Читать книгу Area Handbook for Albania - Stephen Peters - Страница 12

The emissaries of the Yugoslav Communist Party interpreted the agreement as a victory for the nationalists and demanded that the Albanian Communist Party not only denounce the agreement but also launch a full-scale attack on the Balli Kombetar. The Albanian Communists bowed to this demand and, in September 1943, launched the attack against Balli Kombetar and subsequently against the Legality Movement. This movement was founded in November 1943 by Abas Kupi, who until August 1943 had been a member of the Central Council of the National Liberation Movement but broke away from it after the Mukaj agreement was denounced.

In May 1944 the National Liberation Front, as the movement was by then called, sponsored the Congress of Permet for the purpose of creating the necessary machinery to seize power. The Congress appointed Hoxha commander in chief of the Army of National Liberation and elected the Albanian Anti-Fascist Liberation Council, which in turn created the Albanian Anti-Fascist Committee, under the presidency of Hoxha, as the executive branch of the council. The Congress of Berat, convened by the front in October of the same year, converted the committee into a coalition provisional "democratic" government, which in the following month seized control of the whole country and on November 28, Albania's traditional Independence Day, installed itself in Tirana.

In many respects the 1943-44 civil war in Albania followed a course similar to that which took place between the partisan forces (Communist) of Josip Broz (Tito) and General Mihailovich's Chetniks (loyalist) in Yugoslavia. The Communist operations and final seizure of power in Yugoslavia played a major role in the Communist takeover in Albania. Albania was the only European Communist country that was freed from the Axis invaders without the actual presence of Soviet forces and without direct military assistance from the Soviet Union. Political direction was supplied by the emissaries of the Yugoslav Communist Party attached permanently to the Albanian Communist Party after its founding in 1941. The Anglo-American command in Italy supplied most of the war material to the Albanian partisan forces.

Albania's future was never specifically discussed by the Big Three—Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—at either the Teheran or the Yalta conferences. Nor did Albania figure in the discussions in Moscow in October 1944 between Churchill and Stalin, when they informally agreed to divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, at least for the duration of the war. Accordingly, when the last German troops were driven out of Albania, there was a kind of political vacuum that the Communists, with superior political organizations and substantial armed partisan groups, were able to fill.

In August 1945 the first congress of the National Liberation Front was held, and the name of the organization was changed to the Democratic Front in an effort to make it more palatable to the public. Contending that the Democratic Front represented the majority of the population because all political opinions and groups except Fascists were included in it, the Communist rulers allowed only Democratic Front Candidates for the first postwar national elections held in December 1945.

The Constituent Assembly elected at this polling was originally composed of both party members and some nationalist elements. The latter apparently continued to feel that cooperation with the Communists was possible but, within a year after the elections, they were summarily purged from the Assembly, and subsequently a number of them were tried and executed on charges of being "enemies of the people." All national and local elections since 1945 have been held under the aegis of the Democratic Front.

Even after the "liberation," the Party continued its conspiratorial nature and did not come into the open until the First Party Congress was held in November 1948. Before that time all its meetings were held in closest secrecy, and no statements, communiques, or resolutions were published in its name. The Party thus continued to use the front technique effectively even after it became the undisputed ruler of the country.

THE COMMUNIST PERIOD

The Constituent Assembly, elected on December 2, 1945, proclaimed on January 11, 1946, the People's Republic of Albania; and on March 14 it approved the first Albanian Constitution, based largely on the Yugoslav Communist Constitution. In this first Constitution no mention of any kind was made of the role played by the Party or any other political organizations. The Constitution was, however, amended after the break with Yugoslavia in 1948, and revisions of the Constitution published since 1951 have cited in Article 12 the Albanian Workers' Party as the "vanguard organization of the working class."

The Communist regime quickly consolidated its power through a ruthless application of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The first measures were both political and economic. In the political field a large number of nationalist leaders who had chosen to remain in the country when the Communists seized power rather than flee to the West, as many of them did, were arrested, tried as "war criminals" or "enemies of the people," and were either executed or given long-term sentences at hard labor. All families considered potentially dangerous to the new regime, especially families of the landed aristocracy and the tribal chieftains, were herded into concentration or labor camps, in which most of them perished from exposure, malnutrition, and lack of health facilities. Some of these camps were still in existence in 1970.

In the economic field a special war-profits tax was levied, which amounted to a confiscation of the wealth and private property of the well-to-do classes. A large number of those who could not pay the tax, because it was higher than their cash and property assets, were sent to labor camps. All industrial plants and mines were nationalized without compensation, and a radical agrarian reform law was passed providing for the seizure of land belonging to the beys and other large landowners and its distribution to the landless peasants.

The 1944-48 period was characterized by an increase of power and influence of the Yugoslavs over the Party and the government. This in turn engendered resentment even among some top Party Leaders, who were kept in check or purged by Koci Xoxe, minister of interior and head of the secret police. Backed by the Yugoslavs, he had become the most powerful man in the Party and government but was tried in the spring of 1949 as a Titoist and executed. By the beginning of 1948 preparations had been completed to merge Albania with Yugoslavia, but the plan was not consummated because of the Stalin-Tito conflict, which resulted in Tito's expulsion from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform—see Glossary) on June 28, 1948.

The Stalin-Tito rupture offered Enver Hoxha and his closest colleagues in the Albanian Party Political Bureau (Politburo) the opportunity to rid themselves of both their internal enemies, such as Koci Xoxe, and of Yugoslav domination. A few days after the Cominform resolution against Tito, the Albanian rulers expelled all Yugoslav experts and advisers and denounced most of the political, military, and economic agreements. Albania immediately established close relations with Moscow, although Stalin never signed a mutual assistance pact with Tirana, as he had done with all the other European Communist countries. The Party leadership was now concentrated in the hands of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu. Shehu had been dismissed in January 1948 as Chief of Staff of the Albanian People's Army, because he had opposed the integration of the Yugoslav and Albanian armed forces and the stationing of two Yugoslav divisions on Albanian soil. He was rehabilitated immediately after the break with Yugoslavia.

The period of direct Soviet influence in Albania began in September 1948, when the first joint economic agreement was signed. After the establishment of the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) in February 1949, of which Albania became a member, the other Soviet bloc countries began to extend economic aid. As a result, an intensified program of economic development began. From 1951 to 1955 industrial and agricultural production increased rapidly, and the basis was laid for transforming Albania from a backward agricultural economy to a more balanced agricultural-industrial one.

The de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union had serious repercussions in the internal situation in Albania. Although Hoxha vetoed any relaxation of police controls and stamped out any dissenting voice within the Party after Stalin's death, by 1956 there was a significant minority in the Party elite that hoped to profit by de-Stalinization. The opposition reached its peak at a Party conference in Tirana in April 1956, held in the aftermath of the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress. Some of the delegates, including Central Committee members, criticized openly the conditions in the Party and requested that the topics of discussion be concerned with such topics as the cult of personality, the rehabilitation of Koci Xoxe and other top Party leaders purged since 1948, Party democracy, and the people's standard of living.

Hoxha silenced the dissident elements, however, and had most of them expelled from the Party or arrested. Some were subsequently executed. Among those executed were Lira Gega, formerly a member of the Politburo, and her husband, Dalli Ndreu, a general in the Albanian People's Army. Soviet Premier Khrushchev charged at the Soviet Twenty-second Congress that Gega was pregnant when she was executed.

Workers' riots in Poland and full-scale revolt in Hungary in late 1956, followed by general uneasiness throughout Communist East Europe, gave Hoxha additional reasons to increase his control over the Party apparatus and to sidestep all pressures from Khrushchev for reconciliation with Tito. Indeed, in an article published in the November 8, 1956, issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth), Hoxha accused Yugoslavia of being at the root of the Hungarian Revolution and implied that the relaxation of internal tensions in some of the Soviet-bloc countries had endangered the existing regimes. In a speech to the Party's Central Committee in February 1957 he came openly to the defense of Stalin and lashed out against "those who attempt to discount the entire positive revolutionary side of Stalin."

Hoxha did, however, pay lip service to the collective leadership principle enunciated in Moscow after Stalin's death. In July 1954 he relinquished the premiership to Mehmet Shehu, keeping for himself the more important post of first secretary of the Party. But aside from this he made no changes in his Stalinist method of rule. He demonstrated this after the Party conference in Tirana in April 1956, when he suppressed ruthlessly all those demanding the elimination of personal rule.

Hoxha showed the same determination in the summer of 1961, when Khrushchev apparently enlisted a number of Albanian leaders, including Teme Sejko, a rear admiral and commander of the navy who had been trained in the Soviet Union to overthrow the Hoxha-Shehu duumvirate and replace it with a pro-Moscow group. Sejko and his colleagues were arrested, and he and two others were later executed.

In September of the same year Hoxha arrested a number of other top Party leaders who were suspected of pro-Moscow sympathies. Among these were Liri Belishova, a member of the Politburo, and Koco Tashko, head of the Party's Auditing Commission; these two were also cited by Khrushchev as examples of the alleged reign of terror that prevailed in Albania.

After the break with Moscow, Albania remained nominally a member of both the CEMA and the Warsaw Pact. It did not, however, attend any meetings, and it withdrew officially from the Warsaw Pact after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Unlike Albania's relations with the Communist world, which have been varied and fluctuating, those with the Western countries have been, with minor exceptions, static and rigid, particularly toward the United States. Only two major Western powers, France and Italy, initially recognized the Communist regime and established diplomatic relations with it. Proposals made in November 1945 by the American and British governments to normalize relations with the Tirana regime were never consummated, chiefly because of the regime's consistent inimical attitude toward them.

There have been three distinct periods in the history of the country under Communist rule. The first, from 1944 to 1948, was characterized by Yugoslav domination. The country's rulers, however, had no difficulty extricating themselves from this domination once Stalin broke with Tito.

In the second period, 1948 to 1961, Soviet predominance was evident everywhere in the country. All the armed and security forces wore Soviet-type uniforms. The regime copied much of the Soviet governmental system. The same kind of bureaucracy and the same secret police, functioning with the same supervision as in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, prevailed. In major branches of the government, the military, and the security forces, there were Soviet advisers and experts. The economic and cultural fields were also patterned after those of the Soviet Union. But despite this widespread penetration, the Soviets were in the last analysis unable to impose their will on the Albanian rulers, and in 1961 they withdrew completely from that country.

The third period, begun in 1961, saw the penetration of Communist Chinese influence in many aspects of political, military, and economic life. Like the Yugoslavs and Soviets before them, the Chinese introduced their advisers and experts in various governmental organs and economic enterprises, and probably in the military and security forces as well, but they were there at the invitation of the Albanian regime (see ch. 6, Government Structure and Political System).