Collapse of Communist Rule in Albania
Albania's communist government fell in 1991 after forty-six years, the last in Europe to go. Enver Hoxha had ruled from 1944 to 1985 and had built the most isolated state on the continent. He broke with Yugoslavia in 1948, with the Soviet Union in 1961 over de-Stalinisation, and with China in 1978, and after each break the country had fewer friends and less trade. Religion was abolished outright in 1967 — the only state ever to declare itself formally atheist — with mosques and churches closed, converted or demolished and clergy imprisoned. Some 170,000 concrete bunkers were built across a country of three million against an invasion that never came. Private cars were banned. Ownership was effectively abolished. Sigurimi, the security service, ran an informer network of a scale that made ordinary conversation dangerous, and something like 100,000 people passed through prisons and internal exile. Ramiz Alia succeeded Hoxha and tried limited reform as the rest of the bloc collapsed in 1989. It came apart in 1990 and 1991. Thousands stormed foreign embassies in Tirana seeking asylum; some 20,000 crowded onto ships to Italy in a single week in March 1991; and the statue of Hoxha in Skanderbeg Square was pulled down in February. The first free elections were won by the communists in March 1991 and by the opposition a year later. The pyramid schemes of 1997 then took the savings of a third of the population and produced a near civil war. Albania joined NATO in 2009 and is a candidate for the European Union. Many of the bunkers are still there.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
