2012, No. 1 (2), Anthropology / history of the Contemporary World

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Tadeusz Czekalski
(No)Memory of Communism. The Albanian Case

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Keywords: Albanian historiography, Enver Hoxha, Tirana, communism, pos-communist memory, political discourse.

Abstract:
Out of European post-communist countries, Albania was the last to start the process of decommunisation and aborted the process after merely five years in a particularly dramatic fashion. The disaster of financial pyramids in 1997 and the related anarchisation of the state was an abrupt awakening from the post-communist euphoria for Albanians and reduced the significance of the events of 1991-1992 in their memory. The phrase rishikimi i historise (understood as a re-vision of history) left its mark, in the recent years, on the returning political dispute about the heritage of Albanian communism, encouraging a far-reaching mystification and mythologisation. Attitudes of nostalgia for communism seem fully justified by the current social and economic crisis and disillusionment towards politicians, but they also result from the society’s lack of knowledge about the times of Enver Hoxha. The current dispute about the identity and evolution of the Albanian nation also shows a tendency to marginalise the period of communism, or even “delete” it from history books and Albanian memory. This is achieved both by destroying material traces remaining from the times of communism and by publishing scientific and pseudo-scientific works discrediting the founders of communism.

About Author:
Czekalski Tadeusz - historian, Assistant Professor in the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University.