Documents as Weapons: The Uses of a Dictatorship’s Archives

Close to thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Albania remains a blind spot in the literature on twentieth-century socialism. International histories of the Cold War continue to ‘de-centre’ Europe, and the focus increasingly shifts to relations between big powers and the so-called Third World. But this recent euphoria of ‘the global’ has also tended to obscure how a small European country can remain terra incognita for so long. In much of the former communist world, the so-called ‘archival revolution’ of the 1990s has helped produce a now large body of literature. Such a process has been slow and complicated in Albania. This essay begins by asking why. It first offers an overview of Albanian-language historical work from roughly the last two decades, placing it alongside other relevant contributions in English, German, Italian and French, to highlight trends and suggest possible analytical paths.

My thoughts are organised around the problem of the country’s archives, which took many years to become available to historians. Shrouded in mystery, communist era archives have often become places of political controversy over major themes like the Second World War and the origins of communist power. This essay argues for making archives objects of analysis, too. After surveying how authors have and have not approached the party-state’s sources, it offers a history of archiving as an example of state led centralisation. The push to centralise archives coincided with a period in which Albania’s regime sought to make sense of shifting foreign alliances: from a dedicated ally of the Soviet Union to an anti-Soviet voice during the revolutionary 1960s. Rather than as depositories of hidden truths, archives emerge as part of a larger project to define the state and discipline its past. They can shed much light on the domestic landscape of this period, but they can also offer new insights into how processes of nationalisation have been deeply intertwined with internationalist imperatives.

Blind Spots

Founded in 1941, the Communist Party of Albania (renamed Party of Labour, after consultations with Stalin, seven years later) was initially bound to neighbouring Yugoslavia, which provided tactical advice. Yugoslav advisors immersed themselves in planning affairs after Albania’s liberation, an arrangement initially also supported by Stalin. Within a few years, however, the Soviet leader had grown impatient with his Yugoslav counterpart, Josip Broz Tito. During the Soviet–Yugoslav rift in 1948, Albania’s cunning party chief Enver Hoxha saw an opportunity to escape from Yugoslav dependency, professing loyalty to the Kremlin. Purges of so-called pro-Yugoslav individuals ensued, followed by years of intense borrowing from the Soviet Union: desperately needed loans, industrial installations, a flurry of technical advisers and scholarships for promising youths. While the regime pursued a war against widespread illiteracy, Russian language courses popped up in workplaces and schools. In a country of peasants, the ruling party set out to build socialism.

But relations between the Albanian and Soviet parties grew uneasy when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, experimented with changes in foreign policy. Hoxha paid lip service to calls for reform but grew increasingly convinced that Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation was a formula for self-destruction. During the dramatic summer of 1960, as Sino-Soviet disagreements erupted, he saw yet another opportunity to escape the pressures of a bigger power. Backing Beijing in the dispute, Albania’s party boss denounced Khrushchev as a traitor to Leninism. There could be no coexistence with capitalism, he declared, continuing to heap praise on Stalin, whom he credited with saving Albania from Yugoslav annexation in the 1940s. Such zigzags allowed a hardline regime in one corner of Southeastern Europe to project itself as the saviour of the nation in the face of more powerful foreigners. They also encouraged repeated purges of imaginary internal enemies alleged to have conspired against the state. In the 1960s relations with Beijing also had their ups and downs. But throughout all of this the country’s regime projected a sense of inevitability to its path – the vicious battles it had waged morphed into a narrative of righteousness. ¹

Unlike elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, state-directed repression did not abate. And so it has been particularly important to study that long-term legacy of state violence. Such has been the pursuit of the Institute for the Study of the Crimes and Consequences of Communism (Instituti i Studimeve për Krimet dhe Pasojat e Komunizmit), which has issued numerous publications, focusing chiefly on political prisoners, internment camps, biographical data and testimonies. ² Much of the rest of Albanian-language historical scholarship on this period has also been domestic-oriented in scope. The country’s flagship professional journal (Studime historike) first appeared under the communist regime in 1964. ³ It continues to be published by the Institute of History, a state-funded entity. In recent years it has churned out occasionally valuable, if typically narrowly conceived, research on the post-Second World War era. But one problem with Studime is the fact that it covers all periods of historical inquiry – one recent issue included articles on Christianity before and after the Edict of Milan (313 AD), eighteenth-century waqfiya (Ottoman era foundation deeds) in the city of Berat and great power involvement in the Balkans in 1914. This means that any one issue might have nothing at all on the post-1945 period.

In the absence of another professional journal dedicated exclusively to contemporary history, more innovative scholarship on the communist period has appeared in the multi-disciplinary journal Përpjekja, started in 1994 by Fatos Lubonja, one of the country’s foremost public intellectuals. ⁴ Përpjekja is unencumbered by the rigidities and infighting that has characterised the Institute of History, where an older generation of historians, who came of age under socialism, have often clashed with a younger cohort. And so Përpjekja has been successful in attracting younger authors who are also able to work in various foreign languages. The journal produces thematic issues, which give readers a better sense of the intellectual contours of the published work. Finally, it is also the rare venue where Albanian and foreign scholars publish alongside one another, which has had the effect of making Studime seem all the more parochial and outdated. ⁵

Much of the Albanian-language secondary literature on the post-1945 period consists of general overviews, with a sharp focus on political history. Unsurprisingly, the National Liberation War (Lufta Nacional-Çlirimtare) continues to be a central topic in historical debates. It is in wartime dynamics, after all, that historians have sought the roots of the communist regime. But as important as the war is, longstanding questions in Albanian-language historiography seem to have turned into dead ends. For example, authors continue to approach archives for clues into the vexing nationalism question: was long-serving party boss Enver Hoxha a nationalist, or not? Did his rejection of bigger states like Yugoslavia and, later on, the Soviet Union signal an enduring nationalism that supposedly trumped his ideology? Was he, instead, an opportunist? (As if these things had to be mutually exclusive.) Depending on one’s position on these questions, the problem of Kosovo’s fate under Yugoslavia can serve as ammunition to prove either viewpoint. Showing Hoxha to have been ‘anti-national’ (anti-kombëtar) has been understood to go some way towards exposing communism as alien to the nation’s destiny, which contemporary authors have been at pains to define as ‘European’. ⁶

Historians have thus pursued tedious polemics on whether the National Liberation War could also be thought of as a civil war, such that foreigners (and their domestic stooges) might be shown to have ‘corrupted’ nationalist causes under the guise of internationalism (which is imagined as a ‘fig leaf’ covering nefarious geopolitical plans in Southeastern Europe). Such exchanges have shown a poor understanding of how the literature on the Second World War has evolved outside the country. They have revealed an uncritical attitude towards archives, as if the answers to such questions might derive from newly discovered sheets of paper in a basement. In fact, these are problems of historical interpretation and, above all, imagination. But wartime archives continue to be places of controversy because that is where the political stakes are. Whereas socialist era historians spent decades crafting a heroic narrative around the war, the effort to ‘expose’ the war as a form of national betrayal is seen as a way of ‘delegitimising’ the communist regime. By comparison, post-war era state archives are far less explored, though there has been some progress. ⁷ The outcome has been a remarkably thin archive based literature on the post-war years, particularly work that systematically combines a view of politics with everyday life or that considers the longer-term exercise of state power through the development of institutions, practices and worldviews. ⁸

Though my focus here is on historical research, and especially on Albanian-language scholarship, it is important to make two clarifications. First, relevant work on the post-1945 period has emerged in several other languages and across national research traditions. There are long-standing Albanian studies-focused clusters of various sizes in Austria, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. They have been sites of important multidisciplinary work though vanishing funding and research positions have affected some of them. International cooperation used to be sporadic but it has also increased. ⁹ Albania is a small place. Its language is not easy to learn. In the age of global history (and evaporating area studies positions), studying a small place carries some professional risk. There are, however, some encouraging signs in Tirana and Prishtina. ¹⁰ And there is a growing cohort of Western-based Albanian-speaking scholars – a reflection of the country’s diasporic reality today – who might serve as a kind of bridge between national traditions.

Secondly, some of the more perceptive analyses of the dictatorship have emerged in other disciplines, including in sociology and anthropology. The US-based sociologist Besnik Pula has brilliantly analysed the micro-dynamics of law and the administrative transformation of Albanian lowland peasantry – as compared to highland society and pre-socialist centralisation – on the eve of communist power. ¹¹ The Tirana-based political scientist Enis Sulstarova, one of the most imaginative voices of the last decade in Albanian-language scholarship, has mined works of fiction to argue about national forms of self-fashioning under socialism. Based on ethnographic work, US-based cultural anthropologist Smoki Musaraj has analysed food queues as a temporal regime in late socialism, as well as the informal practices of receiving the ‘capitalist’ signal of Italian television. ¹² Arbër Shtëmbari and Georgia Kretsi delved into the crucial biografitë (institutional biographies) that permeated power relations between individuals, families and the state. ¹³ Ardian Vehbiu’s study of the linguistic strategies of the dictatorship remains seminal, as does his longstanding contribution through a popular blog attracting some of the best writing in the Albanian language. ¹⁴

A considerable body of work has also developed around the practices of ethnography under socialism, illustrating how the state created a framework for advancing knowledge about ‘national culture’. ¹⁵ This is most evident in the example of state-funded studies of ‘people’s culture’ (kultura popullore), but one can also imagine worthy studies of archaeology, linguistics and vernacular forms in architecture as a reflection of the imperative to integrate a national spirit (fryma kombëtare) in construction. Fundamentally, the entire small industry of studime albanologjike will have to confront the problem that it is a product of the socialist state’s investment in a specific framing of what constitutes national culture, as made evident in the work of France-based social anthropologist Albert Doja and the scholar of international studies Enika Abazi, who have written about the official uses of folklore. ¹⁶ A history of studime albanologjike as a state project can demonstrate the evolving concerns of a powerful but insecure regime, especially in light of a greater political retreat by the late 1970s. ¹⁷

Recent work has tended to focus on the second half of the communist period, perhaps a reflection of the possibility to conduct oral history and the wider published secondary source base available. Analyses obsess over issues of identity (as did the communist regime). This is also the lens through which much of Western scholarship has typically approached Albania’s socialism: as a form of fierce nationalist expression. ¹⁸ The political breaks with Belgrade, Moscow and Beijing have served to highlight this idea of a supposed staunch nationalism prevailing over alternatives, which dovetails with the way the regime saw itself. And yet, some of the recent work mentioned above shows that micro-level studies can help cast the socialist period from new perspectives: without succumbing to a totally divorced view of domestic politics from the international stage in which the state participated, and without assuming the inevitability of some already-there nationalist vision. There have always been many ways to be Albanian, just as there have been competing visions for the country’s place in the international system. Marxism-Leninism offered a path to claim such a place.

As revelatory as archives can be, we also know – through case studies ranging from the pre-1990s Soviet Union to the modern Middle East – that historiography can develop in imaginative ways in their absence. ¹⁹ So it is worthy to reflect on what archives cannot do. It is similarly important to explore unofficial archives, moving beyond what the party-state has left behind. ²⁰ We should consider how memoirs, rather than archive-based accounts, have raised some of the more probing questions about social dynamics under Hoxha’s regime. ²¹ Over more than four decades, a significant number of educated individuals ended up as political prisoners: from the small pre-war Central Europe educated intellectual cohort, or even individuals with living memory of Ottoman era administration, to Comintern-connected activists who fell victims to periodic purges, and all the way to the apparatchiks and youths charged with so-called anti-state crimes in the 1970s. They coexisted with others locked up for non-political crimes, such that prison turned into a kind of education, too. The outcome has been a flood of published recollections, attesting to prison life as daily humiliation but also as a form of socialisation: history lessons, gossip about the party and long discussions about world affairs. Purged high-level officials, after all, had been witnesses to crucial events in the party’s past, describing them in detail to their cellmates. (Some of the imprisoned officials continued to believe in the communist cause while behind bars.)

The best of these works illuminate the incredible parallel society that the dictatorship unwittingly created – the kind of intergenerational and cross-social class connections it forged through the exercise of violence. Approaching official archives, to which I turn to next, will require an imaginative approach also informed by this important and expanding body of literature.

The Politics of Access

One reason for the paucity of deeply grounded historical analyses of the dictatorship has been the fact that communist era archives, in particular the records of the highest party organs, were not accessible prior to the early 2000s, or they were accessible to a few people with the right connections. Even as more collections became gradually available, guidelines for access and declassification were not systematically applied in practice. ²² Not even the inventories of the Central Committee collections, for example, were made freely available until recently. Discouragement of this type worked; many Tirana-based scholars avoided the archives. Moreover, archives have turned into places of political infighting between the country’s two major parties (‘Democrats’ and ‘Socialists’) and their cronies. Since the position of the director of the state archives has been deemed a political appointment, the person holding it has always been at risk of being removed after parliamentary elections. In fact, majority parties have occasionally used the position as a reward for smaller coalition partners.

Such deep running politicisation has been toxic for the historical profession, which mirrors the infighting. Historians have often fallen into, or have been assumed to be part of, ‘camps’ roughly corresponding to perceived political loyalties. Most simplistically such camps consist of those deemed to be ‘anti-communists’ and so-called apologists for the old regime. This has not been helpful in generating new research agendas, but it has helped distribute access to salaries and funds. It is hardly surprising, then, that historical discussion has developed in the form of public polemic. The readership of specialised journals is tiny; much of the back-and-forth over historical problems has taken place in daily newspapers and, increasingly, online. For its part, the press has revelled in the scandalous, bombarding readers with extracts from archival documents on the secret lives of party higher-ups, their supposed mistresses and misdeeds and other click-worthy tabloid headlines. Detached from their historical context, archival extracts – trial records, testimonies extracted under duress from arrested individuals, denunciations, personal letters – have fuelled hostile exchanges and counter-accusations of having collaborated with the former regime.

Nothing exemplifies this approach to documents as weapons like the long-standing controversy over the records of the feared security police (Sigurimi i shtetit). Until very recently Sigurimi’s files were off-limits to researchers. In fact, even if one somehow got temporary access, it was not possible to work in them in any kind of systematic fashion because a vast amount of the material was completely disorganised. Still, drips of information and rumours about the files have circulated privately and publically for decades, fuelling speculation about what damaging material might be contained there. ²³ Politicians have routinely accused opponents of having served as Sigurimi informers. Lists of alleged informer ‘nicknames’ have also circulated online. The obsession over the secretive records reached the point that Albania’s parliament recently created a special agency (Autoriteti për informimin mbi dokumentet e ish-Sigurimit të Shtetit) tasked with going through the material and making files accessible.

This controversy has revealed, more than anything, a lack of understanding of how the party-state (and, by extension, its archives) operated. Debates have been framed around the problem of ‘publicising’ the contents of ‘secret’ files, rather than elaborating on the specific role of information – its gathering, processing and various uses – at various times in the history of the communist regime. There will be, no doubt, incriminating and embarrassing evidence in these files, as histories of other Eastern Bloc security police agencies have shown. But the reality of the security police’s paperwork may be far more mundane than assumed. Sigurimi could be ruthless. It wanted to convince Albanians that it had ‘ears’ everywhere. It pitted family members against family members. And yet it could also be demonstratively incompetent. For historians in particular, ‘transparency’ can be no substitute for interpretation. Merely making files public, displaying heavily redacted documents behind glass – as in the recently opened Sigurimi museum in Tirana – does not offer any explanation for how the repressive apparatus actually functioned. Exhibits without context do little to advance knowledge besides lending the false impression of a substantive engagement with the past.

Similarly absent has been a discussion of archives as a process, rather than a place of truths waiting to be brought into the light. The mystery over the Sigurimi files, and more generally the poor handling of archival access, has encouraged the impression of a finely tuned regime with an all-knowing security police. Instead, a history of archiving and their administering bodies over time makes it possible to go beyond the idea of archives as obvious repositories of truth. ²⁴ We know that the communist era archives are full of lies. We know that the regime used paperwork – people’s work and personal biographies, their willing and unwilling written testimonies – as weapons in a battle to identify so-called enemies. The truth of the dictatorship does not reside in any one ‘secret’ folder to be ‘discovered’ and made public; its violence cannot properly be understood as divorced from the broader state building history. It becomes necessary, therefore, to think about archives as part of a larger project, carried out formally and informally, to define the state and its subjects.

Archives as History

How Albania’s archives are organised (or not) tells us a great deal about the ambitions and priorities of the party-state, as well as its failures. Three main aspects of this story stand out: the lateness of a comprehensive organisation of state archives, especially given other urgent state-building efforts and an unskilled labour force; the far-reaching role of the party apparatus in matters of preservation, interpretation and access and, finally, the impact of the country’s unforeseen geopolitical shifts (from Belgrade to Moscow to Beijing) on approaches to the past. These are interconnected issues. An awareness of being latecomers to organised communism and industrialisation permeated the politics of the Party of Labour in the 1940s to 1950s. Intra-state competition over resources under central planning left traces in the archives, too. Squabbles with foreign partners like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, additionally, repeatedly raised the problem of historical revision. Even a tentative sketch of how recordkeeping became a state matter illustrates how these problems became enmeshed.

The immediate post-war years saw waves of expropriations – houses, small workshops, machines, hidden gold and personal libraries – but a less visible battle also took place over the sorting out of compromising fascist era materials and the adjudication of political loyalty on the basis of personal biographies. From the beginning the party’s collections were kept separate from state records, thus reflecting the dual party-state typology of the new regime. ²⁵ Officials began collecting wartime testimonies and compiling a history of ‘resistance’ under fascism. Records were placed under the authority of politically trusted personnel within the Central Committee. Established in 1955, the Central Party Archive (Arkivi Qendror i Partisë) documented the history of organised labour in the pre-war period, anti-fascist activism, Comintern’s involvement in Albanian affairs and the biographies of important resistance groups. Given the clandestine nature of communist activities during the interwar period, collecting materials and compiling biographical data became especially important for creating a party genealogy, for grounding the party within national history. This imperative became especially important after the split with Yugoslavia in 1948.

By comparison, it took considerably more effort and time to centralise state archives and gather materials into local repositories. Initially, in 1949, a government decision placed the central state archives with the Institute of Sciences, but two years later they were placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior. ²⁶ Instructions went out to ministries and other agencies to make proper room for documentation, emphasising the importance of keeping secret documentation sealed. ²⁷ Unable to keep up, administrators complained about scarce space. Systematic collection and proper housing of material continued to be a challenge for years, especially among local agencies in the outer districts. ²⁸ By the mid-1950s a team of investigators, along with a Soviet specialist, surveyed the situation and found it worrisome. Previous government decisions had not worked; local officials kept amassing paperwork in large piles dumped into storage rooms. On some occasions there was not even proper accounting about what paperwork came in and out. The number of personnel entrusted to the task of classifying materials was inadequate. ²⁹

Such correspondence betrays uncertainty over the proper place for archives within a party-state. Placing the Ministry of Interior in charge reflected concerns over the sensitive nature of the material, but some officials appeared confused about what documents to keep and what to throw away. Since party and defence archives were kept separate from the rest, they were subject to their own guidelines. When it came to state records, however, determining the status of documentation was not always clear. Matters of economic planning, for example, were also supposed to be confidential. With each five year planning push, officials obsessed over wreckers and saboteurs, which raised the problem of protecting planning data. ³⁰ Administrators periodically berated their inferiors for either mishandling sensitive correspondence or for forwarding it to persons unauthorised to see it. Throughout campaigns to single out ‘enemies’ government officials became engrossed with the importance of keeping things secret, even as they created more and more secrets by simply writing more – forwarding ever-increasing amounts of paperwork across agencies.

The party’s Politburo tackled the problem of the state archives in late 1960, proposing to move the agency from the Ministry of Interior to the purview of the Council of Ministers. This signalled a shift in thinking about state archives as a cross-agency problem, requiring oversight, but also personnel, technical training and equipment. The new department was envisioned as employing a mix of military and technical personnel. ³¹ But as much as government officials pushed, some state organs still lacked proper personnel dedicated to archiving. For example, the Radio Agency (Radio-Difuzioni), the Telegraphic Agency (Agjencia Telegrafike) and the Film Studio (Kinostudio) only had temporary archives where material had already begun to disintegrate. ³² At the local level, many of the executive councils (këshillat ekzekutive) still lacked proper repositories. Only after repeated warnings from higher-ups did functionaries begin to separate files into folders and arrange the material chronologically.

An investigation into recordkeeping from the State Control Commission brought up the example of the Ministry of Trade, where documents lay on the floor and in a basement, next to cleaning supplies. In another agency the basement storing the documents had flooded during winter, resulting in damaged paperwork. Financial files at the State Bank were reported to be disintegrating due to excessive moisture. ³³ Some records were still scattered around – unsecured – in different locations and in the possession of individuals. ³⁴ Alarmed, officials insisted that archiving had a ‘military, scientific, and techno-scientific’ character of utmost importance, but they were also confronted with the simple fact that bureaucratic build-up made centralisation complex. ³⁵ One proposal mentioned asking Moscow to send a specialist on archives for training purposes, in addition to sending Albanian trainees abroad. ³⁶ By the middle of 1961, however, relations between Tirana and Moscow had turned icy, and Soviet specialists soon left Albania. Later that year there was a proposal to convert the vacated Soviet embassy into the archive agency’s building, but the prime minister vetoed the idea.

By the early 1960s, then, archiving was no longer understood simply as a problem of storage and security (though it was that, too). It was now seen as a process of assessment and classification, as a way of distinguishing different types of paperwork and attaching different forms of value to documents. This took place in the context of increasingly scarce resources and in the shadow of the political break with Moscow. A scholar working in today’s state archives may not immediately see the work that went into this process. But these were procedures worth thinking about – the 1960s parallel effort across agencies to think of the country’s post-war bureaucracy as an interconnected whole. Though archives speak with the language of order, the view of a centralised state came about retrospectively. ³⁷ This invites us to think about what has entered the archives, what is missing there and how 1960s conceptions of governance, authority and value have framed documentation. (What goes where? What should be discarded?) A history of socialist era archiving warns us against assuming all along the presence of a fully formed state. Exposing the administrative messiness of the post-war years, archives can also show how the battle for order became inextricable from the battle for socialism itself.

Centralisation was not an event but a process. More than bureaucratic decrees, it entailed intellectual tasks in making sense of the state as an interconnected thing. Albania’s archives are a good place to illustrate how the idea of an orderly state was a historical project, too. More specifically, it might be useful to analyse how conceptions of order – disciplining paperwork and the bureaucrats producing it – interacted with the disquieting disarray of the socialist world after the Sino-Soviet split. This might show how the imperatives of centralisation also became exercises in self-definition, as state bureaucrats came to deal with the clutter they were surrounded by, and how this anxiety about a growing state apparatus took a life of its own, ultimately exploited by the party boss to launch forced shuffling during the ‘revolutionary’ years (revolucionarizimi i jetës së vendit) of the late 1960s. A ground-level history of these years remains to be written. There will be much of value in the archives to elucidate the important domestic social dynamics. ³⁸ But my point is that these same archives make it possible to show how internal dynamics were informed by developments in the broader world.

The Local and the Global

One way to open up Albanian historiography to fresh perspectives is to see interpretative possibilities in the country’s Cold War era alignments and schisms: first as the uneasy satellite of Yugoslavia in the mid-1940s, then as an ally of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and, finally, as China’s fiery partner during the 1960s and much of the 1970s. ³⁹ Beyond these, the Party of Labour maintained ties to various Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements, fringe groups and armed guerrillas ranging from nearby Italy to Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula, and all the way to the Congo and the Brazilian rainforest. ⁴⁰ The scope of this form of revolutionary ‘globalism’ has only recently become visible. Each of these partnerships left behind traces in the archives (especially within the party’s foreign department), which contain documents in Serbo-Croatian, Russian, French (the language of party business prior to the state-supported expansion of Russian in the 1950s), Chinese, Korean and other languages.

It is possible to capture socialism’s global footprint precisely in the fact that an international archive came about in one tiny corner of Southeastern Europe. Socialist states themselves encouraged these kinds of transnational contacts early on, but the ideological squabbles of the 1960s produced new contacts and communications on a large scale. At the same time, precisely because recordkeeping took a while to become centralised, how the history of these international ties ought to be systematised turned into an ideologically significant problem. Each of the country’s political alliances had a beginning and an end, and so party ideologues were confronted, repeatedly, with the problem of placing these relationships into a proper analytical frame. Why did Belgrade stray in the late 1940s? Why did Khrushchev betray Stalin in 1956? Why had the communist world splintered? And then, years later: why did the Chinese choose to welcome US president Richard Nixon? Why had revolution failed in the decolonised world? ⁴¹

It became urgent to rewrite the recent past, to reframe socialist internationalism through the unavoidable problem of geopolitics. Writing such a history was not merely a formal task; it became a matter of self-definition on a large scale. In so doing, officials insisted that it was impossible to detach the party’s history from national history. For example, the 1948 schism with Belgrade was followed by efforts to write Yugoslavia out of earlier history – withdrawing textbooks, culling speeches, cleansing library holdings. ⁴² A decade later, the rift with Moscow during the Sino-Soviet crisis would similarly require a cultural reorientation. Central Committee higher-ups urged Albanians to continue to celebrate the heritage of Stalinism but also denounce the ‘revisionism’ that had taken root under Khrushchev (and then his successors, too). The centralisation of state archives and the establishment of party history initiatives thus coincided. What has been taken out of records, or redacted? What kind of work was necessary to remix the historical record, in order to serve the evolving needs of a party that saw itself as embattled? Reading archives as an ongoing preoccupation over time and in conjunction with other institutions means looking for evasions, contradictions and gaps.

More concretely, such analysis might pursue the history of neglected institutions, especially those lower than the office of the party boss or the Politburo, which are the obvious places for histories of the regime. Consider, for example, the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, which was the vehicle through which many up and coming party elites made their names. Attached to the party Central Committee, the Institute served as a ‘theoretical centre’ tasked with promoting the official line – the regime’s ideological, economic and organisational orientation. ⁴³ Its history can be particularly revealing since it was also responsible for publishing select primary sources from the archives and preparing official party histories. Moreover, it collaborated with other institutions (like the State University and the Academy of Sciences) on proceedings of national conferences on topics like the National Liberation War, the development of social sciences, constitutional matters, class war and the international order. ⁴⁴ In short, the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies was one of the official mechanisms for elaborating a ‘scientific’ socialist understanding of the wider world – an essential objective after the Sino-Soviet split.

Another key task of the Institute was to publish party leader Enver Hoxha’s voluminous collected Works (Vepra), which first came out in 1968 and reached over seventy volumes by the early 1990s. ⁴⁵ We are missing a comprehensive study of how the party leader’s publications – a central element of his developing personality cult – came about. ⁴⁶ His books continue to be consulted by foreign scholars, in itself a reflection of the money and time that the party apparatus put into translating them into foreign languages and disseminating them around the world. Many of Hoxha’s titles, including his so-called diaries, are based on archival documents, but they also often rearrange chronologies, distort the bigger picture and leave out important details. They are pastiches. One can imagine a history of the apparatus that came about to collect and edit this data, to sanction translations from and into Russian (which remained a key language well after the Soviet-Albanian schism in 1960–1), to select the ‘right’ historical evidence for each task, to intervene in texts and to order and execute translations into major Western languages with the help of foreign allies.

More broadly, works that explore the inner workings of such institutions can shed light on the paradoxes of socialism’s waning years. Too often, Albania’s 1970s and 1980s are marked as a period of ‘isolation’. And it is true that the regime’s paranoia about outside interferences reached a peak: the 1976 constitution, for instance, confirmed Marxist-Leninism as official ideology and forbade credits from or concessions to foreign companies or ‘capitalist, bourgeois and revisionist states’. The effects were deeply felt throughout the 1980s, as food lines grew and the economy caved in. But talk of the country being ‘sealed’ from the outside world obscures the fact that isolationism also encourages a constant mapping of the outside world. Back in the 1960s the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies had been a vehicle for popularising Mao Zedong’s writings in the Albanian language. ⁴⁷ A decade later it continued the work of showcasing Hoxha as a major voice in international Marxism-Leninism, in addition to distributing foreign-language translations of the party’s history. ⁴⁸ Radio Tirana, founded with Italian technical assistance in the late 1930s and boosted through Soviet and Chinese technology, became by the 1970s a kind of ‘guerrilla’ global revolutionary voice, too. A younger generation of Albanians, especially in the largest cities, continued to find creative ways to receive and engage with Western cultural signals. ⁴⁹

Such studies could expose the limits of concepts like ‘isolation’ and ‘openness’ in analysing the variegated world of socialism, particularly in its later years. These terms do little to capture the paradoxes of a globalised socialism operating on many fronts and at multiple scales. Albania’s regime spoke aggressively but was also deeply insecure. It continued to profess internationalism abroad even as it became increasingly paranoid about ideological contamination. It did not hesitate to execute individuals and erase their bodies from history, but it was also profoundly unsettled by Western texts, ‘capitalist’ radio signals and foreign television broadcasts. It pursued a path that does not fit within standard narratives of socialist reformism. And so when we look at places that don’t fit general histories, we call them anomalies. But it might be a good idea to start from the ‘anomalies’ as way of testing explanatory frameworks. ‘Anomalies’ force us to think about the trap of mistaking the choices of others for pathologies.

This history is worthy of study in its own right, but Albania’s past also invites us to rethink the progression from Stalinism to ‘normalised’ socialism to regime collapse. Such choices of periodisation have analytical implications. A diplomatic history of the Sino-Soviet split might pursue party elite perceptions, for example, but a cultural history of the split can illustrate how diplomatic rifts also create room for manoeuvre and new modes of self-fashioning. To go against Moscow in the 1960s, after all, was to try and figure out new ways of speaking about the present and the future of socialism. Insights from a broader range of sources from this era – scientific and technical agreements, cultural exchanges with China, not-always-successful forays to Cuba and Africa – can reveal how ideology turned into a kind of currency for smaller actors to navigate this changing geography of socialism – one that Moscow and Beijing helped shape but which they could not fully control. This latter point goes against the tendency in Cold War scholarship to fixate on Soviet or Chinese ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ in other places.

As global history overlaps more and more with the history of capitalism, finally, it is important for all kinds of historians of socialism to continue to demonstrate how anti-capitalism has long produced contacts and practices on a global scale. Parts of this history are also the places that have resisted internationalisation, and those rulers who pursue the allure of ‘self-reliance’ in a world dominated by big capital. Here, Albania’s historians have an opportunity to connect their work to broader ongoing debates about how illiberal regimes exploit geopolitical anxiety; how they strategically deploy appeals to a supranational sphere (communist-led revolution fifty years ago; ‘Europe’ these days). One challenge will be to give due attention to local particularities without perpetuating the idea of the country’s uniqueness in the world. ⁵⁰ In defining itself, Albania’s regime favoured a limited range of conceptual categories: heroic endurance, painful betrayal by foreign powers, subjugation and a do-it-alone spirit. It is important to continue to explain how these terms became operative. After all, strange though this militancy might sound in retrospect, such terms are hardly absent from politics in today’s world.