Enver Hoxha

Enver Hoxha ruled Albania for forty-one years and left it the poorest and most isolated country in Europe, having quarrelled in turn with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China. He was a schoolteacher and tobacconist who founded the Albanian Communist Party in 1941 with Yugoslav help, led the partisan war and took power in 1944 without Soviet troops, which is unusual in the region and which he used to argue that Albania owed nobody anything. He broke with Tito in 1948 over the proposed absorption of Albania into Yugoslavia and executed his rival Koci Xoxe. He broke with Khrushchev over de-Stalinisation in 1961 and lost the Soviet submarine base at Vlora. He then aligned with Mao, and broke with China too after Nixon's visit in 1972 and Mao's death, leaving Albania with no allies at all by 1978. He declared the country the world's first atheist state in 1967, closing every mosque and church, and religious practice carried prison sentences. The Sigurimi ran a system of internment camps and forced labour; several hundred thousand concrete bunkers were built across the countryside against an invasion that never came. His designated successor Mehmet Shehu died in December 1981 in what the state called a suicide and most historians treat as a killing, after which Shehu's family was imprisoned. Hoxha wrote dozens of volumes of memoirs and polemic, and Hoxhaism survives as a small international current defining itself by opposition to everything. He was succeeded by Ramiz Alia, who could not hold the system together through the collapse of 1990 to 1992; Hoxha's body was removed from the Martyrs' Cemetery in 1992 and reburied in a public grave.

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