I have had a soft spot in my heart for Albania for many years. Ever since I heard Radio Tirana on my shortwave radio back in the 1980's, my fascination with this little, misunderstood country on the fringes of Europe has never ceased. One day I hope to do graduate work on Albania and its people. In the meantime, I read historical works and novels about the country and dream of visiting it one day.

Albania's conversion to democracy after the devastating regime of Enver Hoxha's Stalinist rule continues to be a rocky one. Too much damage from five centuries of Ottoman rule coupled with communist brutality remains to this day. Arshi Pipa, in "Albanian Stalinism," attempts to systematize the damage communist rule imposed on the country.

This book consists mainly of essays about communist Albania and the Kosova province. It also includes a book review of Jon Halliday's "The Artful Albanian," a poem about Mother Theresa visiting Enver Hoxha and Stalin in Hades, and some speeches. There is even a small fictional piece about a stay in a forced labor camp and a dedication to a Catholic archbishop who died in an Albanian prison. Pipa wrote these essays over a forty-year span, from the 1950's to 1990.

The primary thrust of Pipa's essays can be summed up in the word "Stalalbanianism," a concoction of Stalinist communism and Albanian communism. After Albania split with the Yugoslavs in 1948, they embraced Stalinist Russia. Albania's emphasis on collectivization, industrial development, gulags, and party purges not only can be traced to this dependence and adoption of Stalinism, but also lasted much longer than Stalinism did around the world. Pipa shows how Enver Hoxha adopted the personality cult of Stalinism, creating a sect around himself through purges and through his dense, convoluted writings. Hoxha became a sort of messiah figure, lauded even after his death as Albania's lone Marxist-Leninist theoretician (he had the other Marxist intellectuals killed). That Hoxha's elevation to a saint of Marxism required the execution and imprisonment of thousands magically eluded Albanian court historians. Pipa tries to set the record straight.

The essays on Kosova are informative, especially since Pipa wrote these essays before the wars and ethnic cleansings in Yugoslavia during the 1990's. In Pipa's writings, Kosova is a pawn between Albania and Yugoslavia. Albania promoted a pro-Stalinist government there in an effort to upset the Yugoslav government. Yugoslavia quashed efforts to elevate Kosova to a republic within the Yugoslav federation because the Serbs objected to Kosova's ethnic Albanian majority. Pipa argues that the Kosova problem might be overcome through economic solutions (a necessary solution, as Kosova had the highest unemployment and lowest income in the entire Yugoslav federation) based on an international outlook that would rise above regional hatreds. The NATO war against Serbia in 1999 showed that these developments never materialized.

This is not unbiased writing. Pipa is a vociferous anti-communist and despises Enver Hoxha. It's not hard to discover why; Pipa spent time in labor camps in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and found himself accused of collaboration with the CIA during the purge of Mehmet Shehu. Since this book isn't unbiased, care should be taken with some of Pipa's observations and conclusions. I'm glad to see that despite his hatred of Hoxha, Pipa did grudgingly admit that the Hoxhan reign raised literacy, improved industrial capacity, and increased medical care to the masses.

Go ahead and read this if you have a background in Albanian studies. If you don't have the necessary background, read a survey or two on Albania first. Pipa's analyses of events in Albania can get a bit sticky if you're not familiar with names and places.