Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania tells the extraordinary story of how one man held an entire country hostage for 40 years – and got away with it. Between 1944 and 1985, the small Balkan nation of Albania was ruled by a strange, sociopathic and, frankly, completely mad dictator by the name of Enver Hoxha. While Stalinism effectively ended in Europe with the death of its namesake, or at least with the Khruschev reforms that followed, it continued unabated and unquestioned in Albania until 1990. When Hoxha died in 1985, Albania was officially the third poorest country in the world, with the GNP of a small town and an average income of 15 USD a month. Four decades of collectivisation had led to near starvation in the countryside, where Hoxha’s aggressive isolationism meant people were still using farming technology from the 1920s. When the regime finally collapsed a few years after Hoxha’s death, it left behind a tired, hungry, confused and fearful population. As Albanians marched towards democracy, like proverbial moles blinking into the sunlight, few had the time or will to reflect upon the man who had ruled them with unimaginable cruelty for over four decades. Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania, by the journalist Blendi Fevziu, is the first proper biography of the dictator to be published. Having proven both hugely popular and hugely controversial in his homeland, it arrives here in English for the first time. Gjirokaster – where Hoxha was born and raised (click to enlarge). Photo by Alex Sakalis. CC. Enver Hoxha was born in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokaster (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in 1908. He seems to have shunned his father, a simple minded Imam who abandoned him in his youth to go work in the United States for several years, in favour of his uncle Hysen Hoxha, the town’s mayor and a radical atheist and anti-colonialist. Despite this, Fevziu argues that Hoxha seems to have shown little interest in politics either here or at his secondary school in Korça. He left to study botany at the University of Montpellier despite, in his own words, having no interest in the subject. He abandoned his studies and travelled to Paris where he passed himself off as a representative of the Albanian communist movement and ingratiated himself into the city’s social circle of communist publishers and avant-garde artists. While there, he attended the notoriously debauched parties of Marxist socialite Paul Vaillant-Couturier. It was perhaps here that Hoxha first tabulated his political beliefs. He was to remain an ardent Francophile throughout his life – one of the few countries he maintained any sort of relationship with. After returning to Albania, Hoxha worked a few odd jobs before getting involved with the Albanian resistance during World War II. Within a few years Hoxha – a little known and even less liked character – had somehow maneuvered himself into the Party leadership. How he accomplished this is, by Fevziu’s own admission, “one of the greatest mysteries in Albanian history”. Much of it seems to be down to his chance friendship with two mysterious Yugoslav agents who effectively ran the Albanian Communist Party as a proxy of Tito’s Partisans. Fevziu’s spends a large amount of time on this particular chapter, and suggests that the Yugoslavs were instrumental in bringing Hoxha to power and helping him consolidate it in the manic post-war years. Despite this, Hoxha broke ties with Tito in 1948 along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact. He would later break with the USSR (Khruschev was a traitor and revisionist, he claimed) forming an unlikely alliance with China which lasted until that country’s opening to the west in the 1970s. When Hoxha split from China in 1978, Albania was well and truly flying solo. One depressing leitmotif which recurs throughout the book is Hoxha’s paranoid purges. At the beginning, they make some contextual sense. Of course he would execute collaborators and political opponents – that’s just how things went. But soon he begins to execute rivals in his own party – including those he had only a few years earlier commended as war heroes. All dissidents were crushed, as were the clergy and the aristocrats. Old school friends and high school crushes were also purged; the person that had given Hoxha his scholarship to study in France was executed, as was the friend who let him live rent-free in his Paris apartment. Former prime ministers, signatories to the Albanian Declaration of Independence in 1912, and founders of the Communist movement were among the many victims of summary executions that were de rigeur until the late 1980s. Hoxha also bumped off much of the intelligentsia to the extent that, by the time of Hoxha’s death, virtually no one in the Politburo could boast more than a high school education. One of the most dangerous positions to hold during Hoxha’s reign was Minister of the Interior – he killed all of them, bar one. As one woman – whose husband was executed by Hoxha – explains in the book: many Albanians had great ideas on how to run the country after the liberation – but only Hoxha was willing to kill his own brother-in-law to realise them. In 1967, Hoxha turned Albania into the world’s first atheist state. He closed down all churches and mosques and even destroyed several religious buildings of priceless cultural value. Clergy were among the most purged of all groups, with few living to tell the tale. In one depressing episode, a priest is executed for the crime of performing a baptism in a couple’s home. Hoxha even banned beards due to their association with Islam and Orthodox Christianity. He cultivated a cult of personality perhaps only equal to Kim Jong-Il in the twentieth century. His published works, which even by the standards of autohagiography are particularly galling, were mandatory reading in schools. Hoxha – or Uncle Enver as he liked to be portrayed – fomented his cult by fastidiously rewriting history

In many former Eastern Bloc countries, wrecking balls and social progress took out hulking Communist buildings and militaristic Cold War structures after the Berlin Wall fell. In Tirana, the mountain-framed capital city of Albania, the government and local artists have chosen more vibrant and unusual ways to blaze their way out of years of dictatorship and economic depression. Crumbling, gray Ottoman-era mansions have been painted in shades of Creamsicle orange and rain slicker yellow; drab, Stalinist mid-rises serve as outsized canvases for jewel-toned Cubist abstracts or rainbow stripes. Much of the credit goes to former mayor Edi Rama, a painter-turned-politician (now Albania’s prime minister), who began a citywide beautification effort in 2000 that saw artists decking out building facades and city workers planting 55,000 trees and bushes in public spaces.

The Kanun or formally the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (English: The Code of Lekë Dukagjini) is a set of laws developed by Lekë Dukagjini and used mostly in northern Albania and Kosovo from the 15th century until the 20th century and revived recently after the fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s. This set of laws was customary, passed down through generations, and not codified and written down until the 19th century by Shtjefën Gjeçov. Although Kanuni is attributed to the Albanian prince Lekë Dukagjini, the rules evolved over time as a way to bring laws and rules to these lands. The code was divided into several sections: Church, Family, Marriage, House, Livestock and Property, Work, Transfer of Property, Spoken Word, Honor, Damages, Law Regarding Crimes, Judicial Law, and Exemptions and Exceptions. Some of the most infamous rules specified how the murder was supposed to be handled, and it often led to blood feuds that lasted until all the men of the two involved families were killed. In some parts of the country, the Kanun resembles the Italian vendetta. These rules have recently resurfaced in northern Albania since people have no faith in the powerless local government and police. There are organizations that try to mediate between feuding families and try to get them to “pardon the blood” (Albanian: me e fal gjakun), but often the only resort is for men of age to stay in their homes, which are considered a safe refuge by the Kanuni, or flee the country. The Albanian name for blood feud is Gjakmarrja. The specified gender roles sometimes led to women pledging virginity and living their life as a man, allowing them to take on male responsibilities and rights. Prime Minister Enver Hoxha tried to stop the practice of Kanun. After the fall of communism, some communities have tried to rediscover the old traditions, but some of their parts have been lost, leading to fears of misinterpretation. Notably, the current Albanian Penal Code does not contain any provisions from the Kanun that deal with blood feuds, and no acknowledgment of this code is made in the contemporary Albanian legal system.  

Only a dozen “sworn virgins” are left in the world, as an ancient Balkan tradition where women live as men dies out. “Albania was a man’s world, the only way to survive was to become one,” says Gjystina Grishaj. As a 23-year-old woman living in the mountains of northern Albania, she made a decision that would change her life. She swore a vow of celibacy and promised to live the rest of her life as a man.   Gjystina’s family has lived in the Malësi e Madhe region of Lëpushë for more than a century. A valley deeply nestled between craggy mountains, it is one of the few areas where the burrnesha tradition still exists: a centuries-old practice in which women swear an oath to village elders, and live as men. These women are known as the burrneshat, or sworn virgins.   “There are many unmarried people in the world but they are not burrneshat. A burrnesha is dedicated only to her family, to work, to live, to preserve her purity,” says Gjystina, now aged 57.