Behind his Balkan curtain, Hoxha embarked on a Stalinist-style exercise in social engineering. He sought the creation of an urban working class worthy of the name (hitherto, Albania had been a clan-based peasant society) and the socialization of national life. Forced industrialization followed, while agriculture was reorganized on the Soviet collective-farm model. At the same time, all of Albania gained access to electricity for the first time, life expectancy rose, and illiteracy rates plummeted. Yet the human cost of this social revolution was enormous.
Hoxha’s secret police, the Sigurimi, were brutal and ubiquitous: hundreds of thousands were tortured and killed. Hoxha’s prime minister Mehmet Shehu spoke openly at a party congress about their methods: “Who disagrees with our leadership in some point, will get a spit into his face, a blow onto his chin, and, if necessary, a bullet into his head.” Out of three million Albanians, one million were at some point either arrested or imprisoned in his perpetual terror.
Hoxha also added his own individual and quixotic touches. Private car ownership was banned, as were beards, which were seen as a rural throwback. Xenophobia was encouraged as the Albanian communists fused their adherence to the strictures of Marxist-Leninism with a glorification of various national myths. The central focus of such propaganda was the man heralded as the greatest Albanian of all time—Hoxha himself. However, Hoxha was careful to share his cult of personality with that of Stalin, who remained an object of forced reverence in Albania for the next four decades.
After the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, Hoxha allied himself with Beijing against Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, which he believed to be abandoning the true path toward socialism laid down by Comrade Stalin. This realignment led to a precipitous decline in Albanian standards of living, as the country had been highly dependent on Soviet grain, and on the USSR as its principal export market. To quell any possible dissent, Hoxha decided to emulate his new Chinese friends and launched an Albanian Cultural Revolution. From 1967, Albania was officially declared an “atheistic” state with all mosques and churches closed and clerics arrested. All private property was confiscated by the state, and the numbers of arrests increased exponentially.
After a brief and highly constrained cultural liberalization during the early 1970s, a further wave of repression and ideological purification followed in 1973. Then, in 1978, two years after Mao’s death and following the rise of the more moderate Deng Xiaoping, Hoxha broke with China, leading his country into yet further seclusion.
Hoxha survived numerous efforts to depose him—by loyalists of the exiled King Zog, by the British government, and by Khrushchev. Awareness of these threats fueled his already considerable paranoia, which manifested itself in a series of internal purges. Those at the apex of the system found themselves under the greatest threat: members of the Politburo and central committee were regularly arrested and executed for allegedly treasonable activities, and the seven successive interior ministers responsible for carrying out his purges were all themselves purged. In 1981 Hoxha’s most trusted henchmen, the long-serving Mehmet Shehu, prime minister since 1954, challenged his plan for the succession and his isolationism. Shehu officially “committed suicide” in the prime minister’s residence after being accused of involvement with “war criminals,” the CIA and the KGB, and suffering a nervous breakdown, itself illegal. Various accounts claimed the aging Hoxha had personally murdered Shehu. In fact, it is almost certain that the sick Hoxha, now aided by his wife, ordered his assassination. Henceforth Hoxha, increasingly ailing, ruled through his terrifying wife, Nexhmije, who joined the Politburo, and their protégé Ramiz Alia.
Hoxha himself died in office in 1985. Embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum, he was later reburied in a humbler grave. Alia, and Nexhmije Hoxha, took over but they were overthrown in 1990. Albania, after a period of chaos, emerged as a democracy—but one still damaged by Hoxha’s tyranny.
KIM IL SUNG & KIM JONG IL
1912–1994 & 1941–2011
The oppressed peoples can liberate themselves only through struggle. This is a simple and clear truth confirmed by history.
Kim Il Sung
Brutal, murderous, repressive and deluded by his own propaganda, Kim Il Sung was the self-styled “Great Leader” and long-time dictator of North Korea. He led his country on a path to war, international isolation and economic collapse, and during his half-century in power North Korea became arguably the most totalitarian and surreal regime in the world. Indeed, long after his death he remains eternally the president—and the third generation of this hereditary dynasty continued to rule this bizarre and hellish state well into the 21st century.
Kim Il Sung was born Kim Sung Ju, the eldest of three sons of a Christian father. Japan had invaded Korea in 1910 and Kim grew up under Japanese rule until, in the 1920s, his family moved to Manchuria in northeast China, where he learned Chinese and became interested in communism. After the Japanese invaded first Manchuria and then the rest of China, Kim joined the anti-Japanese resistance movement. During the Second World War he fled to the Soviet Union, where he underwent further military training and political indoctrination.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided into two zones of occupation, with the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. In 1946 the Soviets set up a satellite communist state in the north, with Kim as its head. While the south of the country proceeded with free elections, Kim immediately began imposing a repressive Stalinist totalitarian system; this included the creation of an all-powerful secret police, concentration camps, the redistribution of property, suppression of religion and killing of “class enemies.”
In June 1950—despite warnings from Stalin urging patience—Kim ordered his troops to invade South Korea in order to reunite the country, thereby triggering the Korean War. North Korea received logistical, financial and military support from China and the Soviet Union, while the South received backing from the UN, who sent an international force, mainly composed of US troops. Despite initial successes, the North Korean troops were soon beaten back. Kim was only rescued by massive Chinese intervention. After three years the conflict—which cost between 2 and 3 million lives—ended in a stalemate.
At home, Kim tightened his grip, banishing outside influence and liquidating internal enemies. An attempted coup by eleven party members in 1953—the first of a number of such attempts—ended in a Stalinist show trial of the participants, who were swiftly executed. A purge of the party followed, and tens of thousands of Koreans were sent to labor camps—still a feature in North Korea.
Kim promoted an all-pervasive cult of personality centered around the Juche (or Kim Il Sungism), a political philosophy based on his own supposedly god-like qualities. According to the state media, Kim was the flawless Eternal Leader or Supreme Leader.
Meanwhile, with military spending taking up nearly a quarter of the country’s budget, poverty became rife. In the 1990s food shortages led to famine, in which as many as 2 million people may have perished. The country maintained its utter isolation. Korea came to be seen as a rogue state and a sponsor of terrorism, particularly against its southern neighbor: North Korea was responsible for the assassination in 1983 of seventeen South Korean officials who had been on an official visit to Burma, and for the downing in 1987 of a South Korean commercial jet, resulting in the deaths of 115 people. North Korea went on to develop its own nuclear arsenal.