Thread by @WholePicture_

here a #Thread about #Albania #Communism #History #COLDWAR :

75 years ago Enver Hoxha turned Albania into a Stalinist development dictatorship
In 1946 the backward agricultural country Albania was re-established as a people's republic.

#BREAKING #Soviet
nzz.ch/international/…

The communists carried out the social experiment with tremendous cruelty. It ended in the country's total isolation.

Enver Hoxha will appear as chairman of a provisional government on Friday, January 11, 1946 in Tirana before the newly elected Constituent Assembly of Albania, which abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the People's Republic.

On the basis of a constitution passed in March, he formed a new government in which he also took over the foreign and defense ministries.

Albania was a small and backward country that was not viable without international help when it seceded from the Ottoman Empire in 1912.

It was dependent on Austria-Hungary until the end of the First World War and passed into the political and economic sphere of influence of Italy in the interwar period. Occupied on Good Friday 1939, it was integrated into the fascist kingdom and ruled by an Italian governor.

After the Italian surrender in September 1943, German troops from the occupied countries of Yugoslavia and Greece moved in, joined Kosovo, which was largely inhabited by Albanians, and promised an independent government for Greater Albania.

However, the German presence was also short-lived, because in autumn 1944 they began to withdraw from the Balkans, as did that from Albania at the end of November.

Albanian resistance groups had formed against the Italian occupation; they only fought with one another temporarily, but the more fought against each other the closer it got to the end of the war.

The National Liberation Front under the leadership of the late-founded Communist Party was to become decisive for the future of the country.

Albania was an agricultural country with a share of about 85 percent peasant, largely illiterate population and some large-scale families who had divided the fertile land. There was no classic workforce as a basis for communist activities.

The writings of Marx and Lenin had not yet been translated into Albanian.

Accordingly, there were about a dozen young communist activists who were to form the core of the later political power, some of them rivaling.

Thanks to this broad support, it was easy for the Liberation Army to prevail against the rest of the resistance and, in the wake of the withdrawing German troops, to occupy Tirana on November 28, 1944.

All political resistance was broken as part of a comprehensive show trial, the large estates were expropriated and the land was distributed to the dispossessed.

The economy was largely nationalized and a central economic control system based on the Yugoslav and Soviet models was installed.

The Communist Party of Albania soon changed its name to the Labor Party.

However, Albania had a problem as they were not recognized internationally, except by the other communist countries.

The problem of modernization was much more difficult to solve. Albania's society was backward, agrarian, poor, illiterate and strongly patriarchal.

The Albanian communists had set out to transform the country into a modern, secular, socialist industrial state paradise within a short period of time.

This radicalism, however, aroused a lot of incomprehension and, above all, decided resistance on the part of the population. Religious ties, traditional family values, ancient customary law, the submission of women - all of this was soon questioned by the single ruling party.

Just recently, in the course of the agrarian reform, the small farmers were confronted with the demand for its co-operativeisation.

The Albanian leadership acted uncompromisingly, mainly by force.

The party established a development dictatorship which in terms of its cruelty could not be compared with any other socialist country in Eastern Europe.

Thousands of people, mostly men, who were often accused of obscure crimes, disappeared for many decades in labor camps, where they were forced to do exhausting work "to build socialism" in the most primitive health and social conditions.

In 1967 the party forbade any practice of religion, religious buildings were destroyed or used for other purposes, and religious personnel were arrested, sentenced to forced labor or killed.

The paradox was that apart from manpower, the country lacked everything that would have been a prerequisite for the implementation of the violent modernization policy: ....

....skilled workers for almost every area, training and production facilities, machines, factories, infrastructure, railways, roads, bridges and above all State capital.

As the poorest country in the Eastern Bloc, the new leadership could build on international socialist solidarity, but this, as it soon turned out, was subject to strong fluctuations.

Without benevolent support, neither the country nor the party were able to survive.

Yugoslavia was the first in a series of beneficiary states. However, it saw Albania as a future part of a Yugoslav-Bulgarian Balkan Federation and from 1946 believed it was on the way to being degraded to a Yugoslav federal state.

Belgrade made a considerable contribution to the Albanian state budget, but in return insisted on adapting the currency and economic structure to Yugoslav conditions.

In mid-1948 Albania opted for Stalin's side and condemned Yugoslavia for the imperialist course.

Now the Soviet Union, but also its allies, ensured regular interest-free loans or grants, goods and grain deliveries and the training of specialists and students.

Complete industrial plants were supplied, which were built by accompanying specialists, but mostly never fully commissioned because of the lack of important prerequisites in the country.

Stalin himself warned Hoxha several times against neglecting agriculture and consumer industries in favor of heavy industry. But this did not impress the Albanian leadership.

When the Soviet Union insisted on its demand in 1959/60, Albania abruptly switched to an alliance with China, which had just entered into a deep ideological conflict with the Soviet Union. The old game was now repeated.

China paid into the Albanian budget pot, supplied factory equipment and made loans available. In 1975, however, the moment came when China demanded loan repayment. This should mark the end of the Sino-Albanian alliance.

In 1976 the Albanian leadership issued a stipulation not to take out foreign loans and only to import as much as one was able to export.

This new course should, however, clearly show that the country was not in a position to create a catching-up development out of itself .......

....- not even under the forced renunciation of consumption by the population and extreme violence by the regime, which continues to call itself Stalinist.

At the end of the 45-year socialist era, the population was starving and the industrial plants that were given away were no longer worth anything. After four and a half lost decades, the country was once again at the beginning.