Enver Hoxha’s Long Shadow – John Watkins
Sunday, 20 October 2024
It was appropriate that just before my recent visit to Albania I read Enver Hoxha’s Long Shadow, John Watkins’ illuminating look at the country he first visited back in 1987 and then compared it to Albania today. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s despotic dictator, died in 1985, two years before Watkins’ first visit, but like a headless chicken Albania stumbled on as a Communist worker’s paradise for another six years until the complete collapse of the regime. It began to crumble in December 1990, but that was already just over a year after the Berlin Wall fell. Post Communism Albania descended into chaos, including a nationwide banking pyramid scheme which destroyed most peoples’ savings. When I visited Albania in 2006 it was still a nation in recovery, it’s a very different story today.
When Watkins made his first visit, accompanying his father, foreign visitors were essentially Albania enthusiasts and his entertaining introductory chapter namechecks some of those characters. Bill Bland headed up the British Albanian Society and his bitter disappointment when the Albanians gave up on Communism was only partially soothed by seamlessly shifting to the British Stalin Society. Of course Stalin was no longer viewed so favourably by this time, but Neil Taylor, who ran Regent Holidays which specialised in taking those type of enthusiasts to countries like Albania, Cuba or North Korea, noted that early clients included ‘the wild revolutionaries determined to find paradise in Albania and to impose it on Britain when they returned.’
Watkins key to tracking the huge changes in Albania and that lengthy shadow cast by its long term dictator was the photographs he took back in 1987. Showing those photographs to modern Albanians sometimes prompted amazement, if they were born after 1981 they could scarcely believe it was the same country. Or, if they were younger, the photographs conjured up forgotten memories, reminders of how much had changed for better or worse.
My recent Albania visit included an interview with Blendi Fevziu, an extremely popular Albanian journalist and the author of Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania. I’ve not read Blendi’s book, but he left me with absolutely no doubt what his opinion was of the country’s tyrannical and resolutely Stalinist dictator: overwhelmingly negative.
