February 1991 the Enver Hoxha statue in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana was pulled down by the crowd. In March and August 1991 tens of thousands of Albanians fled to Italy by ship. The Party of Labour won the elections of 31 March 1991; but in May–June 1991 the general strike of the independent unions brought down the government. In June 1991 the party changed its name to the "Socialist Party" and formally abandoned Marxism-Leninism. Those who left the party founded, in December 1991, under the leadership of Hysni Milloshi, the Communist Party of Albania. The Democratic Party of Sali Berisha won the elections of March 1992.

There are explanations of this fall that differ greatly from one another. Let us look first at what was said in the Marxist-Leninist line's own documents, which form the point of view of the piece, and then at the other explanations.

7.1. The fall in this line's own documents

After the fall of socialist Albania, the parties and organisations standing on the Albanian line came together in August 1994 in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and founded an international conference. The documents of this conference reflect this line's official view of the fall. (The quotations below have been translated from the conference's English texts.)

a) The founding declaration (Quito, 1994). The declaration counts Albania, together with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, among the places where capitalism was restored, and starts this process from the 20th Congress of the CPSU: "the process of the restoration of capitalism that has continued since the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union". Among the causes it counts these:

that the process "bears the traces of the actions of imperialism and of the reactionary forces";
that the revisionists and the opportunists are the "principal responsibles" for the damage done to the international communist and workers' movement;
that the communists could not prevent "the rebirth of a bourgeois class that conceals itself as 'socialist', seizes power and destroys socialism".

But in the declaration there is also a self-criticism, usually missed, that is very important for us. The declaration also counts the internal weaknesses of this defeat:

"the absence of theoretical development",
"the underestimation of the internal contradictions of socialist society",
"the isolation of the communist party from the workers and the masses".

And it adds: the Marxist-Leninists "are conscious of our weaknesses in the application and development of Marxism-Leninism"; these "are our own shortcomings, and we will overcome them". The declaration calls, in order to draw lessons from the past, for us to "open the debate, and set ideas, analyses, experiences and lessons against one another".

b) The International Platform (2016). The platform headed "On Capitalism, the Working Class and the Fight for Communism" gives Albania a special place: it says "While capitalism was being restored in the socialist countries, except for Albania..." and then adds "socialism collapsed in Albania too". As the main cause it shows the "counter-revolutionary line dressed in the form of modern revisionism" that became dominant after the 20th Congress; it says this line "cut short socialist construction and opened the road to capitalist restoration", and that the revolutionary mass parties of the working class "turned into trade-unionist, reformist-parliamentarist parties". It defines the bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy inside the workers' movement as the foothold of the bourgeoisie. It describes the dictatorship of the proletariat as "democracy for the great majority of the population, dictatorship over the exploiting classes". According to the platform, "the Albanian communists under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, and the Party of Labour of Albania", played an important role in the formation of the new Marxist-Leninist parties. And "not only victories, but defeats too, can be instructive for the working class and the peoples."

c) The assessment of the thirtieth year (2024). The assessment published on the occasion of the 30th year of the conference's founding recounts that the collapse of 1990 also covered "socialist Albania, which as a small country had for a long time struggled alone against revisionism", that this caused "an immense ideological and political bewilderment" inside the movement, and that some parties dispersed or merged with revisionist, social-democratic and Trotskyist groups. The text also contains a sentence of self-criticism: "We have shortcomings in the assimilation of Marxism-Leninism."

d) The party in Albania. The secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Albania, which stands on this line, says in an interview he gave in 2019 that after Hoxha's death Ramiz Alia "usurped" the party and turned the country towards capitalism with Euro-Atlantic support; he defines the collapse of 1990 "not as a failure of the socialist system, but as the result of the betrayal of the highest leadership of the Party of Labour". A similar frame is dominant in the publications on this line in Turkey as well; for example the title of a piece in Özgürlük Dünyası sums up the thesis in a single sentence: "The renegade R. Alia team put Albania on the road to capitalism" (in Turkish).

An unsigned assessment published in Turkey on this line in October 1991, right in the middle of the fall, on the occasion of Hoxha's 83rd birthday, shows plainly the state of this frame at that time. The piece opens with a basic proposition of Marxism: "The revolution is the work of the masses", but this does not mean that the masses will make the revolution spontaneously; mass movements, if they lack a conscious leadership, "a revolutionary communist party", cannot reach their aim. It assesses the developments in Albania as follows:

"Today, in Enver Hoxha's country, Zogist, reactionary, fascist forces, incited by the imperialists and the reactionaries, are in a state of rising. Their principal targets are also M-L and Enver Hoxha. [...] The PLA, meanwhile, has bowed as much to imperialism as to the internal reaction, and is being dragged along behind the raging reaction."

"This development alone is the clearest proof of E. Hoxha's irreconcilable stance against imperialism, of his standing firm in the dictatorship of the proletariat, of his insistence on continuing the class struggle in every field of life."

That is, according to the reading of 1991, the fall proves not that Hoxha was wrong, but that he was right: because after his death the party abandoned the irreconcilable stance, reaction won. The theoretical basis of this reading is Hoxha's Imperialism and the Revolution: imperialism destroys socialism not only from outside with arms, but also from inside by means of revisionism. It is for this reason no coincidence that Özgürlük Dünyası, on the same line, offered this book again to the reader in February 1991, when the statue was pulled down, as "a strong weapon against imperialism, modern revisionism and every kind of denial" (in Turkish). But the same thesis also brings a question with it: if revisionism is imperialism's "greatest victory", and if the party that knew this best was the Party of Labour of Albania, why could that party not protect itself against this "victory"?

The piece's own starting proposition in fact makes us ask the question we too want to underline. If the mass movement cannot reach its aim without a correct communist party, and if what was decisive in 1991 was the party's "bowing", we have to ask this: why did the party that Hoxha built, educated and repeatedly "cleansed" for forty years bow so easily only six years after his death? The same piece says that the masses "also create their own organisations and their own leaders". In 1990–91 the Albanian masses really did create their own organisations: independent unions, student councils, new parties. But none of these was communist. This is perhaps the clearest indicator of the extent to which the party had broken from the masses. The self-criticism of the Quito Declaration, "the isolation of the party from the workers and the masses", falls exactly here.

e) A current assessment from Turkey. In the piece "Enver Hoxha's last statue: even if it is not seen, it is not missing" (12 April 2026, in Turkish), published in Evrensel on the anniversary of Hoxha's death, Kavel Alpaslan does not enter the causes of the fall; he opens the discussion from another place. According to him, the Western press has fitted Hoxha into the mould of the "mad king"; because in this small Balkan country Hoxha "had shown the audacity to take a front at the same time both against the imperialist pole and against post-Stalin Soviet revisionism, and had tried, with what was lacking and what was in excess, to form a model". Alpaslan accepts that whether the road Hoxha preferred was right or wrong is "a different subject of discussion", and adds this: "Of course we cannot say that everything in socialist Albania was roses." But looking at today's Albania, where the mafia has gained weight, the young are fleeing, inequality has deepened, and which even accepts Europe's prisons, he asks this question: "The real madness, I wonder, was in which period?" And he makes a warning of method: in examples such as Albania, where anti-communist propaganda is intense, while assessing the arrows of criticism "we need to take into account whose bow they come from".

This warning is in place; this piece too, by questioning in section 6 the source of the figures and their political context, tried to apply the same principle. But the warning also has another face: looking at whose bow the arrow comes from must not take the place of asking whether the arrow hits. The deaths of children at Tepelena, those shot at the border, or the ban on religion that contradicts Hoxha's own circular, were lived independently of who tells of them. The sentence "everything was not roses" is a correct beginning; what is really instructive for young comrades is to fill in what lies behind that sentence.

In sum: This line's explanation has two layers. The dominant layer is this: the fall is the result of the revisionism that, from 1956, enveloped the world communist movement taking power in Albania too, under Alia's leadership, after Hoxha's death, and of imperialist pressure; socialism was not defeated, it was betrayed. But in the founding declaration there is also a second, self-critical layer: theoretical stagnation, the underestimation of the internal contradictions in socialism, and the party's breaking from the workers and the masses.

To be honest, I must also add one thing: in the documents I could reach, I could not find a detailed analysis in which these self-critical items were applied concretely to the Albanian experience. The self-criticism remains at the general level; when it comes to Albania, the explanation rests largely on "Alia's betrayal".

7.2. The other explanations

There are also other views that explain the fall. You need to know them, both in order to test your own view and in order to understand the person opposite you in discussions.

View	Who?	Main thesis
Anti-revisionism critical of Hoxha	The writings on Albania of the Communist Party of New Zealand	Alia's "counter-revolutionary fraction" prepared the fall; Alia encouraged the students to be "the masters of the country"; "Alia had destroyed the essence of Hoxha's life long before the students pulled down Hoxha's statue". But Hoxha himself was also "an incomplete Marxist": his concept of "people's power", outside class, prevented the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Albania.
Spanish Marxist-Leninist critics	The Bitácora (M-L) team, 2019	"Albania in Enver Hoxha's last years had lost the revolutionary pulse that had once characterised it." The cadres neglected Hoxha's warnings of degeneration; the Party of Labour of Albania also had errors (for example the misleading account of the Shehu affair, the delayed stance against Khrushchev in 1956). But this was not enough to stop the rise of Alia's revisionism.
The state-capitalism thesis	The Socialist Party of Great Britain (Paul Bennett, August 1991); Ian Birchall, from the International Socialists tradition	Albania was never socialist; it was a state capitalism. The moment administration loosened a little, inefficiency appeared: "The failure of state capitalism was revealed once again." Albania would integrate more openly into the world capitalist system.
The liberal/mainstream explanation	Most of Western historiography, the Albanian right	The inevitable collapse of a totalitarian system: Gorbachev's reforms, the Eastern European domino effect, Alia's fear after Ceaușescu's execution, economic collapse, and the awakening of a people isolated from the world. Socialism itself had failed.
Neither nostalgia nor a narrative of victory	The Marxist philosopher born in Albania, Lea Ypi, Free (2021)	Without hiding the repressive face of the socialist period, but also rejecting the liberal narrative of the 1990s that "freedom has come": the transition brought unemployment, factory closures, the privatisation of public services, gangsterism and emigration. "Freedom had arrived at last, but it resembled a dish served cold."

An interesting result that comes out of this table is this: even among those who defend the Albanian line, there are voices that, instead of tying the fall only to Alia, also look at the Hoxha period itself. The comrades in New Zealand point to the concept of "people's power", the Spanish critics to the loss of revolutionary vitality in Hoxha's last years. The discussion is richer than the duality of "betrayal, or the system?"

7.3. Why did the majority of the people not defend the system?

But young comrades, the dominant explanation does not answer one question: why did the majority of the people not defend the system?

A revolutionary power of forty years collapsed only six years after the death of a leader.

There were also people who took to the streets to defend the system, and to skip this would be an injustice. A piece published in Turkey on this line in October 1991 recounts that, after the pulling down of the statue in Tirana, the first reaction came from Përmet, the city of Hoxha's partisan years: the workers had gone on strike, workers, cooperative peasants, teachers, students and soldiers had marched shouting "Enver Hoxha lives!", a bust of Hoxha had been erected in one of the city's squares, a crowd that included 800 children had begun a hunger strike for the statue to be erected again; the "Union of Volunteers of Enver Hoxha", stated to have 700,000 members, had held a rally in Gjirokastër, and these actions, despite the government's obstruction, had spread to many cities for more than a week. I could not verify these figures from independent sources. But that the pulling down of the statue created a deep division in society, and that at least four people were killed in the clash that broke out on 22 February 1991 in front of the military academy in Tirana, also appears in other sources.

But this defence was not enough to keep the system standing. What was decisive was the movement in the opposite direction:

Those who pulled down the statue were the students of the university that bore Hoxha's name.
In February 1991 miners at the Valias coal mines went on hunger strike.
In May 1991, at the call of the independent unions, hundreds of thousands of workers went on general strike and brought down the government of the Party of Labour.
Tens of thousands of young people, crowding onto ships, fled the country.
The Communist Party of Albania, founded in 1991 and continuing Hoxha's line, was banned in 1992; after the ban was lifted in 1998, in the elections it entered it received 0.7 per cent in 2005 and 0.07 per cent in 2017.

If the decisive sections of the working class are not defending the state that was said to have been founded in their name, and on the contrary are overthrowing it by going on strike, we have to accept that the problem is not only "the traitors above". Marxists explain history not by the good or bad intentions of persons, but by the movement of social forces. To say only "Alia betrayed" is to move away from this Marxist method. Besides, this question also remains unanswered: who chose Alia as successor, and which mechanisms inside the party made his rise possible?

7.4. Applying Quito's self-criticism to Albania

Our proposal is not to invent a new line; it is to take seriously the self-criticism in this line's own founding declaration, and to apply it to Albania. The declaration counts three internal weaknesses: the underestimation of internal contradictions, the isolation of the party from the workers and the masses, theoretical stagnation. In Albania these took the following concrete forms:

The isolation of the party from the workers → The absence of workers' democracy. Mechanisms such as the councils, the factory committees and workers' control of the first years of Soviet power never gained a real strength in Albania. Even the "revolutionising" measures of 1966 were conducted from above, by the hand of the party. The party decided in the name of the working class, the politburo in the name of the party, a single leader in the name of the politburo. The workers saw themselves not as the owners of production and of the state, but as the administered.
Isolation from the masses → Rule based on fear. In a society where the Sigurimi is everywhere, people do not say what they think. This also makes it impossible for the administration to know the real social mood. The anger that exploded in 1990 was an anger suppressed for forty years.
The wrong handling of internal contradictions → The party's consuming of itself. The paradox is this: Albania was the country that most emphasised that the class struggle continues under socialism. But these contradictions were handled not as contradictions inside the people, by way of debate and persuasion, but as "enemy agency", by way of purge. The purge, at every break, of the most able and most critical cadres left the party without creative thought and without an independent will. When Hoxha died, what remained was a cadre that knew no road other than his, and that did not know what to do when that road blocked. That is, the internal contradictions were not underestimated; they were handled wrongly.
Theoretical stagnation → Autarky and economic blockage. The principle of "by our own strength" was a justified stance against the imperialist debt trap; but when, together with the 1976 Constitution's ban on foreign credit, it turned into a complete isolation, it led to the people's standard of living standing still, and in the 1980s to its falling back. In a small country, no creative theoretical effort was seen on how socialist construction cut off from the world would be continued. Young people watching the televisions of neighbouring Italy and Yugoslavia compared their own lives.
The break of generations. The generation that had lived the war and the pre-war poverty saw the system's gains in its own life. The generation born after 1960 knew only the queues, the bans and the fear. The system could not develop a language that would convince this generation.
The alienation created by religious and cultural pressure. Broad sections of the people perceived the coercive intervention directed at their beliefs and their traditions as an attack directed at their own lives.
International loneliness. When Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, Albania had the support neither of the Soviet Union, nor of China, nor of any ally. The imperialist pressure the declaration emphasises was also real. But this loneliness and pressure were added on top of the internal causes above; they did not take their place.

7.5. The comparison table

The dominant explanation	The honest addition
The Alia administration slid into revisionism.	Hoxha chose Alia as successor; the ground of the degeneration was prepared in the Hoxha period, by the mechanisms that silenced every critical voice inside the party.
A bourgeois class concealing itself as "socialist" was reborn.	A mechanism of workers' democracy that would control this layer was never established; in Quito's words, the party was isolated from the workers.
Imperialism besieged the country.	The strongest defence against the siege was the people's support; that support had been consumed by ruling through fear.
The collapse in Eastern Europe created a chain effect.	Albania had been outside the Soviet bloc since 1961; the internal dynamics of the collapse were decisive.
The counter-revolutionaries deceived the young.	The young saw the queues and the fear with their own eyes; they had no need to be deceived.
Socialism was not defeated, it was betrayed.	Socialism could not find enough defenders because it had been built in a form in which the working class was not the subject; those who defended it remained a minority.

This table does not devalue Hoxha's contributions and this line's criticism of revisionism. On the contrary: it shows that when the ideological struggle against revisionism is conducted without workers' democracy, it can produce its own opposite (a bureaucratic system based on fear). This line's founding declaration says "we must open the debate". This piece is a contribution to that debate.

7.6. The Albanians' memory is divided

You need to know one thing more: today in Albania Hoxha's legacy is deeply divided. According to a study carried out at the end of 2016 with OSCE support, almost half the population saw Hoxha's historical role positively. But in the same country live tens of thousands of families who lost their relatives at Spaç, at Burrel. A language that, while remembering Hoxha, ignores the pain of these families is both morally wrong and politically cuts us off from the Albanian working people.

The other face of memory is also told by a village. At the beginning of the 1990s the Hoxha statues in the country were either demolished or sold as scrap. But in the village of Labinot Mal, where the General Headquarters of the National Liberation Army was established in 1943, when the building used as a museum began to be plundered in the 90s, the museum director and the villagers rescued Hoxha's statue and locked it in a store. The last Hoxha statue in Albania has stood since that day among the straw, in a store resembling a barn, under the watch of the villagers from generation to generation. One of the watchers, Sabire Plaku, tells it like this (in Turkish): "Hoxha's presence in the village may not be seen, but it is not missing either."

In the same country, on one side the pain of Spaç, on the other the loyalty of Labinot Mal. Both are real, and both are the memory of the Albanian people. An honest assessment has to hear both at once.

8. Capitalist Restoration: from 1991 to 2026

8.1. Shock therapy

From 1992 the Berisha administration entered a rapid process of privatisation and liberalisation with IMF and World Bank programmes. The cooperatives were broken up, state industry was either closed or sold for next to nothing. Within a few years industrial production fell by more than half; hundreds of thousands of workers were left unemployed. A large part of the factories, irrigation canals and agricultural infrastructure built in the socialist period was plundered or left to rot.

8.2. 1997: the pyramid companies and the civil war

In the mid-1990s the pyramid companies, which appeared with the promise of "the abundance of capitalism", gathered the people's savings with the promise of high interest. It is estimated that about two-thirds of the population put money into these companies; the amount gathered approached half of the country's annual national income. A part of these companies had close relations with the party in power. At the beginning of 1997 the pyramids collapsed. The people lost their savings. The rising that began in the south turned in a short time into a civil war; military depots were plundered, hundreds of thousands of weapons passed into the people's hands. Thousands of people lost their lives. An international military force led by Italy was sent to the country.

1997 was the first great break at which the Albanian people saw the real face of capitalist restoration.

8.3. Emigration: a people's scattering

The most destructive result of capitalist restoration is a people's scattering, in the literal sense of the word:

According to Eurostat data, between 1990 and 2025 a net 1.8 million people emigrated from Albania.
According to the 2023 population census, the country's population fell from 2.8 million in 2011 to 2.4 million; in 12 years about 429,000 people, that is 14 per cent of the population, disappeared. Compared with 1989, about a quarter of the population is missing.
The median age rose by seven years in 12 years, to 42.5. Births fell by about 30 per cent compared with 2011.

These figures show that the "freedom" capitalism promised Albania was largely the freedom to leave. Albania today is Europe's exporter of labour, the depot of cheap labour of the agriculture and construction sectors of Italy and Greece.

8.4. The narco-economy, informality, human trafficking

From the end of the 1990s Albania became an important link in Europe's cannabis and drug trade. The village of Lazarat, until the police operation of 2014, was known as one of Europe's largest centres of cannabis production. The trafficking of women and organised crime became the social wound of the 1990s and the 2000s. Drug money is shown as one of the important sources of the construction boom in Tirana.

In this period two events must be remembered especially in their class meaning:

15 March 2008, Gërdec: In the explosion that occurred at a facility where old military munitions were being destroyed, 26 people died. Most of those who died were poor peasants, employed at low wages and without safety measures. The munitions-destruction work was a source of profit for circles close to the government.
21 January 2011: At an anti-corruption demonstration in Tirana the Republican Guard opened fire; four demonstrators died.

8.5. The Rama period: the Albania of the "strategic investors"

Edi Rama, the leader of the Socialist Party, in power since 2013, won the election for the fourth time in May 2025. The main features of the Rama period:

The hope of the European Union: Albania became a candidate country in 2014, and accession negotiations were opened in 2022. EU membership became the government's main promise, legitimising everything.
"Strategic investment" legislation: Legal arrangements opening public lands, coasts and protected areas to large investors. The change in the protected-areas law in 2024 allowed five-star hotels in protected areas.
The construction boom: Skyscrapers changing Tirana's skyline; claims that money of uncertain origin is being laundered.
The plunder of public space: The demolition in 2020 of the historic National Theatre building, despite the protests, in a police operation towards morning, became an emblem.
The migrant-camp agreement with Italy: Albania accepted holding Italy's migrants in camps set up on its own territory; the country's role as "Europe's buffer zone" became official.

8.6. Labour today

According to INSTAT data, in the first quarter of 2026 the average monthly gross wage became 90,119 lek (around 900 euros). But the median wage is 74,010 lek; about half of those in work, after tax and insurance deductions, take home less than 60,000 lek. Even if wages have risen rapidly in nominal terms in recent years, Albania remains far behind the EU average in purchasing power, wages, productivity and public services.

8.7. The promise of restoration, and the reality

The promise given in 1991	What happened in 2026
Freedom and prosperity	A net 1.8 million emigrants, a quarter of the population missing
The abundance of the market	The pyramid collapse of 1997, which swallowed the people's savings
The rule of law	The leaders of both main parties are associated with corruption investigations
Joining Europe	Europe's depot of cheap labour, and its migrant camp
Democracy	For thirty-five years the same two parties and the same two leaders (Berisha, Rama)
The coasts that were the people's property	Protected areas opened to luxury resorts linked to Kushner

9. The Last Days: The Wave of Protest (November 2025 – October 2026)

9.1. The first phase: the streets of the right-wing opposition (November 2025 – April 2026)

In October 2025 Albania's Special Prosecution against Corruption and Organised Crime (SPAK) opened an investigation into Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku, concerning tenders worth more than 200 million euros. In November the court removed Balluku from office; Rama criticised the court, and in the end, in February 2026, he removed Balluku from the cabinet.

Berisha's Democratic Party, using this process, organised a series of demonstrations in front of the Prime Ministry from November 2025 to April 2026. Most of these demonstrations passed with Molotov cocktails, fireworks and clashes with the police; at each of them there were dozens of detentions, and among them there were children. At the demonstration of 20 February 2026 Enver Hoxha's former villa in Tirana ("Villa 31") was attacked and partly burned.

The class character of this phase is clear: it was the party that had founded the plunder order of the 1990s using the street in a struggle for power. Berisha himself is also being tried on corruption charges. A large part of the people kept its distance from these demonstrations.

9.2. The second phase: the Flamingo Revolution (May – September 2026)

At the end of May 2026, at Zvërnec near Vlorë in the south, local people and environmentalists acted against the fencing with barbed wire of the strip of coast the people had used for centuries. The area is part of the Vjosa-Narta Protected Area, which hosts about 70 endangered species and lies on the flamingos' migration route. Behind the wires was a luxury resort project of billions of euros, planned for Sazan Island and the Zvërnec coast by a consortium with Qatari and Albanian partners, in which Jared Kushner's company Affinity Partners, Trump's son-in-law, was also included. The project had received "strategic investment" status in January 2025.

On 30 May private security guards, before the eyes of the police, attacked the activists. The next day, daily demonstrations began in Tirana, gathering every evening at 18:00 in Skanderbeg Square and marching to the Prime Ministry. The emblem of the movement became the flamingo.

The important turning points:

10–13 June: Large rallies across the country and in the diaspora; an estimate of participation in Tirana of between 100 and 200 thousand.
20 June: The largest rally, with participation of more than 250 thousand. The largest and longest-lasting, largely peaceful mass movement in Albania's history since the beginning of the 1990s.
22 June: Five demands were declared: (1) the resignation of Rama and his cabinet, (2) a twelve-month technical transitional government above the parties, (3) a new constitution, to be approved by referendum, containing a reform of elections and of party financing and bringing a two-term limit for the prime minister, (4) the repeal of the laws on protected areas, cultural heritage, the "Mountain Package" and strategic investments, (5) "a new social contract" between the citizen and the state.
4 July: Protesters pulled down Rama's bust. The agencies likened this to the Enver Hoxha statue pulled down in 1991.
Throughout July: Clashes in front of the parliament, pepper gas and water cannon; dozens of detentions. By the end of the summer it was reported that more than 119 criminal cases had been opened against protesters.

The slogan shouted most by the movement was this: "Rama në burg, Berisha në burg" — Rama to prison, Berisha to prison. That is, the movement was against not only the government, but the two-party order that has shared the country since 1991. Rama, meanwhile, explained the protests by "foreign intervention" and "an international climate against Trump", and said "as long as I am here, investment will not stop". Even if news appeared that the project had been suspended until its environmental impact assessment was completed, the government continued to say it had not given up the project; SPAK is investigating claims of forgery in the land titles.

9.3. Where are the workers?

Most of the analyses written on the Flamingo Revolution read it as a struggle between "citizens and a corrupt elite". Even the assessment of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation defines the movement as "a coalition across classes", stretching from the left to environmentalists, from feminists to conservatives, and does not see the workers' organisations as a separate force.

But the workers were there:

The oil workers: At Bankers Petroleum, owned by Chinese capital, the Hydrocarbon Sector Union organised a strike lasting three weeks, and hunger strikes, against low wages, delayed payments and breaches of the collective agreement. More than 60 per cent of the members took part in the actions. The actions moved from Fier to Tirana.
Mine and oil workers: According to ACLED data, at the peak of the protest at the beginning of June, mine and oil workers also acted at Marinëz and at Spaç.

Spaç, young comrades. The camp where, in the socialist period, political prisoners were forced to work in the copper mine. Today, in the same mines, the workers of capitalist Albania are acting for wages and for security. To place these two images side by side fits the twentieth-century history of Albania into a single frame: neither a "socialism" based on fear, nor a capitalism based on plunder, freed the miner's life.

9.4. The third phase: the student uprising (October 2026)

The students acted peacefully for about three months, because of the high cost of education, the bad conditions in the universities, the absence of financial support, and hopelessness of work after graduation. Their demands were not answered; the government preferred smear campaigns to dialogue.

This week, on 13–15 October 2026, the anger exploded:

Tens of thousands of students were in the streets of Tirana.
The Ministry of Education building was entered and set on fire; fires broke out around the Prime Ministry, in the ministries, and in bank branches, among them a Raiffeisen branch.
The police used water cannon and pepper gas; dozens of police and protesters were injured, dozens of people were detained.
The actions spread to the universities of Elbasan and Shkodër.
The slogans: "Resign!" and "Criminal police!". A student told Reuters "we will not stop until Rama resigns".

Rama's answer: "Governments change not by revolution, but by election. Last year we held an election, not a revolution."

This uprising is a continuation of the student movement of December 2018. At that time Rama had removed eight ministers from office and declared a "University Pact"; but most of the demands were not met.

9.5. A class look at these movements

Young comrades, while assessing this wave of protest we must avoid two errors: either romanticising every mass movement, or belittling it as "unconscious, without a programme".

The strong sides of the movement:

It rejects the two-party plunder order as a whole. The slogan "Rama to prison, Berisha to prison" expresses a healthy lesson the Albanian people has drawn from 35 years of experience.
It defends public space, the coasts, nature and education against commodification; that is, it brings the question of property onto the agenda, even if it does not name it openly.
With the participation of a part of the youth, of women, of the diaspora and of the workers, it formed a broad social base.
It developed independently of the control of the right-wing opposition.

The weak sides of the movement:

It has no class programme. The demands for a "technical government" and a "new constitution" aim to change not the order itself, but the administration of the order. A "technocratic government above the parties" has generally meant, in history, governments that apply IMF and EU programmes more harshly.
The organised working class is not the decisive force of the movement. The strikes and the square actions were not tied to one another.
Illusions about the EU are strong: a part of the movement sees the EU as a referee against Rama. Yet it is also this relationship that turns Albania into a migrant camp and a depot of cheap labour.
In some actions nationalist slogans and right-wing infiltrations are seen (such as the march in August on the embassies of Serbia and Ukraine).
The burning and wrecking actions in October, even while they show the legitimacy of the anger, are also the indicator of the lack of organisation and of strategy. Burning a building does not bring down a government; but it gives the government the opportunity to legitimise repression with the discourse of "chaos". The only thing that really stops a regime is the organised workers' strike that stops production.

And an irony: The crowd that pulled down the Hoxha statue in 1991 believed that capitalism would bring freedom and prosperity. The crowd that pulled down the Rama bust in 2026 is rising against the thirty-five-year balance sheet of that capitalism. But it does not yet fully know what it wants. The Albanian left (new and small structures such as Lëvizja Bashkë) is taking part in this movement; but a mass class party is not yet in sight. Hoxha's name is little mentioned in these streets; when it is mentioned, it is mostly as a past that has to be surpassed.

This is what carries the most important lesson for us: if socialism is to become a hope again for Albania's youth, this can only be a socialism that openly settles accounts with the repressive practice of the past and that puts workers' democracy at the centre. A left that wants to erect Hoxha's statue again cannot find the right to speak in those streets.

10. What Is Taken from the Legacy, What Is Left?

To be taken	To be left
A resistance against fascism that is resolute, organised, and rests on the people	The turning of the anti-fascist front, after the war, into a one-party monopoly
Not bowing to the tutelage of the great powers, or to attempts at annexation	The turning of independence into a complete isolation and autarky
Ideological clarity against revisionism and against compromise with imperialism	The culture of purge that equates every different view with "enemy agency"
The will to develop in the fields of education, health, electricity and women's rights	The administration of this development by fear and surveillance
The principle of sovereignty against foreign debt, the IMF and foreign concessions	The banning of religion and of belief by administrative coercion
A small people's trust in its own strength	The cult of the person, and the myth of the leader's infallibility
The idea that the class struggle continues under socialism too	The mechanical application of this idea inside the party, and the denial of workers' democracy

11. Concrete Tasks for Young Comrades

Read from the source. Read Hoxha's books "The Khrushchevites" and "Imperialism and the Revolution". But beside them, also read the testimonies of those who survived Spaç and Burrel. Whoever does not read the two together understands neither.
Use the criticism of revisionism not as a weapon, but as a measure. Revisionism is compromise, in the name of socialism, with imperialism and with capital. While applying this measure to others, apply it also to the bureaucratisation in our own organisations, to the silencing of criticism, and to the cult of the leader.
Make workers' democracy a matter of programme. Whatever organisation you are in, ask how decisions are taken, how criticism is made, how minority views are protected. A future socialism will be born from our organisational practices today.
Follow the movement in Albania, and build solidarity. Gather information from Albanian sources about the Flamingo Revolution, the student uprising, and the strikes of the oil and mine workers. Organise pieces and interviews that compare the problems of fees, housing and hopelessness of work of the university youth in Turkey with those of the Albanian students.
Expose the concept of "strategic investment". The coasts opened to Kushner in Albania, and the olive groves, coasts and forests opened in Turkey to mining companies and hotels in the name of "the public interest", are the product of the same class logic. Ask the defence of public space together with the question of property.
Discuss emigration as a class question. A quarter of Albania's population has gone. In Turkey too, the emigration of the young, called "brain drain", is growing. Discuss that leaving is not an individual salvation but a social defeat, and that the burden of those who stay and organise grows heavier.
While discussing history, show respect to the victims. Facing the wrongs done in the name of socialism does not weaken socialism; it strengthens it. A language that ignores the pain of the person opposite you makes you unlistened to, even on the matters where you are right.

12. Closing: Not the History of Statues, but of the Class

Dear young comrades,

In 1991 a statue was pulled down in Tirana. In 2026 another bust was pulled down. Meanwhile, in Labinot Mal, in the village where the partisan army was founded, a last statue continues to be hidden among the straw. In between there are thirty-five years, one million eight hundred thousand emigrants, a civil war, a narco-economy, and the barbed wires planted in the flamingos' nest.

Statues do not make history; classes do. Enver Hoxha was the leader of a people that fought fascism and did not bow to the great powers. He was at the same time the head of a system that ruled that people by fear and that shot its own comrades. Without accepting both at once, it is not possible to understand him.

Today Albania's young people, in one of Europe's poorest countries, are looking for a new road, facing on one side the balance sheet of capitalism and on the other the ghosts of the past. Whether that road leads to socialism depends on how honestly socialists can settle accounts with their own past.

Our task is this too: to take from the past the anti-fascist resolve, the will to sovereignty against imperialism, the ideological clarity; and to leave there the fear, the purge, the bureaucracy that makes the worker an object. And to organise for a socialism in which the working class governs itself, in which criticism is not counted as betrayal, and in which no one is shot at the border.

We are not saying happy birthday. We are saying this: we claim the legacy by criticising it.

Shoulder to shoulder against fascism. Sovereignty against imperialism. Workers' democracy for socialism.

Oğuz Demirkapı 16 October 2026

Sources

The gains of socialist construction

US Library of Congress country study (Albania: A Country Study, 1992): "Education under Communist Rule", "Pre-communist education", "Health and Welfare", "Social Insurance", "Agriculture".
Christian Science Monitor, "Economic strides help Albania meet people's rising expectations", 1 February 1988.
Christian Science Monitor, "Albania Upgrades Life on the Farm", 2 August 1989.
Christian Science Monitor, "In Albania, A Return to 'Eye for Eye'", 7 August 1997 (the return of the blood feuds).
Malaria Journal, "Exploring the spatiotemporal drivers of malaria elimination in Europe", 2016.
IndexMundi / UN Population Division, "Albania – Life expectancy at birth".
Wikipedia, "Education in Albania", "Vau i Dejës Hydroelectric Power Station", "Lake Malik", "History of rail transport in Albania", "Durrës railway station", "Albanian Orthography Congress", "Cinema of Albania", "Gjirokastër".
openDemocracy, "Gendered legacies of communist Albania: a paradox of progress".

Current developments (2025–2026)

Al Jazeera, "'Boiling point': Why students are protesting against Albania's Edi Rama", 15 October 2026.
Al Jazeera, "Fire erupts at Albania's Education Ministry as protests spiral", 14 October 2026.
Reuters / GMA News, "Banks, buildings burn as Albania's capital Tirana erupts into student violence", 14 October 2026.
Balkan Insight, "Albanian Student Protesters Clash with Police Outside Ministry of Education", 13 October 2026.
Washington Post, "3rd day of clashes in Albania as anti-government protests sparked by Kushner-linked project swell", 15 October 2026.
Wikipedia, "2025–2026 Albanian opposition protests".
Wikipedia, "Flamingo Revolution".
Wikipedia, "Sazan Island Resort".
ACLED, "Foreign luxury resort sparking Albania's biggest protest wave in years".
The American Prospect, "How Jared Kushner's luxury hotel sparked a protest movement in Albania", 17 July 2026.
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, "Understanding Albania's Flamingo Revolution".
Foreign Policy, "Albania's Flamingo Revolution Against Billionaires and Autocrats", 20 July 2026.
New Eastern Europe, "Making sense of the Flamingo Revolution in Albania", 7 July 2026.
Euronews Türkçe, "Thousands in the street in Albania: protesters want Prime Minister Rama to resign", 11 June 2026 (in Turkish).
European Relations, "Albania Suspends Kushner Resort Amid EU Pressure", 15 October 2026.

Labour and the economy

INSTAT, "Wage Statistics Q1 2026".
Gazeta Tema, "Half of Albanian workers take home less than 60,000 leks a month", 15 June 2026.
Olof Palme International Center, "Strike gave Albanian oil workers a stronger voice", April 2026.
Citizens.al, "Bankers Petroleum oil workers move protest to Tirana", 24 October 2025.

Emigration and population

Balkanweb, "Eurostat: 1.8 million inhabitants have emigrated from Albania during the period 1990–2025".
Tirana Times, "Albania's population shrank by 429,000, census results show".

Historical memory

OSCE Presence in Albania, "Citizens' Understanding and Perceptions of the Communist Past in Albania and Expectations for the Future", 2016.
Tirana Times, news on the 2016 study supported by the OSCE.
IDMC, "Between Apathy and Nostalgia".

The period of repression, the figures, and the defences

UNDP Albania, "Framework Study on prison system, internment and forced labour" (ISKK 2016 data and the Ministry of the Interior archive).
ICMP, "Albania, Missing Persons from the Communist Era: A Needs Assessment".
OSCE Albania, "Sigurimi handbook", 2025.
BunkArt, "Forcat e Kufirit — the Border Forces".
Wikipedia, "Spaç Prison", "Tepelenë Internment Camp", "Koçi Xoxe", "Liri Gega", "Beqir Balluku", "Bunkers in Albania", "Cultural and Ideological Revolution", "Irreligion in Albania", "Operation Valuable", "Northern Epirus".
US Library of Congress country study, "Hoxha's Antireligious Campaign".
Idrit Idrizi, "Enver Hoxha's Last Purge: Inside the Ruling Circle of Communist Albania (1981–1983)", East European Politics and Societies, 36(4), 2022.
Enver Hoxha, "We must fight religious practices with the patriotic and revolutionary spirit of the masses", 27 February 1967 (Portuguese translation, marxists.org).
Bill Bland, "Enver Hoxha As Statesman", 1985.
Ian Birchall, "Hoxha", 1986 (a criticism from the left).
marxists.org, Albania subject archive.

Explanations of the fall

The Quito Declaration, 29 August 1994.
"On Capitalism, the Working Class and the Fight for Communism" (International Platform), 2016.
"30 years of struggle for revolution and socialism", 12 December 2024.
Peoples Dispatch, "Working to restore the socialist system in which independence and democracy are true" (interview with the Communist Party of Albania), 21 August 2019.
Wikipedia, "Communist Party of Albania (1991)".
Özgürlük Dünyası, "The renegade R. Alia team put Albania on the road to capitalism", issue 30 (in Turkish).
Communist Party of New Zealand, "Trotskyite Coup in Albania: Alia to Blame" (Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line).
Equipo de Bitácora (M-L), "El PCE (m-l) y la cuestión albanesa", 2019 (in Spanish).
Paul Bennett, "Fake 'Socialism' Ends in Albania", Socialist Standard, August 1991.
Wikipedia, "Fall of communism in Albania".
bianet, "The collapse of socialism through a child's eyes: Free" (on Lea Ypi's book; in Turkish).
Kavel Alpaslan, "Enver Hoxha's last statue: even if it is not seen, it is not missing", Evrensel, 12 April 2026 (in Turkish).
Gazete Duvar, "The village that did not leave Enver Hoxha: even if it is not seen, it is not missing" (in Turkish).
Unsigned assessment published on the occasion of Enver Hoxha's 83rd birthday, and S. Senem, "The Name of Enver Hoxha and the Communist Ideals Are Immortal", October 1991 (publication details to be added).
Tampa Bay Times (AP), "At least four shot dead in Albanian rioting", 23 February 1991.
Exit News, "29 Years Since Toppling of Enver Hoxha's Statue in Tirana", 20 February 2020.
Özgürlük Dünyası, "A strong weapon against imperialism, modern revisionism and every kind of denial: 'Imperialism and the Revolution'", February 1991 (reprinted 12 March 2015; in Turkish).

Enver Hoxha's works (basic reference texts)

Enver Hoxha, The Khrushchevites (1980).
Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution (1978).
Enver Hoxha, Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism (1980).
Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China (1979).
Enver Hoxha, The Titoites (1982).

Note: The development indicators of the socialist period rest largely on Albanian official statistics; the numbers belonging to the period of repression rest on the estimates of Albanian institutions and researchers after 1991. Neither kind of source is independent of its political context; the figures should be read with this caution.

Topics:Labour and Organising Economy, Capitalism and Ecology World and Imperialism Socialism and the Left Culture, Art and Memory

Tags:#class #history #labour #socialism #imperialism #fascism #europe #capitalism

On Enver Hoxha's Birthday: From the War Against Fascism to Today's Albania

From Darkness to Light, from Light to Plunder: A People's Hundred-Year Class Account

On Enver Hoxha's Birthday: From the War Against Fascism to Today's Albania

16 October 2026 — the 118th anniversary of Enver Hoxha's birth

SUMMARY

Dear young comrades,

1. From Gjirokastër to Korçë: A Teacher's Journey

2. The War Against Fascism (1939–1944)

2.1. From scattered groups to a party

2.2. The National Liberation Front and the army

2.3. Mukje, and the dimension of civil war

2.4. Liberation

2.5. The protection of the Jews

2.6. The lesson of anti-fascism for today

3. From Darkness to Light: The Gains of Socialist Construction

3.1. The starting point: Albania in 1944

3.2. The land to the peasant

3.3. The great literacy campaign

3.4. Health: the defeat of malaria, and a life twenty years longer

3.5. Light to every village

3.6. From marsh to field, from mountain to railway

3.7. A country without debt, without tax, without unemployment

3.8. Social security

3.9. The liberation of women

3.10. Language, culture and historical heritage

3.11. A people's increase

3.12. The balance-sheet table

3.13. The limits of these gains, and their fate

4. The Exposure of Revisionism: Three Breaks

4.1. Against Tito (1948)

4.2. Against Khrushchev (1960–1961)

4.3. Against China (1978)

4.4. Why does the Marxist-Leninist movement claim this legacy?

5. Its Importance for the Socialist Bloc and the World Revolutionary Movement

6. The Shadows: Facts We Do Not Hide, and the Defences on the Marxist Front

6.1. First the figures: what do we know, what do we not know?

6.2. The Sigurimi: the Directorate of State Security

6.3. The camps and the prisons: Spaç, Burrel, Tepelena

6.4. The party's purge of its own cadres

6.5. The ban on religion (1967)

6.6. Those killed at the border

6.7. The cult of the person, and the bunkers

6.8. The defence's strongest card: "revolutionising" against the bureaucracy

6.9. Autarky and economic blockage

6.10. Summary table: the defence, its true side, and where it falls short

7. Why Did It Fall? Different Explanations, and a Sincere Assessment

7.1. The fall in this line's own documents

7.2. The other explanations

7.3. Why did the majority of the people not defend the system?

7.4. Applying Quito's self-criticism to Albania

7.5. The comparison table

7.6. The Albanians' memory is divided

8. Capitalist Restoration: from 1991 to 2026

8.1. Shock therapy

8.2. 1997: the pyramid companies and the civil war

8.3. Emigration: a people's scattering

8.4. The narco-economy, informality, human trafficking

8.5. The Rama period: the Albania of the "strategic investors"

8.6. Labour today

8.7. The promise of restoration, and the reality

9. The Last Days: The Wave of Protest (November 2025 – October 2026)

9.1. The first phase: the streets of the right-wing opposition (November 2025 – April 2026)

9.2. The second phase: the Flamingo Revolution (May – September 2026)

9.3. Where are the workers?

9.4. The third phase: the student uprising (October 2026)

9.5. A class look at these movements

10. What Is Taken from the Legacy, What Is Left?

11. Concrete Tasks for Young Comrades

12. Closing: Not the History of Statues, but of the Class

Sources

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