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Albania
The Cultural and Ideological Revolution
In the mid-1960s, Albania's leaders grew wary of a threat to
their power by a burgeoning bureaucracy. Party discipline had
eroded. People complained about malfeasance, inflation, and low-quality
goods. Writers strayed from the orthodoxy of socialist realism,
which demanded that art and literature serve as instruments of
government and party policy. As a result, after Mao unleashed
the Cultural Revolution in China in 1965, Hoxha launched his own
Cultural and Ideological Revolution. The Albanian leader concentrated
on reforming the military, government bureaucracy, and economy
as well as on creating new support for his Stalinist system. The
regime abolished military ranks, reintroduced political commissars
into the military, and renounced professionalism in the army.
Railing against a "white-collar mentality," the authorities also
slashed the salaries of mid- and high-level officials, ousted
administrators and specialists from their desk jobs, and sent
such persons to toil in the factories and fields. Six ministries,
including the Ministry of Justice, were eliminated. Farm collectivization
spread to even the remote mountains. In addition, the government
attacked dissident writers and artists, reformed its education
system, and generally reinforced Albania's isolation from European
culture in an effort to keep out foreign influences.
In 1967 the authorities conducted a violent campaign to extinguish
religious life in Albania, claiming that religion had divided
the Albanian nation and kept it mired in backwardness. Student
of agitators combed the countryside, forcing Albanians to quit
practicing their faith. Despite complaints, even by APL members,
all churches, mosques, monasteries, and other religious institutions
had been closed or converted into warehouses, gymnasiums, and
workshops by year's end. A special decree abrogated the charters
by which the country's main religious communities had operated.
The campaign culminated in an announcement that Albania had become
the world's first atheistic state, a feat touted as one of Enver
Hoxha's greatest achievements
Traditional kinship links in Albania, centered on the patriarchal
family, were shattered by the postwar repression of clan leaders,
collectivization of agriculture, industrialization, migration
from the countryside to urban areas, and suppression of religion.
The postwar regime brought a radical change in the status of Albania's
women. Considered second-class citizens in traditional Albanian
society, women performed most of the work at home and in the fields.
Before World War II, about 90 percent of Albania's women were
illiterate, and in many areas they were regarded as chattels under
ancient tribal laws and customs. During the Cultural and Ideological
Revolution, the party encouraged women to take jobs outside the
home in an effort to compensate for labor shortages and to overcome
their conservatism. Hoxha himself proclaimed that anyone who trampled
on the party's edict on women's rights should be "hurled into
the fire."
Data as of April 1992
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