A Devouring Minotaur – Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant

Some notes after reading Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha (London: Reaktion Books, 2026).

“After Nixon’s visit to China, a group of disappointed radical Marxists from Washington state hung a banner in downtown Seattle reading: ‘Defend Albania, Marxism’s last hope’.”[1]

Despite its diminutive scale and its poverty, Albania in the latter decades of the Cold War retained a wider importance to cognoscenti on the Far Left worldwide because of its unflinching and unembarrassed Stalinism. This was the product of the unflinching and unembarrassed tyrant who ruled the Balkan country for forty of its forty-seven years of Communist rule, Enver Hoxha, most of it as a minotaur defending his maze. With perfect timing, Hoxha died exactly one month after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the USSR in early 1985 – granting the world just the tiniest sliver of overlap between the last holdout of Communism’s murderous but potent heyday in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the man who would inadvertently dismantle the structures that allowed the system to remain rigid despite its increasingly obvious contradictions.

Hoxha thought he and his régime were of global importance every bit as much as his more enthusiastic overseas admirers. In my latter primary school years, those immediately after Hoxha’s death, Radio Tirana, at some financial cost to this small and impoverished country, dominated the shortwaves with its portentous, somewhat sinister, interval signal introducing programmes in twenty languages, aiming to export Albania’s vision of revolution. I doubt programming in other languages was any less tedious than that in English, which was soporifically dry and always delivered in a halting, heavily accented monotone, bemoaning the machinations of “American imperialists” and “Soviet socialist imperialists”.

A Provincial Schoolmaster Takes Power

Hoxha was born in what was still Ottoman Gjirokastër, near the Greek border, in 1908, the son of a Muslim merchant who was widely travelled in Europe and the United States – a prosperous family but a provincial one of no great political importance. The young Enver was something of a dilettante who rather squandered his opportunity to study in France and Belgium in the 1930s. In 1937, he returned to his homeland to teach in grammar schools but was soon thrust into the convulsions of the Second World War.

After the collapse of Ottoman rule in 1912, which had lasted for half a millennium and had not always been unpopular in this mixed but Muslim-majority country, one régime after another came and went without being able to establish any great societal legitimacy. The bourgeois liberal democracy that followed the Ottomans would prove a fleeting interlude, as elsewhere in the Balkans; Zog’s autocratic monarchy was corrupt and lacked broad social legitimacy; the Italians invaded in 1939, with a great deal of arrogance and a limited measure of brutality; in 1943, Nazi Germany took over, with considerably more brutality.

Liberation came in November 1944. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Communists schemed and fought against their national-republican or monarchist rivals in the anti-fascist resistance as much as they did against the occupiers. They were greatly assisted in this by the Yugoslav advisers who thought they were in control of the younger and weaker sister that was the Party of Labour of Albania (PLA).[2]

These were the perfect conditions for a university dropout and provincial schoolmaster just turned thirty-six to take power. A country with no legitimate hegemon was one where the path to Communist takeover was greatly eased; and a Communist Party only formed during the War gave ample space for an ambitious man from nowhere to make his mark. The young Hoxha was a good-looking charmer with a great sense of humour. Charm and humour, it is too easily forgotten by the earnest and ideological, have always been great assets in politics. Underneath the charm lay ruthless brutality. The purges started at the beginning with political opponents, and rapidly moved inside the party.

Hoxha and his PLA did have some achievements. Living standards rose, albeit remaining modest, and infant mortality fell dramatically. Electrification was effected, literacy spread from a small minority of perhaps 15% in 1944 to almost the entire population by the 1970s, and women were emancipated in the partial-but-real Communist manner. It is telling that one of the few occasions on which Nexhmije Hoxha disagreed seriously with her husband was regarding his welcome of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which he interpreted entirely as a matter of power politics without reference to its likely impact on women.

Moscow, then Beijing

Communist Albania didn’t start out as a hermit kingdom. Hoxha was as much a Nationalist as a Communist, but this was the norm rather than the exception for Communist leaders, including in countries far more open than Albania. Yugoslav tutelage was critical to Communist success in the wartime struggles with monarchists and liberals, and Yugoslavs and their local supporters remained influential in the PLA into the early 1950s. Indeed, some form of federation was discussed seriously in the immediate aftermath of liberation. But Hoxha always feared Tito, despising him firstly as an inflexible ideologue, later and longer as a betrayer of Stalin’s legacy. Hoxha was always, first and foremost, a Stalinist, who thought Khrushchev was a sell-out. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalin to the CPSU’s Party Congress of 1956 began the divorce between Tirana and Moscow.

This was complete by 1961 – Mao lost faith and trust in Moscow simultaneously and for broadly the same reasons as Hoxha, and so the two became allies. Albania was never especially important to China, but having a friendly political bridgehead in Europe was marginally helpful. The Beijing-Tirana relationship mattered far more to the Albanians, who were always asking for goods and skilled personnel to be sent over. It was in these years that Hoxha got one over on Mao, banning religion entirely, in the space of a few months in 1967 closing all the mosques, churches, monasteries, and tekkes, and demolishing many of them outright.

The Sino-Albanian relationship came under strain after Nixon visited China in 1972, deteriorated further when the relative moderate Hua Guofeng won the internal succession struggle after Mao’s death, and finally snapped in 1978. The authors argue that the purges that defined Hoxha’s final years were at least partially inspired by Enver’s desire to spare Nexhmije the fate of Madame Mao. She was always an important figure, and a dominating one after her husband’s near-fatal heart attack in 1973.

Nor is it a coincidence that the mad programme of building concrete bunkers for use should foreign invasion occur – one of the defining and most disfiguring features of Albania today – which really got going after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, accelerated at the time of the Sino-Albanian split. In the last years of Hoxha’s life, the minotaur would be isolated from the world in a maze of his own making.

Communist Albania had always been dependent on technical assistance and deliveries of goods from other Communist countries. These had been slowing ever since the PRC’s opening to the USA in the early 1970s cooled the relationship between Tirana and Beijing. Now they dried up entirely, and the gains in prosperity of early Communist Albania were wiped out, with malnutrition increasing again. This ensured that when Albania emerged back into the world in 1991, it did so backwards and miserably poor. The authors also record a rise in criminality from the mid-1970s, presaging another harsh reality of the rest of the world’s post-1991 experience of Albania. All this, the authors say, has left Albanians with something of an inferiority complex.

The One-Way Mirror

The clan system, a sometimes destructive and powerful strand of Albanian communal life, was also eroded by the PLA, particularly through the collectivisation of agriculture. The Party was at least initially weakest in the northern mountains where the clan system was most entrenched, although from around the late 1960s, the educated classes in the cities became the strongest loci of discontent. In the lowlands, particularly in the centre and south, peasant lives improved sufficiently from the days of the bey landlords that the PLA was for long periods genuinely popular.

The attack on extended family relationships was hardly unique to Hoxha’s PLA. Nearly all Communist régimes tried to corrode family structures, potentially the most powerful restraint on the untrammelled power of the state, and nearly all used the collectivisation of agriculture as one of the most powerful means of doing so.

In that light, it is ironic that Blloku, the central Tirana neighbourhood that was the preserve of the Party élite, was a spider’s web of intermarriage and private gossip over evening parties. Here, the Hoxhas were relatively isolated even from the rest of the party hierarchy, socialising mainly with Enver’s longstanding deputy, Mehmet Shehu, and his wife Fiqrete. Hoxha preferred to spend his evenings in voracious reading and writing on history, politics, and anthropology. He was, therefore, far more than even the rest of the Blloku nomenklatura, isolated from the degree to which Albania was changing during his rule.

While its leader had been isolated for decades, Albania became a hermit kingdom only in stages. At first large numbers of the brightest Albanians, whether in technical professions or the arts, were educated in other Eastern Bloc countries, especially in Moscow and Prague. Specialists from across the bloc in turn worked in Albania. Many intermarriages resulted, and these were broken apart with a great deal of cruelty after the Secret Speech. After the Chinese followed on as Hoxha’s patron, their specialists working in the country lived lives detached from the Albanians. Social, let alone romantic, relations were highly constrained. The Albanians harboured some degree of racial suspicion towards the Chinese as, it seems, did Hoxha himself. Nor was Albania’s isolation ever as complete as North Korea’s today. Despite all the tensions in the relationship between Tirana and Belgrade, for example, Albanian professors taught at the Albanian-language University of Prishtina from 1970 until the crackdown that followed the 1981 Kosovo student demonstrations closed that channel.

It was these foreign encounters that a gradually ageing and increasingly reactionary Hoxha blamed for the changing fashions of Tirana and major provincial cities, changes in keeping with the 1960s world – jazz and rock music, flared trousers, cowboy boots, and long hair. The Italians were also fingered as a possible source of contamination.

By the early 1970s, Albania was making its own television sets, which the enterprising in large parts of the country could use, with the help of rearranged coat-hangers, to receive programming from Italy or Yugoslavia. Political programming was doubtless less popular than the like of Dynasty and Dallas, but the supposed hermit state was in practice something of a one-way mirror. Of course, Albanians knew life was getting better elsewhere even as it was getting worse for them.

The Minotaur in His Maze

One wonders how much Hoxha’s health made him nastier than he might have been. He always had a bad heart, although after it nearly killed him in 1973, this once ferociously heavy smoker cut down to twenty a day or less.[3]

In this, as in much else, he was a bourgeois gentleman of his generation. His personal semiotics, as with his generation of Communists across Eastern Europe, were a long way from those of the radicals from the 1960s onwards – whether Western, Latin American, or Chinese. No Mao or Castro outfits for Enver! Hoxha was rarely photographed except in a suit, tie, and trilby hat. A 1980 photo of the Hoxhas and the Shehus is fascinating – the gentlemen in particularly smart and traditional suits, the ladies in tailored jackets, looking less like the leaders of a proletarian revolution than Christian Democrat factory owners in the Po Valley at the opening night of the opera season, or a special Mass at the cathedral.

Communism in practice was always disproportionately the creed of people like Hoxha – scions of the lower end of the upper bourgeoisie in a world where the old order had died, seeking to liberate the proletariat so they would be free to enjoy Pushkin and Tchaikovsky as they themselves did. But it was people at the other end of that equation, working-class Westerners who got rich through capitalism – people like the Beatles and the increasingly rich stars of the NFL and European football – who had actually redefined social class in the world of 1980, leading the bourgeoisie into at least affecting proletarian lifestyles.

Hoxha’s final significant piece of political thinking also reflected the mind of a man of his generation formed in the era of European empires. In a speech to the PLA’s Seventh Party Congress in 1976, he rejected Mao’s ‘Three Worlds Theory’, which posited that the Third World had the potential to advance China’s interests and therefore help bring about a Communist world. Hoxha attacked this as a reactionary racialisation that rendered the universal system of Communism anti-white. It also ignored, he argued, the revolutionary potential he still saw, as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist, in the countries with the largest working classes – those of Europe and North America. The delusion about revolution in blue-collar America and Canada is revealing of his increasing detachment from conditions in the real world. More revealing still is his rejection of the ideas of the world’s largest Communist country, which chimed with similar ideas about race and power then coming to prominence in the New Left of the West – ideas which have remained highly influential to this day, even with Communism long dead.

It was less important that Hoxha was an old man, than that he had been formed by an old set of ideas – Marxism-Leninism – that were no longer a useful guide to how the world worked. By the time he died, the Chinese themselves had begun to abandon them, moving to exploit the system of globalised capitalism the USA had midwifed, ultimately brilliantly, albeit in Communist drag.

In 1981, Hoxha hounded Shehu, his oldest and longest-standing ally, to suicide. A final purge left the broad and increasingly impoverished mass of Albanians untouched but intentionally cut a brutal swathe through both the most loyal and most able leaders of the party – these not always being the same people. Competent technocrats, always suspected by Hoxha of placing effectiveness in their respective fields over ideological zeal, and intermittently targeted by him since the mid-1960s, also faced a final round of assaults. Some were executed, more were jailed; a depressing number killed themselves once they knew they were being softened up.

He died surrounded by the mediocrities he had recently promoted. Nexhmije was safe, for the moment, although she could not be protected from the collapse of the system which had brought her husband to power: she served five years of an eleven-year sentence in prison for embezzlement in the 1990s. She would live until 2020, dying in the month before Covid-19 shut the world down, more than long enough to see democratic Albania join NATO, whose local headquarters at the time of the Kosovo War was in the fantastic pyramid initially constructed as her husband’s memorial museum and designed by their daughter.

Did Hoxha Matter? Is This Book Worth It?

The authors assess that Hoxha and the PLA had more than five thousand killed and thirty-four thousand jailed on political grounds, while fifty-nine thousand families were expelled to Albania’s labour camps – the minotaur had a taste for human flesh. For a comparison with the Soviet Union, multiply those numbers by a hundred to account for the population differential … it was not only in words that Hoxha paid homage to his political hero.

Hoxha died a shortwave radio dictator in an age of satellite television, Eurocentric in an age of globalisation, seeking to forge the collective psyche of a nation in an age of individualism. The future did not belong to Communism, but to the weird mixture of utopian progressivism, leftist vibes, and consumer capitalism that won the Cold War for the West.

Communism or capitalism, which is best? Compare Albania in 1991 with rural and backwards parts of Greece, including those with largely Albanian populations. There is no comparison. In Turkey, which shared so much longer-term history and culture with Albania, even the east was richer by the end of the Communist period, and rural Western Turkey was a place far closer economically to Valencia than it was to Vlorë. Perhaps today’s Albanians ought to cut themselves some slack for the difficult hand that recent history has dealt them.

If I had money I think I might invest some of it in Albania. Poorer than it needs to be, internally stable, integrated into NATO and in countless ways also with a European Union that isn’t quite sure it wants it as a member, and intimately networked with a widely spread and increasingly prosperous diaspora, Albania looks like a country on the up.

Austin and Hoxha’s biography[4] can at times be frustrating. A whirling narrative seems initially attractive, but it leaps backwards and forwards through events a little too often for its own good, and could do with a stronger grounding in facts, dates, and figures. But it has its magic moments: bursts of purple prose, a solid understanding of the rapidly changing and modernising social structure of Communist Albania, and great insight into the psychology of the minotaur inside the maze. It provides a useful introduction to modern Albanian history more generally. It was well worth the twenty quid I gave Blackwell’s for it and the late evening relaxation time I put into it.

Did Hoxha matter? Well, nobody in 2026 is writing biographies in English of Brezhnev-era pro-Moscow hatchet men like Zhivkov, Kádár, and Husák. He certainly made a serious fist of creating an actually Communist society – that’s why there were people hanging banners praising him in 1970s Seattle. And that means that ultimately, Hoxha matters mostly because of the failure of his project, doomed from the beginning by its misanalysis of the human condition – doomed from the start despite the terrible price paid for it by others, and ultimately by himself.

---

[1] Austin and Hoxha, Enver Hoxha, 237.

[2] Formally the Communist Party of Albania from its foundation in 1941 until its renaming in 1948 – I have decided to impose a slightly false consistency on the main article for ease of comprehension.

[3] Albania’s climate and soil are perfectly suited for tobacco and, back in the day, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe recommended loading up on fags there due to their low price. Wikipedia claims that Hoxha’s predecessor, King Zog, had a 225-a-day habit, which scarcely seems feasible.

[4] Yes, one of the co-authors shares a surname with the dictator.