From Stalin to Mao

Albania and the Socialist World

Elidor Mëhilli

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501712234
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Europa del Este

Elidor Mëhilli has produced a groundbreaking history of communist Albania that illuminates one of Europe's longest but least understood dictatorships. From Stalin to Mao, which is informed throughout by Mëhilli's unprecedented access to previously restricted archives, captures the powerful globalism of post-1945 socialism, as well as the unintended consequences of cross-border exchanges from the Mediterranean to East Asia.

After a decade of vigorous borrowing from the Soviet Union—advisers, factories, school textbooks, urban plans—Albania's party clique switched allegiance to China during the 1960s Sino-Soviet conflict, seeing in Mao's patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Mëhilli shows how socialism created a shared transnational material and mental culture—still evident today around Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity. Combining an analysis of ideology with a sharp sense of geopolitics, he brings into view Fascist Italy's involvement in Albania, then explores the country's Eastern bloc entanglements, the profound fascination with the Soviets, and the contradictions of the dramatic anti-Soviet turn. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs, From Stalin to Mao draws on a wealth of Albanian, Russian, German, British, Italian, Czech, and American archival sources, in addition to fiction, interviews, and memoirs. Mëhilli's fresh perspective on the Soviet-Chinese battle for the soul of revolution in the global Cold War also illuminates the paradoxes of state planning in the twentieth century.

1

TEN YEARS OF WAR

World War II has never really ended in Albania.

Harrison Salisbury (1957)

The day after Good Friday, 8 April 1939, residents of Tirana woke up to find themselves under occupation. Rumors about an Italian invasion had been circulating that whole week. On 5 April, Albania’s Hungarian-born queen had given birth to a son. Within the span of those two days, King Zog, the Muslim chieftain who had established a royal dictatorship, got an heir and lost the kingdom. Desperate and defeated, he fled to Greece. (He would not step foot into the country again.) “Since yesterday,” Mussolini is reported to have said with characteristic exaggeration, “Italy has been turned again into a great empire.”1 With the military occupation complete, Italian officials formed a puppet government and assumed control of the army. The parliament offered the Albanian crown to Victor Emmanuel III. An economic and customs union between the countries followed. Promptly, the Italians also set up a local Fascist party, which took its orders from Rome. But Fascist ambition was no match for Italian capacities. Humiliation ensued. In 1940, Mussolini launched a campaign to invade Greece and failed. Hitler had to come to the rescue; the Wehrmacht attacked Greece the following spring.

Mussolini’s occupation set the stage for the establishment of a Communist party in the only Eastern European country that did not have one. To be sure, there had been a number of Communist-leaning activists in the 1920s and 1930s, many of them pushed into exile after Zog’s overthrow of the government of Fan Noli (the “red bishop”).2 They had set up the National Revolutionary Committee in Vienna, with support from the Communist International (Comintern). One early Comintern-connected activist was Egypt-born Koço Tashko, a Harvard graduate who became involved with the Vienna committee. Tashko studied at the Lenin Institute in Moscow and then, in 1937, moved to Albania and became leader of a Communist group in the southeastern town of Korçë.3 There were other such groups around the country, almost all of them quarreling with one another.4 Two Yugoslav instructors, Miladin Popović and Dušan Mugoša, arrived in 1941 with the task of helping to unite the factions.5 “We had found a real chaos,” Popović later described the domestic scene.6 After intense campaigning, some activists agreed to join forces and founded the Communist Party of Albania—the official date given as 8 November 1941.

Borrowings from Yugoslav practices were conspicuous from the beginning. Communist-led resistance groups adopted, for example, the wartime motto “Death to Fascism—freedom to the people!” Wartime army-related organizations, similarly, drew from Yugoslav methods. But such borrowings, as we will see, would later become an embarrassment. After the 1948 Stalin-Tito break, Albanian authors would insist that the party had always been native. Yugoslav accounts, in turn, insisted on the Yugoslavs’ role.7 What was supposed to be a historic moment—the founding of a young party of freedom fighters and revolutionaries—fueled accusations, for over half a century, that the Albanian organization had simply been an “appendage” of the mother party in Belgrade. But this controversy is largely a function of later quarrels. In the early 1940s, there was no contradiction in the fact that an inexperienced group could derive its strength from a popular movement for liberation and at the same time borrow extensively from the Yugoslavs, who, for their part, reveled in their organizational superiority.

One participant in the founding meeting of the party was a thirty-three-year-old activist named Enver Hoxha. Son of a Muslim merchant, Hoxha was born in Gjirokastër and briefly studied natural sciences in Montpellier on a state scholarship (issued from the same government he would later vilify). He failed to graduate, however, and moved to Paris and then Brussels, where he worked for the Albanian consulate. In his memoirs, he later claimed to have become active in French Communist circles, an idea that secondary sources have repeated without seeking out any evidence.8 In reality, Hoxha was a latecomer to Communist interwar activities. Upon his return in 1936, he took up a teaching position at the French lycée in Korçë. There he became friendly with the local Communist faction (where Tashko was active) and, later, in Tirana, he ran a tobacco shop secretly used for party meetings. Not a widely known figure, Hoxha was elected to the provisional Central Committee and took on the role of secretary. Petro Marko, a writer who had volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, only to end up locked in Italian prisons, later recalled that people at the time, including other high-level agitators, did not know much about Hoxha. Like Yugoslav involvement, this fact became fodder for later speculation: Who stood behind this man?9

What he may have lacked in experience, Hoxha nevertheless made up for in ambition and appeal: in the Albanian context, he seemed like a vaguely intellectual type, youthful, and a charismatic agitator with a Francophone background (no matter how brief the exposure to the French university had been). He was not leader of any one of the factions, which would have worked to his advantage.10 As the British recognized, Hoxha was particularly adept at appearing like “a man of moderate views,” a mediator between factions.11 “An attractive person,” one 1947 US intelligence report described him, “he makes friends easily and gives the impression of being an accomplished politician.”12 Another confirmed that he was “tall, handsome, athletic,” while adding that he was also “determined and aggressive, ambitious, cunning, insincere, and lacking in any fundamental ideals.”13 The clandestine nature of the party proceedings and the urgency of war also likely worked in favor of a quick solution to the problem of selecting a temporary secretary. But Hoxha would prove anything but a provisional choice.

Communist ranks increased thanks to aggressive campaigning and promises of liberty and land reform. Why did peasants in the lowlands mobilize, and, more important, how did the Communists retain this popular base? The sociologist Besnik Pula has emphasized institutional and legal centralization showing how the Communist regime reframed “the terms of political conflict from one involving the peasantry and the landowners, to one which found the cause of peasant grievances in the policies of the state.”14 Other domestic forces vying for power included conservative republican opponents, royalists (supporters of the exiled king), liberals, and various landowners alarmed by “the Bolshevik threat.” The self-proclaimed nationalists of the National Front (Balli Kombëtar), on the other hand, were made up of agrarian and conservative elements, as well as nationalist proponents of “ethnic Albania” (which included Albanian-inhabited Kosovë/Kosovo). In the pursuit of a “popular front,” the Communist Party called a conference in late 1942, out of which came the National Liberation Movement. The Communist elements within the movement, who had the advantage of not being associated with former ruling classes, presented themselves as eager to engage in warfare. The National Front, they would protest, was unwilling to do the same.

British support was another factor in the pursuit of a united front.15 This took on added significance after Mussolini’s fall in the summer of 1943 and the capitulation of Italian troops later that year, which some took to mean that a British intervention might be imminent. Instead, the Germans quickly invaded the country. Like the Italians, they put in place an “independent” government composed of nationalist figures. The Nazis also aggressively exploited the ethnic rallying cry of a “greater Albania,” gaining collaborators along the way. They argued that the Reich would sustain Albanian independence in the Balkans, just as Austria-Hungary had supported its exit from the Ottoman Empire. Aware of the importance attached to land reform, a German-language paper emphasized the slogan “Bread for all of Albania.”16 When confronted with mounting partisan resistance, however, particularly along the countryside, Nazi response was ruthless. The Communist-led forces, for their part, lambasted the nationalists of the National Front as collaborators. In this context, the British struggled with the choice of a faction to support. Disagreements among local resistance groups were, as one of their memos put it, “distracting and exasperating.”17

Some differences among the locals were clear. One British report described the partisans as “young, ill-mannered, fanatical, desperately poor, who perhaps steal on occasions.” Ill prepared for sustained fighting, they were nevertheless equipped with determination: “They are sincere, irritatingly, infuriatingly sincere, and, if they are not fighting the Germans, the Germans are fighting them.” The nationalists of the Front, on the other hand, did not “possess the fanatical determination of the partisans.”18 Hostility between the partisans and the nationalists escalated into bitter fighting, with the latter invoking German assistance to fight the former.19 These choices doomed some of the principal non-Communist elements and helped clear the field amid the resistance groups. In the middle of 1944, as they grew more sure of an Allied victory, the expanded Communist-led partisan forces also turned up the violence against the nationalists and pro-Zog elements. British back-and-forth moves, on the other hand, added to suspicions over Allied intentions, based on the fear that London might seek to cooperate with Rome and Athens at the expense of Albanian territorial integrity.20

All of this is important for understanding the conflicting impulses that foreign presence created long before the advent of a Communist regime. In November 1944, following German retreat, Hoxha marched into the capital in triumph. Yugoslav organizational guidance, combined with British supplies, but more critically the direction of the anti-Nazi counteroffensive far away from Albania helped propel the partisans to power. Their dogged determination but also some of their opponents’ wartime choices allowed the Communists to set the terms for describing what was happening on the ground. They presented themselves as the force of action. Their rivals, by comparison, were divided and prone to squabbles. On the one side, there were youthful fighters chanting about the glory of the future. On the other, there were older men, easily stereotyped as bent on restoring past privileges. “The regime was brought to power mainly by the enthusiasm of the youth,” observed one British memo.21 The average age of the army troops, according to witnesses, was about twenty years. The party apparatus was similarly young.22 Not all nationalists had been Nazi collaborators, but this did not make the youthful charge against them less powerful.

The significance of Communist wartime tactics comes across in a report from Major A. V. Hare, a British officer present in Albania between November 1943 and November 1944. Alongside fighting, the major observed, the Communists placed great emphasis on education and agitprop. “The Party built up a network of political education” within the Front, he wrote, “with the task of explaining the war and the general political situation to every peasant in the zone, in just the way [the Front] wanted it explained.” Hare reasoned that a political force that wished to rule in a small destitute country would, by necessity, have to rely on an outside power. The local Communists, he wrote, “naturally look to Russia.” But the Communists could also be pragmatic. “In order to check the more natural tendency of the country to look to the Western allies,” Hare added, “they employ strong propaganda against us through party cells, while openly maintaining sufficiently friendly relations with us to continue the flow of supplies.”23

In retrospect, the words seem prophetic. Communist officials came to dominate the Democratic Front (a successor to the National Liberation Movement), which they were at pains to present as a broad-based organization. Joseph Jacobs, the American representative in Tirana, wrote that he had “no illusions” regarding the new regime, which he described as a “sincere, patriotic group of individuals who are going to be difficult to deal with.” The officials, he explained, “are ignorant of the science of government, know little of international relations, and are highly sensitive over the fact that, after fighting a common enemy, they have as yet failed to receive any recognition except from Yugoslavia and possibly secret sympathy from the Soviet Union.”24 Belgrade had been the first to recognize Albania’s new government, in May 1945. Soviet recognition followed later that year.

In the December 1945 elections, almost all the candidates on the ballot were members of the Democratic Front, and they campaigned in the name of that organization rather than the Communist Party. Party officials were intentio...