Ramiz Alia

Ramiz Alia inherited the most isolated state in Europe and presided over its dissolution, which was not what he intended when he took it on. He was born in Shkoder to a Muslim family from Kosovo, joined the partisans as a teenager, and rose through the ideological side of the party as Enver Hoxha's man for propaganda and culture - the department that enforced the atheism campaign of 1967 and the ban on foreign influence in music and dress. Hoxha marked him as successor in the late 1970s and he took over on Hoxha's death in 1985, holding a country with no private cars, no foreign debt, no allies, and several hundred thousand concrete bunkers built against an invasion that never came. He allowed small liberalisations, restored diplomatic relations, and permitted religion again in 1990, but he was trying to manage a system whose legitimacy rested on never changing. The embassy occupations of July 1990, when thousands climbed into the foreign missions in Tirana and demanded to leave, showed how little the concessions had bought. He legalised opposition parties in December 1990, won an election in March 1991 that the countryside delivered for him, and lost the general strike that followed; the ships sailing for Bari with tens of thousands aboard were the country's answer. He resigned the presidency in April 1992 after the Democratic Party won properly, was arrested the following year, and was convicted of abuse of power and misappropriation before being released in 1995 and amnestied. He spent his last years in Dubai and Tirana, defending the record without much conviction and insisting that the transition had been peaceful because he had let it be, which is a claim with something in it. Albania under him held the only communist government in Europe that had quarrelled with both Moscow and Beijing and been left with neither. He was the last head of state anywhere in Europe to lead a one-party Marxist-Leninist system out of office by election. His trial in 1994 was widely seen as political, and the appeal court agreed.

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