World War II.
Using Albania as a military base, in October 1940, Italian forces invaded Greece, but they were quickly thrown back into Albania. After Nazi Germany defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, the regions of Kosovo and Çamria were joined to Albania, thus creating an ethnically united Albanian state. The new state lasted until November 1944, when the Germans--who had replaced the Italian occupation forces following Italy's surrender in 1943--withdrew from Albania. Kosovo was then reincorporated into the Serbian part of Yugoslavia, and Çamria into Greece.
Meanwhile, the various communist groups that had germinated in Zog's Albania merged in November 1941 to form the Albanian Communist Party and began to fight the occupiers as a unified resistance force. After a successful struggle against the fascists and two other resistance groups--the National Front (Balli Kombtar) and the pro-Zog Legality Party(Legaliteti)--which contended for power with them, the communists seized control of the country on Nov. 29, 1944. Enver Hoxha, a college instructor who had led the resistance struggle of communist forces, became the leader of Albania by virtue of his post as secretary-general of the party. Albania, which before the war had been under the personal dictatorship of King Zog, now fell under the collective dictatorship of the Albanian Communist Party. The country became officially the People's Republic of Albania in 1946 and, in 1976, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
The man who became the movement almost from the beginning was the party leader Enver Hoxha (1908-85). Hoxha rose from a boiling crucible made up of several explosive ingredients: the daily travail of poorly armed and badly organised guerrilla units fighting against well-equipped and highly trained occupying armies; a nationalist determination to prevent the more powerful Yugoslav resistance movement from interfering unduly in Albanian domestic affairs; constant bickering with mainly right-wing British liaison Officers operating in Albania during the war years; and the civil war of 1943-4. Hoxha emerged from this blood-stained period as a very ambitious, ruthless, cunning and fanatical Communist guerrilla leader and politician. He also managed to combine very dogmatic Communist beliefs with fierce nationalism.
After pursuing the retreating Nazi armies from Albania and defeating their right-wing rivals the Communists set up their own government, under Hoxha's leadership, in November 1944. Unlike the Yugoslav Communists, their Albanian counterparts had no direct links with Moscow during the war. This state of affairs continued in the early post-war years, when the Albanian regime was in effect a Yugoslav satellite. But Tito and his colleagues soon discovered that their desire to make Albania part of the Yugoslav federation was strongly opposed by Hoxha himself. They consequently tried hard to replace him with a more pliant leader. But Hoxha employed all his machiavellian deviousness to thwart Yugoslav efforts to topple him, and in fact succeeded in doing so. Hoxha came to display the same ruthlessness in his determination to create a one-party state. All opposition - political, economic, social and cultural - was crushed with the utmost brutality. The only group towards whom he showed any wariness or consideration during the early years was the peasants, who made up the great majority of the population. He first introduced a mild agrarian reform in order to win their support. But later, when he had consolidated his own position in the party and the country, he embarked upon a fierce campaign of full collectivisation of agriculture.
The Yugoslav ambition to annex Albania created a split within the Albanian party between a pro-Yugoslav and an anti-Yugoslav faction. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the leader of the pro-Yugoslava faction, Koci Xoxe, was appointed Minister of the Interior, thus in control of the secret police and all other security forces. The 1948 schism between Stalin and Tito suddenly gave Hoxha an opportunity to achieve three main political ambitions: to escape once and for all from Yugoslavia's clutches; eliminate pro-Tito opponents who had made life difficult for him for several years; and to establish his first direct links with Moscow. From 1948 onwards he was to embrace Stalinism with unparalleled eagerness and fervour. One could say he became one of the Soviet dictator's most natural and consistent disciples. Hoxha visited Stalin in Moscow on several occasions, when he discovered, to his delight, that there was great affinity between them. Although the Albanian leader had been a natural pro-Stalinist most of his life, the close alliance and friendship with Stalin served to confirm and reinforce all his innate domineering and bloodthirsty propensities. Both believed in absolute personal power, which was justified by a very flexible ideology which could be manipulated to suit all possible situations. Like Stalin, Hoxha was utterly determined to destroy all opponents, real or imaginary, and remove every obstacle his policies encountered. Hence under his rule every trace of natural justice, of freedom of thought and expression, as these terms are understood in the civilised world, was wiped out in his country, just as it had been in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
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