Koci Xoxe

Koci Xoxe was Albania's interior minister and Enver Hoxha's chief rival, and was shot in 1949 for the pro-Yugoslav position the party had held until the year before. He was a tinsmith from Korce, one of the few genuinely working-class figures in a leadership of teachers and students, and he ran the Sigurimi and the party organisation during and after the partisan war. His power came from the Yugoslavs: the Albanian party had been founded in 1941 with Yugoslav help, Tito's emissaries sat in on its decisions, and Xoxe was their man in it, pressing at successive plenums for closer integration and eventually for Albania to enter the Yugoslav federation as a seventh republic. He led the attack on Hoxha at the Eighth Plenum in 1948, forcing him into self-criticism, and for some months looked likely to replace him. Then Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948, and every argument Xoxe had made became a capital charge. Hoxha reversed the positions within weeks, and Xoxe was expelled, tried in secret in 1949 as a Titoist agent, and executed; the trial was one of the first of the Eastern European purges that continued through Rajk in Hungary and Slansky in Czechoslovakia. His fall set the pattern Albania followed for forty years, in which every foreign alignment ended with the execution of whoever had advocated it. Mehmet Shehu, who took over the security apparatus, died the same way in 1981. He was buried in an unmarked grave and his name was removed from the party history. Yugoslavia and Albania did not restore relations for decades. The Albanian party congress of 1948 rewrote its own founding to remove the Yugoslav role entirely.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history