How Does Communism Continue to Affect Albania Today? Part II

A follow-up to last week's post that incorporates reader feedback about gender roles and the social influence of communism

Last week, I published a piece about the lingering effects of communism on Albanian society (I recommend reading that post first! This one can be understood on its own, but the previous context will make reading this one a bit easier).

I got mixed reactions from readers. Some people really enjoyed what I had shared, but two of my closest confidantes in Albania gave me some negative feedback.

“I think you’ve chosen the wrong examples to answer your question.”

The Botox point angered some people. “Every woman on the face of this planet is doing Botox. That isn’t an Albanian thing. That’s a Kardashians and Instagram thing.”

Valid (although I was speaking less about Botox itself and more about the social conformity its widespread use signals). I spoke to a few disgruntled readers, who thought I had skipped over more concrete examples of how communism has affected Albanian society and continues to shape it today.

I had written the previous post with the knowledge and experience of a foreigner living in a foreign country. I’ve had some quirky and unique experiences living here - not many Americans who move to Tirana have worked in a call center, for example. Hence, the lingering effect of Italian sticks out prominently in my mind.

Maybe it isn’t the most concrete or direct consequence of communism. But it’s what I’ve experienced regularly, so I wrote about it.

My Albanian friends who reached out to me gave me some food for thought that I wanted to share with readers curious about other, more direct lingering effects of communism on Albanian society.

Paranoia and Privacy

Albanians who grew up during the reign of communism had to contend with the Sigurimi, the Albanian secret police in charge of surveilling the population and gathering intelligence on spies and political opponents.

The logo of the Sigurimi secret police unit. Its caption reads “For the people, with the people”

As much as a third of the Albanian population was recruited, formally or informally, into the legendary unit’s surveillance web. The Sigurimi imprisoned around 18,000 people and executed some 6,000 for political opposition over its long and varied history.

One man ended up being put in jail for ten years for expressing ‘modern tendencies.’ The website Balkan Insight reports:

Friends and relatives were also engaged as informers, as Maks Velo, a renowned Albanian architect and painter, discovered recently.

Velo was informed upon by his friend, another painter, as he found out when he saw his Sigurimi files.

“It was shocking to me to learn that he was even reporting our conversation about Picasso to the Sigurimi. I would never have imagined that I was going to jail based on talks like this,” he told BIRN.

Albanians thus could not trust each other. Even children were recruited into the Sigurimi’s network of spies: schools indoctrinated them to buy into the vision of the dictator and the tenets of the ruling People’s Socialist Republic.

Ultimately, the propaganda and communist revolution worked on and for some people - Dr. Sidita Kushi, in an article about women’s roles in post-communist Albania, documented her family’s thoughts about the communist regime her parents grew up in:

Talking to my parents – who lived through Hoxha’s communist nightmare, hiding their radios as they played forbidden Italian music and fearing with every spoken word – ambivalent judgments abound. Hoxha was bad – really bad – but part of his legacy may secretly be seen as good even in the minds of the most terrified citizens. 

Many people who were dirt poor beforehand were happy that communism leveled the playing field and provided education and employment. One friend with whom I discussed communism told me that her grandfather only spoke positively about those days: “Nobody was better than you, and nobody was worse. We were all equal. And the government provided for the people.”

(Never mind the countless tales of starvation: many had almost nothing to eat, no work, and no opportunity during the forty-odd years of Hoxha’s rule, which centralized the means of production and forbade private investment or initiative.)

The effects of the brutal surveillance state were that Albanians became a lot more closed off from each other. 

Stalin and other communist icons celebrated in Albania in 1974

Although to me, Albanians seem to be extremely blunt and open (maybe that’s because I grew up in the United States, a country whose culture is infamously polite, politically correct and “fake”), many of my friends described Albanians today as still harboring a sense of suspicion and fear towards one another.

Certain social issues are not discussed openly. Certainly, when it comes to family issues, Albanians prefer to keep things private: mental health, marital dysfunction, and familial feuds are usually kept on the down low.

Similarly, asking for outside help seems complicated for some Albanians; many attribute this attitude to the communist era.

For many, communism was a time of hunger. Families often ate only once a day, usually at night, to conserve what little food they had.

If someone offers an Albanian food today, they oftentimes push it away.

“Jo, jam mire.”

People resist receiving gifts because, in the past, that could very well mean that the giver wouldn’t be eating that night.

So people got used to refusing food offers from their neighbors and friends. Even today, Albanians aren’t comfortable receiving gifts.

Distrust of Centralized Power

After such a long time spent under a government that oppressed them to no end, it’s no surprise that Albanians are wary of centralized power.

If your ruler never allowed you to voice your opinion freely, jailed your neighbor for looking at a favored politico the wrong way and closed your country off from contact with the outside world, wouldn’t you also be skeptical when it comes to large organizations telling you what to do or buy?

Today, the Albanian economy and political system are more or less liberalized and open (though the government suffers from corruption). Free elections allow citizens to choose among political parties to represent them in parliament, and healthy competition in the economic sector has led to lower prices and higher quality of services for consumers.

But it’s funny to hear everyone saying the same thing: Albanians don’t trust marketing.

Some trace it back to their distrust of the communist regime. How could you expect a people subdued by a centralized government to trust the word of a large, faceless corporation peddling a product they’ve never heard of?

Albanians rely more on word of mouth when trying new products and services. Corporate marketing and advertising are viewed with a heavy dose of suspicion. An Albanian is far more likely to purchase an unknown product or service if a friend of a friend has heard about it and recommends it rather than because they saw an ad for it on a billboard in Sheshi Wilson or a glitzy actress promoting it on TV.

Gender Roles

The final topic I wanted to touch on was gender roles in Albania.

One friend, in particular, pointed out that communism had a sort of evening effect on gender roles in the country. 

In my earlier post, I wrote how the lack of interaction with the outside world created multiple generations of Albanians stuck in the times and morays of the early twentieth century. Albanian society back then was strongly patriarchal due to its highly tribal nature and the influence of Islam. These two institutions heavily regulate the role of a woman in society.

Poster commemorating the annual Congress of the Union of Albanian Women

What I hadn’t thought about, however, was that communism’s ethos was a radical departure from the past. It preached an equality that sought to erase the differences between men and women.

Hoxha famously preached:

“The Party and the whole country should rise to their feet, burn the backward canons and crush anyone who would dare trample on the sacred law of the Party on the protection of the rights of women and young girls.”

So, while the legacy of Hoxha’s regime was undoubtedly dark and made victims of both genders, the dictator did do away with many of the traditional, clan-like roles that Albanian society had pigeonholed women into: 

• The regime opened the doors to higher education for women nationwide, providing a window of opportunity to half the population. Half of all Albanian students were women, and with higher levels of education, women were able to find high-paying jobs and achieve independence, resulting in almost half the workforce being female by the late 1980s

• Many laws were passed outlawing forced marriages between young women (often just girls, usually from villages) and older men 

• The Albanian socialist state mandated a quota for female representation in government; in 1988, some 33% of parliamentary representatives were women. In the people’s councils, women made up 40% of legislative bodies

The topic of women’s rights and how communism may have affected it is complicated, likely warranting its own post. Communism helped to level the playing field between men and women in many respects - Hoxha’s literacy program boosted rates to 90% by the 1980s in a country where most of the citizens didn’t know how to read. This had the most pronounced effect on women, who had suffered the most from illiteracy.

But the regime also restricted access to abortion and other methods of birth control, since the dictator sought to build up the Albanian population. (No wonder Albania had one of Europe's highest population growth rates in the late 1980s.)

So, in a sense, women were “liberated” by entering the socialist workforce. But Hoxha could never successfully do away with the traditional roles that women still held in private - to take care of the home and children. 

This led to the reality I described in my previous post of general female exhaustion in Albanian society as women straddle two very demanding worlds.

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“Another post about communism?”

Most Albanians are confused by my fascination with communism, which is seen as simply a part of the country’s past.

For most Americans, however, who grew up only hearing about communist countries on the news and reading about them in textbooks, communism versus democracy (and capitalism) has been portrayed as the ultimate good versus evil narrative, one that continues to engender lively debate in American educational and media circles today.

Positive portrayals of communism in the US are not uncommon these days. So to me, living in a post-communist country and encountering its legacy in real life is a jarring experience that provides a firsthand opportunity to learn more about its complex effects on society.

I’m constantly learning about Albania, its culture and history, both by living here and by interacting with and speaking to Albanians. If you have any thoughts or comments about the effects of communism on Albanian society or what I shared here, I’d love to hear them below!