Pablo Hiriart
Tirana, Albania. Eighty years ago, Albanians made a fateful mistake for which they are still paying today: they voted for a Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist leader who used democracy to come to power and then destroyed it. He also destroyed the separation of powers, freedom of expression, private property, and autonomous institutions, concentrating absolute power in his own hands. In 1944, Enver Hoxha won the elections. He died in power in 1985 and left behind a successor who was just as Stalinist as he was.
In the streets of the city center, older people walk quickly, taking short steps, without making any noise. They do not look to the sides.
When you approach someone to ask a question, their shock is evident. The mistrust is in their eyes, their tight lips, or their evasive monosyllabic response. The shadow that haunts them is the legacy of the communist dictatorship that imposed a single way of thinking. He installed the binary logic of loyalists and traitors. He imposed the idea of the leader as the exclusive spokesperson for the interests of the people. He eliminated the checks and balances of power. He turned the media into “the voice of the people,” that is, his own voice.
Klea, my Spanish-speaking guide, tells me that she did not live through communism, “but my parents and grandparents did. It was a dark time, a time of terror, without food. The government gave out coupons to exchange for milk and bread. That was all,” she says as we walk through the central square where there is only one statue, that of the national hero, Skanderberg. There was another, of the dictator Hoxha, which students tore down on February 20, 1991, to seal the end of Marxist-Stalinist tyranny.
A few meters from the square stands the minaret of a mosque, the only religious site that was not destroyed during the dictatorship, as it was used as a warehouse. Churches (Catholic and Orthodox) and mosques were demolished, and all religious practice was banned. Only faith in the Labor Party was allowed, and the party was Hoxha.
In 1967, the dictator, an acolyte of Stalin, broke with the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia, allied himself with Mao’s China (with which he also broke), completely abolished private property, surrounded his country with barbed wire, and also banned internal migration—“where you were born, you died.”
No one left Albania, no one entered Albania, not even the news. One in four Albanians was an informant for the Sigurimi (political police). “Since you didn’t know who the Sigurimi informant was, because it could be someone in your family or your neighbor, you had to be careful even about how you slept,” says Kler.
“What do you mean? How did you sleep?” I ask.
“If you put your hands together, someone could accuse you of praying, and you would go to prison. And from prison—look, it’s the one over there—85 percent of those who went in did not come out alive,” says Klea, the guide and translator who fell in love with the Spanish language through Mexican soap operas (something not uncommon in the Balkans), tells me about the paranoid whims of the late dictator:
“In the early 1980s, he ordered the construction of 173,000 underground bunkers because he told the population that everyone in the world was an enemy who wanted to destroy Albania, but he would protect them even from a nuclear attack.” It’s true, the bunkers look like little concrete mushrooms in the mountains, on the sidewalks, on the beaches, along the rural roads—one hundred and seventy-three thousand bunkers in a country the size of Veracruz.
Here in Tirana, I entered the largest of them, Bunker 1, on Mount Dajt. It is possible to walk through some of the underground levels, see a good part of the 200 rooms, kitchens, a classroom, cafeterias, a punishment room, a theater, and Enver Hoxha’s offices next to reception rooms.
“When the dictator got sick, people had to cry; otherwise, they could be punished. My mother says they beat her to make her cry, because otherwise she couldn’t produce tears,” Adriana, a guide at the port of Durres, tells me. During communism, the persecution of religious figures and opponents was brutal.
Anton Luli, a Jesuit priest, was imprisoned after being denounced by a neighbor for “agitation against the people’s power.” He spent 17 years in prison and additional years in forced labor and survived to tell the tale. His first cell was a bathroom in a mountainous area, where he had to remain for nine months amid hardened feces and with no space to lie down. One Christmas, he was hung from the ceiling by his armpits to “wait for his savior.” Despite everything, he considered his imprisonment a prolonged celebration of his priestly vocation. The torture, loneliness, and his faith as his only refuge are recounted in his autobiographical account, which is preserved in the Vatican.
Businessmen did not escape. Konstantin Boshn, an economist and banker, was imprisoned for criticizing the transfer of land to the state and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison several years later, under surveillance, and died in extreme poverty.
Fresh in memory is the suffering of priest Simon Jubani, imprisoned for 26 years. He refused to work in the mines and endured brutal punishment. He was released in April 1989, and a year later celebrated the first public Mass in almost half a century, symbolizing the return of public faith to Albania after the collapse of the communist regime.
The sun shines on the white walls of the newly built St. Paul’s Cathedral. In the atrium, we find the statue of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was from Albania (now her birthplace belongs to North Macedonia). The airport is named after her.
Nothing remains of the dictator. Only institutional destruction after abolishing freedoms, subjugating his people, and eliminating private property. There is no business sector that can rebuild this country. In the city and on the coast, numerous buildings are under construction, primarily for large hotel chains, as tourism has the potential to boost Albania’s economy significantly. It has two and a half million inhabitants and received 11.9 million foreign visitors last year.
And the other thing that remains of the communist government is the shadow of fear and mistrust in a national community destroyed by communism. Young people are emigrating from the country. In five years, 20 percent of the population had left, almost entirely those under 35. They are fleeing a history of fear and silence. They are leaving. The future lies elsewhere. They love their country, they tell me. It hurts, but they resign themselves and close the door, never to return.
It would be worth putting a plaque on each of the 173,000 abandoned bunkers and on the door of every empty house that says, “Communism passed through here.”
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