ENVER HOXHA'S LONG SHADOW
Those two visits to Albania in 1987 and 1988 had a profound effect. I had never been to a country organised along such different lines and with such different principles. I was so taken with it that I wrote a book called Albania, The Red Fortress that used a mixture of travelogue and analysis to explain how, to the best of my understanding, how Albania operated. I wrote about the National Liberation War and how the communists under Enver Hoxha came to power at the end of 1944. I described their efforts to collectivise agriculture and outlaw private property. I explained how Albania had allied itself first with the Soviet Union and then with China, and what was meant by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
But by the time I was ready to show it to publishers, the communist regime was faltering. In an effort to save the book I added a question mark to the title: Albania, The Red Fortress? But in February 1991, Enver Hoxha’s statue in Scanderbeg Square was pulled down and that marked the symbolic end of the communist regime. No-one was interested in what Albania had been. Everyone wanted to see how it was going to transform itself into a democratic state allied to the countries of western Europe.
Although much of the analysis in Albania, The Red Fortress was now redundant, I still had the first-hand descriptions. As the years passed and memories of the old regime faded, those sections seemed to gather extra force, descriptions of a world that no longer existed.
I had also kept a detailed diary of our six month tour of the Balkans in 1990. For about six weeks, we had skirted Albania’s borders with Greece and Yugoslavia, trying to get some sense of Albania’s relations with its near neighbours. We sometimes wondered if Albanian spies were watching our progress and wondering what we were up to. When I retired I went back to those notes and wrote up the Albanian parts of the journey.
So now I had two accounts of communist Albania; one from the inside and one from its borders. The idea taking shape was to write a book in two parts: a historical section that described Albania in the last years of communism and a modern section that would give an account of post-communist Albania and its struggle to democratise.
When I had finished, I did a word count and was horrified. The project had ballooned to more than 200,000 words, more than twice what any publisher would want. So the project had to be slimmed down. I ditched the whole of the border section from 1990 and then started to merge descriptions of communist and post-communist Albania.
Although I couldn’t use much of the analysis from The Red Fortress, I realised that any attempt to explain why modern Albania is the way it is had to refer back to those forty-plus years of communism. As you travel around, reminders of the old regime are everywhere. They are embedded in the landscape: the old factories, the collectivised farm buildings, the prisons and labour camps, the bunkers, the Martyrs’ Cemeteries and commemorative monuments, the apartment blocks that still dominate many of Albania’s towns and cities.
The reminders of the old regime were so prevalent that we decided to call the book Enver Hoxha’s Long Shadow - Travels in Albania