Enver Hoxha, was the paramount leader of Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Communist Albanian Party of Labour. He was also Prime Minister of Albania from 1944 to 1954 and the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1946 to 1953. Under Hoxha, whose rule was characterized by isolation from the rest of Europe and firm adherence to Stalinism, Albania's government projected the image that it had emerged from semi-feudalism to become an industrialized state.

Biography

Hoxha was born in Gjirokastër, a city in southern Albania. He was the son of a cloth merchant who travelled widely across Europe during his childhood, and the major influence on Enver during these years was his uncle, Hysen Hoxha (/hyɛn hɔʤa/). Hysen Hoxha was a militant who campaigned vigorously for the independence of Albania - which occurred when Enver was four years old - and opposed the repressive governments that prevailed after independence. Enver took to these ideas very strongly, especially after King Zog came to power in 1928.

In 1930, he went to study at the University of Montpellier in France on a state scholarship but he soon dropped out. From 1934 to 1936 he was a secretary at the Albanian consulate in Brussels. He also studied law at the university there. He returned to Albania in 1936 and became a teacher in Korçë.

Hoxha was dismissed from his teaching post following the 1939 Italian invasion of World War II for refusing to join the Albanian Fascist Party. He opened a tobacco shop in Tiranë where soon a small communist group started gathering. He was helped by Yugoslav communists to found and become leader of the Albanian Communist Party (called Party of Labour afterwards) in November 1941, as well as the resistance movement (National Liberation Army), which took power in November 1944.

Hoxha declared himself an orthodox Marxist-Leninist and strongly admired Joseph Stalin. He adopted the model of the Soviet Union and severed relations with his former Yugoslav communist allies following their ideological breach with Moscow in 1948. He had defence minister Koçi Xoxe executed a year later for alleged pro-Yugoslav activities.

Hoxha's regime confiscated farmland from wealthy landowners and consolidated it into collective farms (Cooperatives), imprisoning and murdering thousands in the process. The Hoxha regime propaganda took great pride in claiming that Albania had become completely self-sufficient in food crops during communist rule, as well as developing an Albanian industry and bringing electricity to most rural areas, all the while stamping out illiteracy and disease.

However, the opening of the Albanian borders to the outside world, following the collapse of the communist regime, revealed a completely different picture. Albania was not the industrialized, advanced nation of communist party propaganda, but in fact a country that was backward, not only by Western Capitalist standards, but also by those of other Eastern Bloc countries such as Bulgaria and Romania. The vaunted industry of Albania was, in fact, completely fictional, while the farming collectives used agricultural methods of the previous century. Telephone communication, long established in every household in Albania's neighbouring countries, was unknown to all but the highest ranking communist party officials. Worker wages and living standards were amazingly low by any conceivable standard for a European nation, a fact that led to a massive exodus of Albanian workers into neighbouring Greece and Italy, where they could sustain better standards of living as illegal immigrants, than they did in their country as nationals.

Despite a chronic history of grand-standing, it appeared that Hoxha's only concrete legacy was an unthinkable complex of over 600,000 one-man concrete bunkers across a country of 3 million inhabitants, to act as look-outs and gun emplacements, pointed against towns and villages, just as often as they were outside of them. The paranoid nature of Hoxha's character, who was beset by fears of American invasion just as much as internal revolution, was apparent in the design.

Hoxha had remained a firm Stalinist despite new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin's excesses in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, but this meant Albania's isolation from the rest of communist Eastern Europe. In 1960, Hoxha aligned Albania with the People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split, severing relations with Moscow the following year. In 1968, Albania withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in response to the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Hoxha's internal policies were true to the Stalinist paradigm he admired, and the personality cult organized around him held striking resemblance to that of the USSR leader he idealized. Internally, the "Sigurimi" Albanian secret police made sure to replicate the repressive methods of the KGB and Stasi. Its activities permeated Albanian society to the extent that every third citizen had either served time in labor camps or been interrogated by Sigurimi officers. To eliminate dissent, the government resorted systematically to purges, in which opponents were dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned in forced-labour camps, and often executed. Travel abroad was forbidden to all but those on official business, in order to sustain the myth of an advanced Albania. Any trace of individuality and creativity in cultural life was stifled, as the arts and belles lettres were allowed to exist only to the degree they served as mouthpieces for the government.

In 1967, following two decades of progressively harsher persecution of religion under his rule, Hoxha triumphantly declared his nation to be the first and only officially atheist state in history. Partially inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, he proceeded to confiscate mosques, churches, monasteries, and shrines. Many were immediately razed, others turned into machine shops, warehouses, stables, and movie theaters. Parents were forbidden to give their children religious names. Anyone caught with the Qur'an, Bibles, icons, or religious objects faced long prison sentences.

According to a landmark Amnesty International report published in 1984, Albania's human rights record was dismal under Hoxha. The regime denied its citizens freedom of expression, religion, movement, and association although the constitution of 1976 ostensibly guaranteed each of these rights. In fact, certain clauses in the constitution effectively circumscribed the exercise of political liberties that the regime interpreted as contrary to the established order. In addition, the regime denied the population access to information other than that disseminated by the government-controlled media. The Sigurimi routinely violated the privacy of persons, homes, and communications and made arbitrary arrests. The courts ensured that verdicts were rendered from the party's political perspective instead of affording due process to the accused, who were often sentenced without even the formality of a trial.

Mao's death in 1976 and the defeat of the Gang of Four in China's subsequent inner-party struggle in 1977 and 1978 led to the Sino-Albanian split and Albania's retreat into political isolation, with Hoxha claiming the anti-revisionist mantle to criticize both Moscow and Beijing.

In 1981, Hoxha ordered the execution of several party and government officials in a new purge. Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu was reported to have committed suicide following a further dispute within the Albanian leadership in December 1981 but it is often believed that he was killed.

Later, Hoxha withdrew into semi-retirement and turned most state functions over to Ramiz Alia. Hoxha's death on April 11, 1985, at the age of 76 led to some relaxation in internal and foreign policies under his successor Ramiz Alia, as communist party rule weakened throughout Eastern Europe, culminating in Albania's abandonment of one-party rule in 1990 and the reformed Socialist Party's defeat in the 1992 elections.