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Albania
Consolidation of Power and Initial Reforms
A tiny collection of militant communists moved quickly after
World War II to subdue all potential political enemies in Albania,
break the country's landowners and minuscule middle class, and
isolate Albania from the noncommunist world. By early 1945, the
communists had liquidated, discredited, or driven into exile most
of the country's interwar elite. The internal affairs minister,
Koci Xoxe, a pro-Yugoslav erstwhile tinsmith, presided over the
trial and the execution of thousands of opposition politicians,
clan chiefs, and members of former Albanian governments who were
condemned as "war criminals." Thousands of their family members
were imprisoned for years in work camps and jails and later exiled
for decades to miserable state farms built on reclaimed marshlands.
The communists' consolidation of control also produced a shift
in political power in Albania from the northern Gegs to the southern
Tosks. Most communist leaders were middle-class Tosks, and the
party drew most of its recruits from Tosk-inhabited areas, while
the Gegs, with their centuries-old tradition of opposing authority,
distrusted the new Albanian rulers and their alien Marxist doctrines.
In December 1945, Albanians elected a new People's Assembly,
but only candidates from the Democratic Front (previously the
National Liberation Movement then the National Liberation Front),
the renamed NLM, appeared on the electoral lists, and the communists
used propaganda and terror tactics to gag the opposition. Official
ballot tallies showed that 92 percent of the electorate voted
and that 93 percent of the voters chose the Democratic Front ticket.
The assembly convened in January 1946, annulled the monarchy,
and transformed Albania into a "people's republic." After months
of angry debate, the assembly adopted a constitution that mirrored
the Yugoslav and Soviet constitutions. Then in the spring, the
assembly members chose a new government. Hoxha, the Albanian Communist
Party's first secretary, became prime minister, foreign minister,
defense minister, and the army's commander in chief. Xoxe remained
both internal affairs minister and the party's organizational
secretary. In late 1945 and early 1946, Xoxe and other party hard-liners
purged moderates who had pressed for close contacts with the West,
a modicum of political pluralism, and a delay in the introduction
of strict communist economic measures until Albania's economy
had more time to develop. Hoxha remained in control despite the
fact that he had once advocated restoring relations with Italy
and even allowing Albanians to study in Italy.
The communists also undertook economic measures to expand their
power. In December 1944, the provisional government adopted laws
allowing the state to regulate foreign and domestic trade, commercial
enterprises, and the few industries the country possessed. The
laws sanctioned confiscation of property belonging to political
exiles and "enemies of the people." The state also expropriated
all German- and Italian-owned property, nationalized transportation
enterprises, and canceled all concessions granted by previous
Albanian governments to foreign companies.
The government took major steps to introduce a Stalinist-style
centrally planned economy in 1946. It nationalized all industries,
transformed foreign trade into a government monopoly, brought
almost all domestic trade under state control, and banned land
sales and transfers. Planners at the newly founded Economic Planning
Commission emphasized industrial development, and in 1947 the
government introduced the Soviet cost-accounting system.
In August 1945, the provisional government adopted the first
sweeping agricultural reforms in Albania's history. The country's
100 largest landowners, who controlled close to a third of Albania's
arable land, had frustrated all agricultural reform proposals
before the war. The communists' reforms were aimed at squeezing
large landowners out of business, winning peasant support, and
increasing farm output to avert famine. The government annulled
outstanding agricultural debts, granted peasants access to inexpensive
water for irrigation, and nationalized forest and pastureland.
Under the Agrarian Reform Law, which redistributed about half
of Albania's arable land, the government confiscated property
belonging to absentee landlords and people not dependent on agriculture
for a living. The few peasants with agricultural machinery were
permitted to keep up to forty hectares of land; the landholdings
of religious institutions and peasants without agricultural machinery
were limited to twenty hectares; and landless peasants and peasants
with tiny landholdings were given up to five hectares, although
they had to pay nominal compensation. Thus tiny farmsteads replaced
large private estates across Albania. By mid-1946 Albanian peasants
were cultivating more land and producing higher corn and wheat
yields than ever before.
Data as of April 1992
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