In 1973, when Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship was at its peak, I slipped into Europe’s most isolated country masquerading as a university lecturer. Journalists were routinely denied visas and subterfuge had to be employed to get across the border. One of the more memorable experiences of our two-week bus tour was a visit to an open air cinema in the port city of Durrës. The main feature was a crackly version of Henry V, starring Laurence Olivier, preceded by a short comedy turn by Norman Wisdom. With his cloth cap at a jaunty angle, censors for the Party of Labour of Albania assumed he exemplified the uplifting struggles of a typical English working-class lad. The evening’s high point was the newsreel. It showed the opening ceremony of a Congress of the Union of Albanian Women. This consisted of a long line of women, queuing to be greeted by Hoxha. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a light-grey double-breasted suit, he embraced each delegate with prolonged gusto. The scene seemed to combine a Mafia don’s behaviour with medieval droit de seigneur, quite unlike the home life of the puritanical men running other communist states in Europe at the time.
The newsreel offers only the most fleeting insight into Albanian political life. To discover what was really going on in ruling party circles under Hoxha’s sway you must turn to Blendi Fevziu’s well-researched biography. Whether or not he was a philanderer, it provides copious ammunition to prove Hoxha was a tyrant. For three decades after Stalin died, during an era when unpredictable terror had given way in the Soviet Union to more survivable repression, Hoxha’s Albania continued the worst practices of an autocracy – purges, torture, abject confessions and executions. They affected old comrades in the politburo far more than ordinary citizens. Of the six co-founder members of the party, only one died at home in bed. The rest were killed or jailed.
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