Albania: General Information

Albania: General InformationThe People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a small country on the sea of the Adriatic, was special in its time for keeping aloft the banner of Marxism Leninism and national liberation in a time when the two superpowers were scheming by every means to control vast swathes of the world. But to reduce it to that would be an unscrupulous distortion the Albanian people have a long history of struggle, going back from the Illyrians, their predecessors, to

The People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a small country on the sea of the Adriatic, was special in its time for keeping aloft the banner of Marxism-Leninism and national liberation in a time when the two superpowers were scheming by every means to control vast swathes of the world. But to reduce it to that would be an unscrupulous distortion -- the Albanian people have a long history of struggle, going back from the Illyrians, their predecessors, to the fight for feudalism by Gjon Kastrioti, to the anti-Turkish patriotic struggle led by the famous Gjergj Kastrioti-Skanderbeg, to Naim Frash‘ri and the League of Prizren leading the National Renaissance, to the Declaration of Independence at Vlora by Ismail Qemali, to the glorious democratic revolution of 1924 after the murder of hero Avni Rustemi, to the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War, led by the Communist Party of Albania (later the Party of Labour of Albania), with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, the greatest figure the Albanian people have ever produced. Albania with its partisan detachments (�etas) was a component part of the worldwide Anti-Fascist War led by the USSR and liberated itself without a single foreign soldier stepping foot on its soil. Under the monarchic yoke of King Zog and in the wake of the ruinous war, life expectancy was below 40, 90% were illiterate and without any formal education, the women were in chains, electricity was a privilege only for the elites, rampant diseases like malaria held sway over the life of the Albanian, and so on. The new people's power, led by the PLA, raised the life expectancy by 10 months for each year through the 1980s (to above 70), set up new schools and eradicated illiteracy en masse, smashed the bondage of women and gave her full equality with men, illuminated every last village with full electrification, abolished the diseases that plagued the nation for so many centuries, and much more. Of significant note was the socialist character of Albania -- it was a state of the dictatorship of the working class, which had abolished exploitation of man by man, inflation, price rises, crises of overproduction, anarchy, unemployment, etc. It was a country of esteemed culture with fine-tuned Marxist-Leninist aesthetes in literature, art, theatre, music, and so on. This ensured a secure and happy life for the labouring people, who achieved everything by their own toil and owned nothing to anyone, and this is what is described in the following book.