this is Albania a tiny mountainous Nation nestled at the mouth of the Adriatic today the unassuming territory is the third poorest in Europe and consistently ranks among the most corrupt nations in the region yet even this less than ideal position is Paradise compared to what it was a little over 30 years ago in the mid 1980s the Albanian state was a communist hermit Kingdom that ranked as the third poorest country in the world not just in Europe it was ruled by a paranoid dictator who carried out Stalin as purges against political dissidents and kept the
populace docile through a network of prisons and brutal secret police almost completely diplomatically and economically isolated the country resisted the modernizing influences of its neighbors and even the rest of the Communist block and remained a relic of a totalitarian past it was Europe's North Korea an equivalent in all respects except for its geography and Longevity and here is its Story one of the dictator en vosa and his paranoia of a mysterious isolated neighborhood in the nation's capital and life within the state stuck in time 20th century Albania was a nation full forged in The Crucible
of conflict it was invaded by Italy in 1939 and only managed to free itself from fascism 5 years later after a German occupation retreated from the southern Balkans in late 1944 what remained in their place was the remnant of collaborationists monarchists nationalists and communist partisans in this power vacuum a relatively unknown variable by the name of enaer emerged at the top of the country's foremost political entity the party of Labor of Albania or the pla even the country's most well-read chroniclers are puzzled by exactly how this unexceptional man achieved such a feat he was not
particularly intelligent nor was he influential in the party his presence at the party's founding was speculated to be a bid to meet religious quotas all other members were Christian and they needed a Muslim member to be representative of the population by all accounts he was just in the right place at the right time had a handful of influential allies and crucially had the stomach to snatch the opportunity with a clinical viciousness his unscrupulous strategies would see him become a paranoid despot rivaled only by his contemporary in North Korea Kim mils posa's Cutthroat approach to ensuring
in his political Supremacy would be demonstrated as soon as the German occupiers began pulling out of the Balkans in late 1944 as the verar retreated northwards the Communist controlled National Liberation Army or the nla directed by the 34-year-old HOA shadowed them and conducted a political cleansing campaign in the abandoned areas where all perceived political opponents were liquidated in these early days of centralizing power hure display a brutality that would become characteristic of his rule in the words of one New Republic journalist quote HOA ordered purges like other people order out for pizza on numerous occasions
he would order the arrest torture and killing of former allies and enemies alike as well as people he resented on a personal level out of jealousy he once had a prominent communist by the name of Lazar fundo tortured to death because because he was a successful Envoy to Comm turn the supranational organization that sought to spark World Revolution and because he had insulted him in the past H's personal dislike of fundo was Amplified by rumors from Yugoslavia that he might be a subversive trotskyist a alleged revisionist that wanted to pervert Marxist ideology this was a
common charge used in the Communist nations of the time and the accusation typically held very little water it was usually employed to justify the elimination of a nuisance to the established leadership for HOA it was just a convenient excuse to persecute someone he already despised and viewed as a potential rival hza must have realized though that if he could determine fund's Associates he too could brand them trotskyists so he asked that when captured the torturers extracted the names of fund's allies and the p La HOA was always on the lookout for information that could provide
him leverage over others this political vigilance however would end up turning HOA into the most paranoid man in Europe over the course of his 41-year rule from 1944 to 1985 the dictator would kill founding party members so that they could not use their seniority to undermine his legitimacy and he would have childhood friends executed or sent to prison for straying from the party line like Stalin the man after which he modeled many of his own policies and his own Cult of the personality hoer would further alter the past by expunging those who had been purged
from the historical records to raise evidence of anyone's prior involvement with the pla he would have the faces of disgraced politicians scratched from photos as if they had never existed eliminating even the smallest traces of opposition when his right-hand man and presumed Heir meu died due to an apparent suicide in 1981 there was speculation that hza had ordered his death not least because immediately after his demise the dictator announced absurdly that shahu had been a traitor all along and had been in fact an agent not just for the Soviets but also for the Americans if
Shah who's death was indeed a suicide side it was one only in name days before his death HOA had forced him to engage in self-criticism for allowing his son to be engaged to a woman who had anti-communist relatives in America when hza summoned the poit bureau Albania's governing body to discuss the Scandal shahu must have suspected that his time was drawing near and decided to take matters into his own hands hja had not pulled the trigger but he had given sheu the gun so to say shahu was as close to stubbornly loyal as you could
get domestic observers and party officials testified that he had never engaged in policy disagreement with HOA and was utterly subservient American intelligence sources believe the same they doubted that shahu would ever challenge H's Authority perhaps the reason for H's actions aside from the laughable assertion of the second most powerful man in the country being a double agent for two rival Powers was that shahu was toying with the idea of tempering Albania's isolationism it was reported that he had recently conducted diplomacy with the capitalist nations of Europe and Yugoslavia Albania's longtime rival hja notoriously paranoid of
foreign influences and favoring isolationism may have felt undermined alternatively some intelligence reports argue that by 1981 posa was in favor of a degree of increased interaction with the Western world if this is the case then his targeting of Shu may have been entirely personal something we will get into in the last chapter of this video hoa's heavy isolationist slant during his time in power is perhaps one of the most obvious parallels to North Korea like the Korean hermit Kingdom Albania shunned Nations that should have been its allies both HOA and kimil sang would break with
the Soviet Union and China effectively alienating the only countries that would have any reason to support them Albania already kept Every Nation on Earth at arms length a policy manifested in the general hostility to any foreign but particularly Western Products ideas art or media the aversion was so extreme that in 1979 one artist by the name of Mark V was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in one of the country's most brutal prisons just for producing art that showed traces of quote foreign influences this alien ination of all allies and suspicion of all things
foreign meant that hza could present the rest of the world however he wished if he wanted to construct a narrative in which the rest of the world was working to see Albania fail he could and that is what he did when the American reporter Harrison Salsbury visited the country in 1957 he noted that albanians believed America was orchestrating a plot to place the exiled King Zog back on the throne Zog had been deposed by the Italian invasion of 1939 and his feared reinstatement would see Albania transformed back into a medieval surom this sort of sentiment
was a product of Albania's propaganda machine now the United Kingdom and the United States had tried to overthrow oa's government in the years after World War II under the highly classified code name operation valuable fiend but they had failed miserably and since 1954 had given up on the prospect of subverting Communism in Albania but this operation had two lasting effects it formed the basis of H's foreign paranoia and gave him justification to be extremely prejudiced when trying to root out subversion it would also lead him to grow distrustful of the Soviet Union who after 1954
opened up to the West under kustov and China who did the same after 1972 as more socialist Nations entered rapon with the capitalist World HOSA began to believe that Albania was the only true Bas of Marxism left with all others having strayed from a path in the words of one Yugoslav contemporary in hosa's mind quote the whole world conspires against little Albania capitalists and imperialists neighboring revisionist Yugoslavia and the far off CLE and P King the Moscow revisionists Italian and Spanish Euro communists and many others this led to a Siege mentality in Albania which HOSA
hoped would prompt his subjects to adhere to the principles of the state as if their life depended on it because otherwise it was implied Albania would be vanquished in his own words for Albania to be self-reliant and protect itself from its enemies everyone should quote work and live as if in a state of Siege this would manifest very literally with HOA embarking on an insane campaign to construct 170,000 bunkers around the country between 1975 and 85 these concrete edifices permanently projected an air of unease around the country and helped etch into the mind of every
Albanian that the world was against them and that the pla was in an existential struggle the construction of these bunkers also meant that the money that may have gone to improving the living conditions of the average Albanian was instead sucked up by a paranoia project project between 99.6 to 11.4% of the nation's National budget went to National Defense and much of it was spent on bunkers this obsession with defense at the expense of the people was not a new trend in 1971 then prime minister Meed shahu recalled that quote in 1961 we couldn't care less
about bread but we were desperate for weapons because the revisionist Russians could attack Us in the face of a received foreign threat the welfare of the citizenry came second to the security of the state Albania was already an extremely poor country with many of its inhabitants on the verge of starvation and the burgeoning military expenses only served to increase their misery Albania's poverty was most evident in the capital tyana which should have been the country's Crown Jewel when the Bavarian Premier franos Strauss visited the country in August of 1984 before his son noted that at
night there were no cars to be found using the city streets and that when they had visited Albania's Museum of Technology they encountered a tractor from the 1920s and manually operated telephone switchboards most of the population lived in cramped Flats with 4 to 10 people crammed in little more than 50 square m just 1/5th the size of a tennis court but this was not the case everywhere in tyan just south of the city Center existed a forbidden zone the mysterious and isolated block this neighborhood was reserved for the upper strata of Albania's poet Bureau and
was populated with lavish Apartments restaurants clubs private clinics and special grocery stores it was as one individual described it an oasis presumably implying its surroundings to be comparably poorly developed when the block was set up in late 1944 to serve as Albania's Forbidden City residents were expelled by the Albanian secret police the sigui to make room for the incoming party apparat the area started being patrolled by plain closed police officers and checkpoints populated by armed guards were erected around the perimeter of the neighborhood to keep out the riffraff even Enos Street was sectioned off to
party members one place in the block is of particular interest this building adjacent to the Central Committee building of the Communist Party whose sole purpose was to function as a sort of club for party Elites within its walls you could find a Cinema showing ban foreign movies lounges billiard rooms and party functionaries shmoozing with each other while drinking expensive liquor this building nicknamed The Party House was the encapsulation of the Divide between halves and Have Nots and the hypocrisy of party Elites breaking the rules that they themselves had set out for the country the building
served a unique purpose for the paranoid envera it acted as a panopticon allowing him to monitor his subordinates closely the son of Albania's trade Minister sharak Nella wrote that HOSA demanded that all high-ranking party members attend the club every single day so as to continually gauge their loyalty to him he treated this rule with the utmost seriousness to the degree that when he set out charges against a minister in his government who had requested among other things a democratization of the party he cited The Minister's absence at the club over the past 2 months as
additional justification for his arrest the party House's secret function reflected the General State of paranoia in the block which seeped down from HOSA himself and Spilled Out into the rest of the party apparatus to ensure political longevity residents of the block would intermar leading to a quasi incestuous and highly isolated web of relationships although it was insisted that quote close blood Affinity was generally avoided it was a shallow gene pool regardless in this close-knit but highly suspicious Community an atmosphere of unees was pervasive everyone was ready to out each other if they detected a hint
of treachery even if it was a father a husband or a son given the inbreeding situation possibly all at the same time elsewhere in the block was H's specialized Clinic stocked with Western medicines and staffed with foreign trained doctors he even employed a renowned French physician by the name of Paul M to round out his medical team HOA was diagnosed with diabetes in 1948 and had been undergoing treatment ever since and it is here in his medical plight that we can see his paranoia was selective for all his fulmination against and suspicion of foreign influences
and products his medical team was dominated by expatriate expertise and his medical cabinet was stocked with foreign drugs expertise and drugs the benefits of which did not extend to his own population HOA also drove a tricked out Mercedes Benz a product of West Germany a capitalist power private property was illegal and private Vehicles therefore also prohibited but this did not seem to apply to Enver or many of those in his cabinet the average person would never see a car with there being only 1,265 private vehicles in the entire country inside his isolated manner in Tana
hoa's study overflowed with translated literary works from the libraries of the enemy n Shakespeare doeski Christie and makavelli all sat on his shelves their spines peering out into a world in which they did not belong much like how political dissidents under his rule were put behind bars literature too was imprisoned hojo's censorship regime verged on that of North Korea's infamously restrictive system but he made sure his library was free from scrutiny when kimil s died in 1994 North Korea entered a prolonged state of mourning and the average citizen engaged in public displays of Hysteria as
if the load star of the North Korean state had been snuffed out similarly in Albania hosa's death was accompanied by a period of extreme public distress hosa's Cult of the personality had constructed him to be what was effectively a God among men the glue that held the nation together and its seemingly Eternal and infallible protector so upon his passing for those who had been submerged in this propaganda for decades it was as if the world as they knew it was crumbling before their very eyes for dissidents not entranced by his spell they too feigned sad
for fear of reprisals in parallels to North Korea albanians wailed and screamed at the sight of their dictators coffin While others looked somberly onwards displaying their deference to their beloved leader as is evidence by what footage remains of the seven days of mourning ordered following hosa's death the funeral rights and acts of remembrance were highly choreographed throughout hosa's entire life he had been careful to present himself as the sole cause of Albania's Good Fortune as the Axis powers retreated from Albania he had distributed pamphlets around the country that cited him as the architect Behind The
Liberation and all the victories against the fascists occupi it hja never had an official biographer and personally penned in great self- congratulating detail the many achievements he had heralded in throughout his life the way in which he would be remembered was incredibly important to him so much so that it speculated he offed his most loyal Ally in presumed air the previously mentioned me shahu because he was afraid that shahu might outshine him after he died posa's opulent and grandiose funeral was likely his final Act of self-deification a last gasp in ensuring his legacy would last
in the end it did it outlasted even the communist state of Albania which fell to ruin in 1992 it seemed without hosa's Iron Fist the people's socialist Republic of Albania lacked the political will to exist the entrenched Elite of the country knew loyalty only to hja and without his presence keeping them on a short leash they became unored Albania opened up to the world politicians permitted foreign broadcasts to be viewed in the country and the fear that kept people in line gradually vanished posure could rule from the grave only for so long and with his
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