Communist Albania was different from every other communist country. This was partly because Communist Albania saw itself as different. Its leaders believed - and told their people - that they kept the true light of communism going, when everywhere else had turned against it. They held on to this up until the end of the one-party state in Albania in December 1990.

Free by Lea Ypi is a book about what it’s like to grow up in such a country. The book is a detailed and nuanced look at what everyday life was like in Communist Albania. Ypi was a child and a teenager in the world’s last Stalinist country. Cut off from the outside world, she and other Albanians learned about what was happening outside through government propaganda (when they weren’t secretly watching Italian television).

It’s hard for us to imagine a perception of the world that is so massively shaped by government propaganda. Schools taught political education to children and had “moral education” tutors. The ideology of the state was parroted to children in kids’ political magazines. TV and other media were controlled by the government.

“Getting your degree”

To survive in such an authoritarian state, Ypi’s parents developed codes for discussing politics. They referred to Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania, as “uncle” for example. Whenever Ypi’s parents talked about someone “going away to university” they meant they had been sent to a labour camp. “Getting your degree” meant being released, whereas “dropping out” referred to people who committed suicide. 

How easy or difficult a degree was, referred to how easy or hard someone’s time in prison was. When someone “became a teacher” that meant they became an informer, to get a reduced sentence. Different degree subjects related to different charges, for example, “studying politics” meant they were in prison for being a political dissident and “studying economics” meant they had been speculating or hoarding gold.

This level of fear of the government seems alien to us, but was sensible under Hoxha's brutal rule. Like under Mao Zedong in China, Albania had had a Cultural Revolution where intellectuals were sent into the fields to work and farmers were sent into the cities. Hoxha's rule was strict and brutal, dissent was published harshly and people informed on their neighbours to the authorities.

Splits and bunkers

Hoxha was one of history’s more eccentric communist dictators. He was a Stalinist, but Albania was isolated from the other communist countries after it broke ties with Russia following Nikita Khrushchev’s programme of de-Stalinization. Albania later split with China after Mao’s death and was expelled from the Warsaw Pact in 1962. Albania was completely isolated and Hoxha built a cult of personality around himself and his delusions.

Hoxha stockpiled weapons and was paranoid about his country being invaded. He built 15 bunkers per square kilometres, which is 75,000 in total, across Albania so that civilians could defend the country in the event of an invasion. You can see a surviving bunker in this video.

This level of authoritarian control didn’t survive into the 1990s. Following the fall of the Berlin wall, Communism in Albania held its first multi-party election in March 1991. Ypi describes this as the arrival of “liberalism”, not capitalism, in Albania. Although it was the liberalisation of both the country’s economic and political systems.

From extreme socialism to extreme liberalism

From an extreme form of socialism, Albania swung to an extreme form of liberalism where everything was permitted. Ypi has said that Albania experienced: “Both socialism and liberalism in its extremes.”

This brought huge changes to her life. After-school programmes provided by the state ended. Her father had to fire people from the port where he worked because of IMF and World Bank structural reforms. The electricity became intermittent after the state stopped supplying it.

Being a gangster, a drug dealer or a sex trafficker were considered normal jobs. Liberalism meant complete freedom, and many people were trafficked out of Albania to work in brothels in other countries. People lost all their savings in pyramid schemes. Hoxha and his Party of Labour of Albania’s rule had held the country together. Once removed, it descended into civil war.

Flawed systems

Free shows lots of terrible things about Communism in Albania, but also the flaws in how capitalism, or “liberalism” as she called it, was introduced. With a lot of nuance, the book charts what is good and bad about both systems. It shows the promises that both made and broke.

Ypi is now an academic at the London School of Economics and she still teaches Karl Marx even though she lived in a repressive Marxist country under the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Despite this, she still thinks Marx has something to offer the inquiring minds of today.

Marxist history, even in Albania, shows how people have struggled, and failed, to build better societies. These struggles are informative, and their failures shouldn’t deter us from trying to make a better world.

Not a misery memoir

When she moved to Italy to study, Ypi was told by socialists what she lived under wasn’t real Marxism or real socialism. Western socialists, including myself, have many criticisms of communism in Albania, how authoritarian it was, how many people it killed, but it was still a form of socialism. It was still inspired by the struggle to build a better society.

Free shows the potential flaws in any socialist system, but - as well as showing the flaws in any capitalist system - it shows how people lived under both. It’s not a misery memoir. It shows, with considerable nuance, how people lived under one of the strangest and harshest regimes of all time and were still able to find meaning and happiness to their lives.

We shouldn’t let the many failures of Albanian Communism from deterring us from struggling for socialism and to make this world a better place. After all, Lea Ypi grew up in Communist Albania and she still believes that Marx and his writing has something to teach those of us who want to build a better world.