Europe's North Korea

This is Albania, a tiny mountainous nation nestled at the mouth of the Adriatic. Today, the unassuming territory is the third poorest in Europe and consistently ranks among the most corrupt nations in the region. Yet even this less than ideal position is paradise compared to what it was a little over 30 years ago.

In the mid-1980s, the Albanian state was a communist hermit kingdom that ranked as the third poorest country in the world, not just in Europe. It was ruled by a paranoid dictator who carried out Stalinist purges against political dissidents and kept the populace docile through a network of prisons and brutal secret police. Almost completely diplomatically and economically isolated, the country resisted the modernizing influences of its neighbors and even the rest of the Communist bloc, remaining a relic of a totalitarian past. It was Europe's North Korea, an equivalent in all respects except for its geography and longevity.

And here is its story: one of the dictator Enver Hoxha and his paranoia of a mysterious, isolated neighborhood in the nation's capital, and life within the state stuck in time.

20th century Albania was a nation forged in the crucible of conflict. It was invaded by Italy in 1939 and only managed to free itself from fascism five years later after a German occupation retreated from the southern Balkans in late 1944. What remained in their place was the remnant of collaborationists, monarchists, nationalists, and communist partisans. In this power vacuum, a relatively unknown variable by the name of Enver emerged at the top of the country's foremost political entity, the Party of Labor of Albania, or the PLA.

Even the country's most well-read chroniclers are puzzled by exactly how this unexceptional man achieved such a feat. He was not particularly intelligent, nor was he influential in the party. His presence at the party's founding was speculated to be a bid to meet religious quotas; all other members were Christian, and they needed a Muslim member to be representative of the population. By all accounts, he was just in the right place at the right time, had a handful of influential allies, and crucially, had the stomach to snatch the opportunity with a clinical viciousness.

His unscrupulous strategies would see him become a paranoid despot, rivaled only by his contemporary in North Korea, Kim Il-sung. Hoxha's cutthroat approach to ensuring his political supremacy would be demonstrated as soon as the German occupiers began pulling out of the Balkans in late 1944. As the Wehrmacht retreated northwards, the communist-controlled National Liberation Army, or the NLA, directed by the 34-year-old Hoxha, shadowed them and conducted a political cleansing campaign in the abandoned areas, where all perceived political opponents were liquidated.

In these early days of centralizing power, Hoxha displayed a brutality that would become characteristic of his rule. In the words of one New Republic journalist, "Hoxha ordered purges like other people order out for pizza." On numerous occasions, he would order the arrest, torture, and killing of former allies and enemies alike, as well as people he resented on a personal level out of jealousy.

He once had a prominent communist by the name of Lazar Fundo tortured to death because he was a successful envoy to Comintern, the supranational organization that sought to spark world revolution, and because he had insulted him in the past. Hoxha's personal dislike of Fundo was amplified by rumors from Yugoslavia that he might be a subversive Trotskyist, an alleged revisionist that wanted to pervert Marxist ideology. This was a common charge used in the communist nations of the time, and the accusation typically held very little water. It was usually employed to justify the elimination of a nuisance to the established leadership.

For Hoxha, it was just a convenient excuse to persecute someone he already despised and viewed as a potential rival. Hoxha must have realized, though, that if he could determine Fundo's associates, he too could brand them Trotskyists. So he asked that when captured, the torturers extracted the names of Fundo's allies and the PLA. Hoxha was always on the lookout for information that could provide him leverage over others.

This political vigilance, however, would end up turning Hoxha into the most paranoid man in Europe. Over the course of his 41-year rule from 1944 to 1985, the dictator would kill founding party members so that they could not use their seniority to undermine his legitimacy. He would have childhood friends executed or sent to prison for straying from the party line. Like Stalin, the man after which he modeled many of his own policies and his own cult of personality, Hoxha would further alter the past by expunging those who had been purged from the historical records to erase evidence of anyone's prior involvement with the PLA.

He would have the faces of disgraced politicians scratched from photos as if they had never existed, eliminating even the smallest traces of opposition. When his right-hand man and presumed heir, Meho, died due to an apparent suicide in 1981, there was speculation that Hoxha had ordered his death. Not least because immediately after his demise, the dictator absurdly announced that Meho had been a traitor all along and had been, in fact, an agent not just for the Soviets but also for the Americans.

If Meho's death was indeed a suicide, it was one only in name. Days before his death, Hoxha had forced him to engage in self-criticism for allowing his son to be engaged to a woman who had anti-communist relatives in America. When Hoxha summoned the Politburo, Albania's governing body, to discuss the scandal, Meho must have suspected that his time was drawing near and decided to take matters into his own hands. Hoxha had not pulled the trigger, but he had given Meho the gun, so to say.

Meho was as close to stubbornly loyal as you could get. Domestic observers and party officials testified that he had never engaged in policy disagreement with Hoxha and was utterly subservient. American intelligence sources believed the same; they doubted that Meho would ever challenge Hoxha's authority. Perhaps the reason for Hoxha's actions, aside from the laughable assertion of the second most powerful man in the country being a double agent for two rival powers, was that Meho was toying with the idea of tempering Albania's isolationism.

It was reported that he had recently conducted diplomacy with the capitalist nations of Europe and Yugoslavia, Albania's longtime rival. Hoxha, notoriously paranoid of foreign influences and favoring isolationism, may have felt undermined. Alternatively, some intelligence reports argue that by 1981, Hoxha was in favor of a degree of increased interaction with the Western world. If this is the case, then his targeting of Meho may have been entirely personal, something we will get into in the last chapter of this video.

Hoxha's heavy isolationist slant during his time in power is perhaps one of the most obvious parallels to North Korea. Like the Korean hermit kingdom, Albania shunned nations that should have been its allies. Both Hoxha and Kim Il-sung would break with the Soviet Union and China, effectively alienating the only countries that would have any reason to support them. Albania already kept every nation on Earth at arm's length, a policy manifested in the general hostility to any foreign, but particularly Western, products, ideas, art, or media.

The aversion was so extreme that in 1979, one artist by the name of Mark V was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in one of the country's most brutal prisons just for producing art that showed traces of "foreign influences." This alienation of all allies and suspicion of all things foreign meant that Hoxha could present the rest of the world however he wished. If he wanted to construct a narrative in which the rest of the world was working to see Albania fail, he could, and that is what he did.

When the American reporter Harrison Salsbury visited the country in 1957, he noted that Albanians believed America was orchestrating a plot to place the exiled King Zog back on the throne. Zog had been deposed by the Italian invasion of 1939, and his feared reinstatement would see Albania transformed back into a medieval surom. This sort of sentiment was a product of Albania's propaganda machine.

Now, the United Kingdom and the United States had tried to overthrow Hoxha's government in the years after World War II under the highly classified code name Operation Valuable Fiend, but they had failed miserably. Since 1954, they had given up on the prospect of subverting communism in Albania. But this operation had two lasting effects: it formed the basis of Hoxha's foreign paranoia and gave him justification to be extremely prejudiced when trying to root out subversion.

It would also lead him to grow distrustful of the Soviet Union, who after 1954 opened up to the West under Khrushchev, and China, who did the same after 1972. As more socialist nations entered rapport with the capitalist world, Hoxha began to believe that Albania was the only true bastion of Marxism left, with all others having strayed from the path. In the words of one Yugoslav contemporary, in Hoxha's mind, "the whole world conspires against little Albania: capitalists and imperialists, neighboring revisionist Yugoslavia, and the far-off Kremlin, the Moscow revisionists, Italian and Spanish Euro-communists, and many others."

This led to a siege mentality in Albania, which Hoxha hoped would prompt his subjects to adhere to the principles of the state as if their life depended on it. Because otherwise, it was implied, Albania would be vanquished. In his own words, for Albania to be self-reliant and protect itself from its enemies, everyone should "work and live as if in a state of siege."

This would manifest very literally, with Hoxha embarking on an insane campaign to construct 170,000 bunkers around the country between 1975 and 1985. These concrete edifices permanently projected an air of unease around the country and helped etch into the mind of every Albanian that the world was against them and that the PLA was in an existential struggle.

The construction of these bunkers also meant that the money that may have gone to improving the living conditions of the average Albanian was instead sucked up by a paranoia project. Between 99.6% to 11.4% of the nation's national budget went to national defense, and much of it was spent on bunkers. This obsession with defense at the expense of the people was not a new trend.

In 1971, then Prime Minister Meho Shahu recalled that "in 1961 we couldn't care less about bread, but we were desperate for weapons because the revisionist Russians could attack us." In the face of a perceived foreign threat, the welfare of the citizenry came second to the security of the state. Albania was already an extremely poor country, with many of its inhabitants on the verge of starvation, and the burgeoning military expenses only served to increase their misery.

Albania's poverty was most evident in the capital, Tirana, which should have been the country's crown jewel. When the Bavarian Premier Franz Strauss visited the country in August of 1984, he noted that at night there were no cars to be found using the city streets. When they visited Albania's Museum of Technology, they encountered a tractor from the 1920s and manually operated telephone switchboards. Most of the population lived in cramped flats, with 4 to 10 people crammed into little more than 50 square meters, just 1/5th the size of a tennis court.

But this was not the case everywhere in Tirana. Just south of the city center existed a forbidden zone: the mysterious and isolated block. This neighborhood was reserved for the upper strata of Albania's Politburo and was populated with lavish apartments, restaurants, clubs, private clinics, and special grocery stores. It was, as one individual described it, an oasis, presumably implying its surroundings to be comparably poorly developed.

When the block was set up in late 1944 to serve as Albania's Forbidden City, residents were expelled by the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, to make room for the incoming party apparatchiks. The area started being patrolled by plainclothes police officers, and checkpoints populated by armed guards were erected around the perimeter of the neighborhood to keep out the riffraff. Even Enver Street was sectioned off to party members.

One place in the block is of particular interest: this building adjacent to the Central Committee building of the Communist Party, whose sole purpose was to function as a sort of club for party elites. Within its walls, you could find a cinema showing banned foreign movies, lounges, billiard rooms, and party functionaries schmoozing with each other while drinking expensive liquor.

This building, nicknamed The Party House, was the encapsulation of the divide between haves and have-nots and the hypocrisy of party elites breaking the rules that they themselves had set out for the country. The building served a unique purpose for the paranoid Hoxha; it acted as a panopticon, allowing him to monitor his subordinates closely.

The son of Albania's trade minister, Sharak Nella, wrote that Hoxha demanded that all high-ranking party members attend the club every single day so as to continually gauge their loyalty to him. He treated this rule with the utmost seriousness, to the degree that when he set out charges against a minister in his government who had requested, among other things, a democratization of the party, he cited the minister's absence at the club over the past two months as additional justification for his arrest.

The Party House's secret function reflected the general state of paranoia in the block, which seeped down from Hoxha himself and spilled out into the rest of the party apparatus. To ensure political longevity, residents of the block would intermarry, leading to a quasi-incestuous and highly isolated web of relationships. Although it was insisted that "close blood affinity was generally avoided," it was a shallow gene pool regardless.

In this close-knit but highly suspicious community, an atmosphere of unease was pervasive. Everyone was ready to out each other if they detected a hint of treachery, even if it was a father, a husband, or a son. Given the inbreeding situation, possibly all at the same time.

Elsewhere in the block was Hoxha's specialized clinic, stocked with Western medicines and staffed with foreign-trained doctors. He even employed a renowned French physician by the name of Paul M. to round out his medical team. Hoxha was diagnosed with diabetes in 1948 and had been undergoing treatment ever since.

And it is here, in his medical plight, that we can see his paranoia was selective. For all his fulmination against and suspicion of foreign influences and products, his medical team was dominated by expatriate expertise, and his medical cabinet was stocked with foreign drugs, the benefits of which did not extend to his own population.

Hoxha also drove a tricked-out Mercedes Benz, a product of West Germany, a capitalist power. Private property was illegal, and private vehicles were therefore also prohibited, but this did not seem to apply to Hoxha or many of those in his cabinet. The average person would never see a car, with there being only 1,265 private vehicles in the entire country.

Inside his isolated manor in Tirana, Hoxha's study overflowed with translated literary works from the libraries of the enemy. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Christie, and Machiavelli all sat on his shelves, their spines peering out into a world in which they did not belong, much like how political dissidents under his rule were put behind bars. Literature too was imprisoned.

Hoxha's censorship regime verged on that of North Korea's infamously restrictive system, but he made sure his library was free from scrutiny. When Kim Il-sung died in 1994, North Korea entered a prolonged state of mourning, and the average citizen engaged in public displays of hysteria as if the lodestar of the North Korean state had been snuffed out.

Similarly, in Albania, Hoxha's death was accompanied by a period of extreme public distress. Hoxha's cult of personality had constructed him to be what was effectively a god among men, the glue that held the nation together and its seemingly eternal and infallible protector. So upon his passing, for those who had been submerged in this propaganda for decades, it was as if the world as they knew it was crumbling before their very eyes.

For dissidents not entranced by his spell, they too feigned sadness for fear of reprisals. In parallels to North Korea, Albanians wailed and screamed at the sight of their dictator's coffin, while others looked somberly onward, displaying their deference to their beloved leader. This is evidenced by what footage remains of the seven days of mourning ordered following Hoxha's death.

The funeral rites and acts of remembrance were highly choreographed. Throughout Hoxha's entire life, he had been careful to present himself as the sole cause of Albania's good fortune. As the Axis powers retreated from Albania, he had distributed pamphlets around the country that cited him as the architect behind the liberation and all the victories against the fascist occupiers.

Hoxha never had an official biographer and personally penned, in great self-congratulatory detail, the many achievements he had heralded throughout his life. The way in which he would be remembered was incredibly important to him, so much so that it is speculated he offed his most loyal ally and presumed heir, the previously mentioned Meho Shahu, because he was afraid that Shahu might outshine him after he died.

Hoxha's opulent and grandiose funeral was likely his final act of self-deification, a last gasp in ensuring his legacy would last. In the end, it did. It outlasted even the communist state of Albania, which fell to ruin in 1992. It seemed without Hoxha's iron fist, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania lacked the political will to exist.

The entrenched elite of the country knew loyalty only to Hoxha, and without his presence keeping them on a short leash, they became unmoored. Albania opened up to the world; politicians permitted foreign broadcasts to be viewed in the country, and the fear that kept people in line gradually vanished. Hoxha could rule from the grave only for so long, and with his death, the collapse of Europe's North Korea was almost inevitable.

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