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Enver Hoxha's World
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13087 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1987 |
3,869 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Pano
Nicholas Pano is professor of history at Western Illinois
University. |
THE ARTFUL ALBANIAN:
The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha
Jon Halliday, ed.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1986, distributed by Salem House Publishers
394 pp., $9.95
At the time of his death in April 1985, Enver Hoxha, first secretary of the Albanian Party of Labor (APL), had ruled Albania for over forty years. He was the senior communist leader with respect to tenure in office. Indeed, in April 1985 only Emperor Hirohito of Japan had served as a national leader longer than Hoxha.
Yet, despite political longevity, Hoxha remains one of the lesser-known communist chieftains. His obscurity has several causes: Except for well-publicized confrontations (with Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1960-61, and the People's Republic of China in 1977-78), Albania has played a minor role in the activies of the communist world. Hoxha had his brief moments in the spotlight during the critical phases of each confrontation, but he receded into the background once the crises had run their course. Hoxha is not known to have traveled outside Albania following his bitter public denunciation of Khrushchev at the November 1960 Moscow meeting of the world communist parties. The Albanian leader's last press conference for Western journalists took place on September 16, 1946, in Paris, where he had gone to defend his country's interests at the Paris Peace Conference. In addition, Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese media coverage of Albanian developments became exceedingly rare following their respective estrangements from Tirana.
The 'Hoxha Classics'
Although Albania, by its defiance of the Soviet Union and alliance with China, cut itself off from the main body of the world communist movement, Tirana by the mid-1960s had come to view itself as a major center, along with Beijing, of communist orthodoxy. It was at this juncture that the publication of what might be called the "Hoxha Classics" commenced with the appearance in 1968 of the first volume of Hoxha's Collected Works (in Albanian). By 1987, fifty-four volumes in the series, covering the period from November 1941 to May 1975, had appeared. It is anticipated that an additional fifteen to twenty volumes will complete the collection.
During the 1970s, as China and Albania drifted apart in the aftermath of the Great
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