Thread: I wrote this article

Originally Posted by Joseph Stalin

because, since we were Stalinists, the enemy could not conquer us, and never will conquer us as long as we remain Stalinists."

So how'd that eventually work out for Albania?

Originally Posted by Hippocrass

So how'd that eventually work out for Albania?

To quote one source:

"one finds that the standard of living of the lowest-paid stratum of the Albanian working people is now [1988] higher than that of the lowest-paid stratum of the British working class."
(Winnifrith, Tom (ed). Perspectives on Albania. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1992. p. 135.)

James S. O'Donell in A Coming of Age: Albania under Enver Hoxha, Peter R. Prifti in Socialist Albania since 1944, etc. all note the economic and social progress made during the socialist period. It was only with the economic "reforms" of January 1990 and onwards that the economy become severely dislocated and basically collapsed.

As for what happened after that:

"With the collapse of Communism in 1991 Albania was convulsed by a violent rejection of everything associated with Hoxha... The reaction to him has severely damaged Albanian education from the actual school buildings to its quality and content. With the fall of Communism schoolhouses were often see as symbols of the regime and therefore destroyed. The virulent revival of blood feuds, which a hapless central authority can do little to remedy, requires thousands of school-age children to stay at home. The economic disaster that is Albania has little funding left for education. The population of Tirana grew from approximately 300,000 in 1991 to almost one million in 2003, but not one new high school was built during that twelve-year period. The mass exodus of the best and the brightest — in the first ten years following the collapse of Communism possibly 20% of the population fled what they considered a hopeless situation — has resulted in an unprecedented brain-drain. Albanian education is in crisis with no quick fix in sight. Women's rights, another of Hoxha's achievements, have been severely set back with the explosion of human trafficking which has seen thousands of Albanian girls and women transported abroad for prostitution and thousands more kept home from school by their parents for fear of such forcible abduction... with patriotic intellectuals openly suggesting that the only way out of the morass may be for Albania to become a ward of the United Nations or an Italian condominium."
(Fischer, Bernd J (ed). Balkan Strongmen. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. 2007. pp. 266-267.)