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 Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the PRC's rapprochement with Washington, Tirana came to regard itself as the "Third Rome" of world communism, the devoted an increasing amount of his time to the preparation of manuscripts containing his views. These works - the first appeared in 1978 - have continued to be published by the regime since Hoxha's death. They include ideological analyses of issues (for example, Eurocommunism, the Yugoslav self-management system, and the prospects for a world revolution); memoirs focusing on major episodes of Albanian post-World War II history; and diaries containing Hoxha's observations on international developments. In addition to the growing library of Hoxha's works available in translation, there is a plethora of Hoxha books and documentary collections available exclusively in Albanian. They include his childhood memoirs and multi volume collections of Hoxha's thoughts on such topics as science, youth, women, and the party. It is only a slight
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