Whither Albania? Uncle Enver’s country is gone, leaving uncertainty in its place
In 2021, Lea Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics wrote a book about growing up in “Uncle Enver’s” Albania.
Then, it was a place that revered the Stalinist dictator. Where socialism was merely a flawed transitory stage, enroute to perfect “communist freedom”. Where Albania’s near-total isolation was celebrated as a sign of its fierce commitment to being on “the right side of history”.
Ms Ypi describes a country pumped up on self-belief, which was all it really had after Enver Hoxha severed relations with much of the outside world. A bit like Millwall Football Club, Hoxha’s Albania might have had the slogan: No one likes us, we don’t care. The country disdained a good relationship with the Italian “imperialists” just over the water, the “revisionist” Warsaw Pact countries and the pretend-Communist Chinese.
She writes: “In the late forties, we split up with Yugoslavia, when the latter broke with Stalin. In the sixties, when Khrushchev dishonoured Stalin’s legacy and accused us of ‘leftist nationalist deviationism’, we interrupted diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In the late seventies, we abandoned our alliance with China when the latter decided to become rich and betray the Cultural Revolution…we had fought mighty empires and shown the rest of the world how even a small nation on the edge of the Balkans could find the strength to resist”.
Growing up in Durres, an Adriatic port city west of Tirana with mother Doli, father Zafo and paternal grandmother Nini, the young Lea is fervent about Uncle Enver. She becomes a Pioneer, or a young Communist leader. Six years old when he died, she only slowly becomes conscious of her own family’s great unsaid — the stories that must never be told, the euphemisms that are de rigueur in an oppressive system.
The book offers fascinating detail about life in Communist times, where some rules were meant to stay in place but not really be enforced: “Take grocery shopping. There was always a queue. It always formed before the distribution lorry arrived. You were always expected to join, unless you had befriended the shopkeeper. That was the general rule. But there were also loopholes. Anyone was allowed to leave the queue so long as they found an appropriate object to replace them…an old shopping bag, a can, a brick or a stone. Then there was another rule…that once the supplies arrived, the object left to act as your representative immediately lost its representative function…In the very rare cases in which the system broke down, fights erupted and queues turned nasty, brutish and long. People fought bitterly over stones that looked similar…”
And she writes about the status symbols in a socialist state: “…my mother bought an empty [Coca Cola] can from another teacher in her school, for the equivalent of what you would shell out for a painting of our national hero Skanderbeg in the tourist shop. She spent the afternoon deliberating with my grandmother where to put it, and since it was empty, whether to adorn it with a fresh rose from the garden. They had decided that thought the rose was an original idea, it would distract from the aesthetic value of the can, and so they had left it bare, on top of our best embroidered cloth.”
Coca Cola cans, she says, were “an extremely rare sight…markers of social status: if people happened to own a can, they would show it off…”
It really was very different back then and Ms Ypi has done well to convey the pros and cons of change, visible all around in Albania some 35 years after the Communist state was dismantled.
As she writes, her own mother often wonders why she teaches and researches Marx and writes about the dictatorship of the proletariat. To which she offers the following answer: “My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, of the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, turning a blind eye to injustice…My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal.”
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
