Life in Communist Albania

Dedicated to Professor Charles Moskos (1934–2008), the son of Albanian immigrants from a small village near Gjirokastër. As the world’s preeminent military sociologist, he earned the U.S. Army’s Distinguished Service Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. But it was his heart that mattered most to my family.

From 1985 to 1991, Professor Moskos and my father Ilia worked in the shadows—meeting in New York, Albania, Vienna, and Paris—laying the groundwork for what seemed impossible: the restoration of diplomatic ties between Albania and the United States. That dream materialized on March 15, 1991. Without his six years of patient diplomacy, the reconciliation might have taken decades longer—or remained an impossible dream.

The Surveillance Began Before I Was Born

In 1976, Deputy Interior Minister Feçor Shehu—a man known for brutal interrogations—summoned my father to his office and began reciting, word for word, a conversation from my mother’s uncle’s dinner table days earlier.

Uncle Jani, a decorated war veteran, had made public a single complaint: that Albania was building bunkers instead of homes for the poor. That remark earned him fifteen years in prison for “anti-government agitation.”

Shehu then advised my father to divorce his pregnant wife—my mother—to protect his career. The logic was simple: distance yourself from families of political prisoners or become one yourself.

My father refused.

The surveillance continued. From 1981 to 1987, my father represented Albania at the United Nations in New York. When the regime accused him of “exhibiting capitalist ideologies,” we were recalled to Tirana—not as a family returning home, but as suspects. Years later, after communism collapsed, two security officers confessed everything: my father had been under constant surveillance from 1981 until the regime fell.

This is the Albania I grew up in. But I was lucky. I lived at the Albanian Mission in New York from age one to five, then spent my childhood in Tirana during the final years of Europe’s most isolated communist state. My father, a decorated linguist, against all odds mastered the English langauge in communist Albania. A feat that led to him representing Albania to the rest of the world.

I was old enough to remember the whispered conversations, the hyper vigilance, the thrill of watching Western TV through illegal antennas. Too young to fully understand what any of it meant.

Naturally I’ve thought about, read about, and studied much of that period hoping to find answers. Hoping to find clarity myself. There are a lot of questions still. And I don’t have all the answers.

The following is my take. What I lived through as seen through my eyes. What I remember.

If you are reading this, and you were there, in that same time and space. Your experience maybe be different. Maybe you had it worst. Or maybe you had it better.

Whatever your experience was. It doesn’t make mine any less real.

This is my story.

House of Leaves Albania — *Surveillance equipment on display at the House of Leaves Museum in Tirana, Albania*

The Scorpions Investigation

My sister and I saw it first. We’d been taught English by our father from an early age, so we immediately recognized the words and giggled at each other. We knew exactly what they were: Scorpions lyrics, from “Winds of Change.” The irony wasn’t lost on us even as kids.

The year was 1990 when someone spray-painted rock lyrics on a building wall in Tirana.

The authorities panicked. They called my father—an English professor and diplomat. They needed him to translate because they were certain this graffiti was either Western spy communication or dangerous propaganda.

My father didn’t keep up with modern pop culture, so he didn’t initially realize what the lyrics were until my sister and I convinced him they were from a Scorpions song. By the late 1980s, almost every household in Albania was watching Western media through rooftop rabbit-ear antennas. These teenagers weren’t unique—they were just bold enough to paint what everyone was secretly listening to.

The investigation was serious. Writing unauthorized text in public could mean years in prison. My father came home that night and told my mother what he’d discovered. I remember them laughing—quietly, the way adults laughed about things that weren’t actually funny. They weren’t laughing at the kids. They were laughing at a system so paranoid it called in diplomatic translators to decode rock lyrics while actual winds of change swept across Eastern Europe.

The regime couldn’t tell the difference anymore between real threats and teenagers with spray paint.

Daily Rhythms

By the 1980s, the desperate dawn queues of earlier decades had largely disappeared. Neighborhoods had bakeries that sold bread, and there was usually enough for every family. Sure, if you wanted hot bread straight from the oven, you might stand in a small line, but nothing dramatic.

Life had a different rhythm than in the West. In Tirana, the workday started early—7 or 8 AM—but most professional jobs ended by 2 or 3 PM. People came home, often took a nap, then prepared for the evening: dinner followed by the ritual xhiro, the evening stroll through the neighborhood where everyone walked, socialized, and exchanged information.

School followed the same pattern. From first to fourth grade, we attended from 8 AM to noon—just four hours—but with plenty of homework afterward. No cafeterias, no lunch programs, no after-school activities. You didn’t bring food to school. The support systems that keep American kids fed and occupied until their parents finish work at 5 or 6 PM simply didn’t exist.

My mother, like most women, did the daily shopping. Every day, she’d go to the market for fresh vegetables, bread, fruits, and bring them home to cook for the family. Everything was fresh, seasonal, local. A family of four like ours had access to meat, eggs, oil, seasonal produce. While variety was limited—you couldn’t always choose exactly what you wanted—there was plenty of food.

What Western narratives miss is the quality: everything was organic by default. Industrial agriculture never reached Albania. No pesticides, no chemical fertilizers. Those tomatoes with feta cheese in summer, watermelon in July, apples in fall—all tasted remarkably pure and flavorful. The isolation that limited imports preserved traditional farming methods.

Living Quarters

We lived in a government apartment building with underground bunkers and tunnels connecting the units. The state decided where you lived based on your profession and your “political biography.” A good profession and biography gave you access to cities like Tirana. Bad biography meant remote villages or industrial towns.

*The apartment building where my family lived in Tirana, photo taken 2015, twenty-five years after the collapse of communism.*

The Soviet-style concrete blocks were actually well insulated—something that surprises people now. Yes, winters got cold and you had to bundle up or sit near the wood-burning stove that doubled as our toaster, but the buildings held heat well. The concrete construction meant noise from neighbors was generally not an issue, despite the density. These structures, whatever their aesthetic limitations, were solidly built.

Families made these spaces into homes. My mother kept our apartment immaculate. We had a color television—rare, acquired through my father’s diplomatic position. Most families had the same state-provided furniture, but small touches mattered: an embroidered tablecloth, a plant by the window, family photographs.

The privilege of diplomatic families like ours was real but relative. We had Western items from my father’s travels—blue jeans that simply didn’t exist in Albanian stores. A cassette player and VHS tapes. Occasional imported food. But we weren’t wealthy. My father’s salary barely covered necessities. “Better” meant having jeans when others had shoes so worn you could feel every pebble through the soles.

My mother would quietly put away Western items when neighbor children visited. Not from fear of being reported—though that was always possible—but because she knew what those jeans represented to families who had less.

School

With material wealth eliminated, Albanian schools became intellectual battlegrounds. We competed fiercely in everything—math competitions, literature recitations, science fairs—because academic achievement was the only distinction that mattered.

The system produced remarkable rigor despite severe censorship. By the late 1980s, Albania had achieved over 90% literacy—a remarkable transformation considering roughly 85% of Albanians were illiterate in 1946. Half of university students were women. We studied advanced mathematics and sciences with an intensity that seems impossible now looking back.

But we also learned to maintain dual realities early. At school, we absorbed Marxist-Leninist ideology, swore oaths to the Party, looked forward to receiving our red pioneer scarves in fifth grade. At home, parents whispered different truths.

I never got my pioneer scarf. The system collapsed while I was in fourth grade. One day it was the symbol of belonging, of growing up, of being a proper Albanian student. The next day my friend’s mother was using hers as a kitchen rag.

This code-switching was universal. Every Albanian child learned what could be said at school and what stayed within family walls. The intellectual hunger this created—constrained by political boundaries but unleashed in permitted subjects—produced a generation of brilliant minds trapped in an impoverished country.

The Sigurimi

The Sigurimi (Albania’s secret police) had 30,000 officers in a population of 3 million. One officer per 100 citizens. But the real surveillance came from the 20% of Albanians who collaborated as informants. Your neighbor. Your colleague. Sometimes your mother-in-law.

One artist discovered his 250-page surveillance file listed 20 informants, including family members. By the mid-1980s, 32,000 people remained in labor camps. Survivors estimate “every third citizen had either served time in labor camps or been interrogated.”

I remember the hypervigilance. Adults would suddenly change topics mid-sentence. Conversations had layers—what was said, what was meant, what couldn’t be said at all.

My father lived this reality intimately. As he later wrote: “Slavish obedience and self-sacrifice offered no protection from the regime’s capricious cruelty, as even the most loyal servants, like Defense Minister Beqir Balluku and Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, discovered too late.“

If even cabinet ministers weren’t safe, what hope did anyone have?

Yet the absurdity of it reached peaks like the Scorpions investigation. By the late ’80s, almost everyone had illegal antennas to watch Italian TV, Yugoslav broadcasts, even MTV. Everyone knew the outside world existed. But spray-painting proof of that knowledge could destroy your life.

The paranoia extended everywhere. Father Ernest Simoni Troshani spent 28 years in prison for holding a mass. Making the sign of the cross meant three years imprisonment. Owning a Bible brought five years. By 1967, Albania had closed all 2,169 religious buildings, declaring itself the world’s first atheist state.

But faith survived underground. Families whispered prayers. Religious holidays became “family gatherings.” Sacred objects were hidden for decades. The state could control public space but never conquered private belief.

The System That Proclaimed Equality

The communist system proclaimed equality while creating new hierarchies. Factory workers and diplomats earned similar salaries. Chinese technicians during the alliance were paid the same as Albanian workers. Everyone received the same ration cards.

But equality meant limited choices. By 1985, average monthly income was roughly $15 in the third-poorest country on Earth. The bunkers—173,000 of them, one for every four Albanians—consumed resources equivalent to twice the Maginot Line while families waited years for washing machines.

Women bore heavy burdens. The state pushed women into the workforce with 46% participation by the late 1970s. “Liberation” meant triple shifts: work, endless queues, then household labor because men rarely helped despite official ideology. Women worked full days, queued for dinner supplies, cooked, cleaned, helped with homework, washed clothes by hand.

Bunkerët — *A crumbling dome shaped bunker on the Albanian Riviera*.

Finding Joy

Despite everything, people found joy. The evening xhiro saw hundreds walking main streets—elderly couples, young people, whole families. It was where courtship happened, information exchanged, community maintained.

At home, we rigged kanaçe antennas—aluminum cans fashioned into receivers—to catch foreign broadcasts. By the late 1980s, this was nearly universal. Italian RAI, Yugoslav television, glimpses of MTV.

Albanian families became experts at small rebellions. The annual Festival of Song provided “authorized nonconformity” until Hoxha declared the 1972 edition too Western and prosecuted the organizers. Directors embedded double meanings, allusions, and coded messages in films. Writer Ismail Kadare navigated censorship through allegory until he defected in 1990, later saying, “You risked being shot for a single word against the regime.“

Children found happiness in simple things. Two weeks at Pioneer Camp that we somehow remember fondly. Playing football in streets from dusk till dawn. Locally-made toys we treasured because they were ours.

enver hoxha statue fall communism albania — *The toppling of Hoxha’s statue, Tirana, 1991*

The Collapse

The end came suddenly but in stages.

January 1990: First revolts in Shkodër. December 1990: Student demonstrations in Tirana. The Communist Party legalized opposition parties on December 11. The Democratic Party formed the next day.

I was nine, watching my world flip overnight. The statue in Tirana’s central square was toppled. The red pioneer scarves became cleaning rags. Teachers suddenly taught different history. Adults argued in ways that would have meant prison months earlier.

But the revelation that shattered many children came from parents who admitted they’d never believed in “Uncle Enver.” Never supported the Party. Had spent our entire childhoods lying to protect us.

Student protests in Albania 1991 End of Communism — *Student protests in Albania 1991 marking the beginning of the end of communism.*

How We Left

What I didn’t know as a child was that my father had been working secretly for years to end Albania’s isolation.

Despite being under surveillance, despite having his wife’s uncle imprisoned, despite the regime’s suspicion—he had been quietly building a channel to restore diplomatic relations between Albania and the United States since 1985. The effort began as secret meetings with Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, an Albanian-American professor who had connections to the U.S. government.

Charles Moskos në këmbë me 2 ushtarë të tjerë — *Charles Moskos (left) the Albanian-American professor, military leader and diplomat who worked tirelessly to lift Albania from the darkness of Communist oppression.*

In April 1990, my father traveled to Vienna to deliver a historic message on behalf of President Ramiz Alia: Albania was ready to restore diplomatic relations with the United States. On March 15, 1991, the agreement was signed—the culmination of six years of quiet diplomacy conducted under the nose of the very surveillance apparatus that was watching him.

In 1991, my father received a scholarship to pursue his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. We left Albania on a student visa. Later, we obtained American citizenship through the asylum process—based on our family’s persecution under the communist regime and my father’s role in secretly helping restore diplomatic relations between Albania and the United States.

The irony is complete: the regime that surveilled him for years, that imprisoned his family for complaining about bunkers, that advised him to divorce his pregnant wife—that same regime was unwittingly relying on him to end Albania’s isolation from the world.

The Transition’s Trauma

The transition brought its own devastation. GDP collapsed 28% in 1991. Industrial output fell 60%. Emergency EU food aid was needed. Crime appeared where it had never existed. The communal bonds forged through shared oppression began dissolving.

Then came the skemat piramidale. One-third of Albania’s population lost $1.2 billion. The 1997 uprising saw 1,500 deaths. Entire forests were cut down. Women were trafficked to Italy. The West that had criticized closed borders now treated Albanian refugees as criminals.

By the 2000s, trust between Albanians had fallen from 24% to 3%. The safe streets became dangerous. The schools struggled. The guaranteed jobs disappeared. The certainty of oppression had been traded for the uncertainty of chaos.

*Bread lines in Tirana, Albania, just after the ouster of communist dictator Enver Hoxha, in 1991*

What Remains

Today most of those 173,000 bunkers have been removed, though some became restaurants, bars, and museums while others slowly crumble into landscapes that never needed them. The House of Leaves, former Sigurimi headquarters, won the 2020 Council of Europe Museum Prize for unflinchingly displaying surveillance equipment and interrogation rooms. The Piramida e Tiranës, built as Hoxha’s mausoleum, reopened in 2023 as a technology center where children play on slopes designed for a dictator’s glory.

But the complexity remains. A 2016 survey found 42% of Albanians view Hoxha as having positive impact on history. They miss the safety (even knowing its price), the education excellence, the community bonds. They don’t miss the surveillance, the shortages, the fear.

This isn’t simple nostalgia. It’s recognition that different forms of oppression exist—the boot on your neck or the absence of any safety net. The Albanian experience shows humans can adapt to almost anything, find joy in almost anything, survive almost anything. But at costs that echo for generations.

Life in communist Albania was nothing like the gray uniformity of Cold War propaganda, nor the workers’ paradise of communist mythology, but something more complex—a place where humanity persisted despite systematic attempts to control it.

The last Stalinist state in Europe wasn’t just about bunkers and surveillance. It was about people living between survival and dignity, finding ways to remain themselves even when the state tried to own everything from their shoe styles to their thoughts.

A True Story

My father has documented his experiences—from the surveillance and persecution to his secret role in restoring U.S.-Albanian diplomatic relations—in his memoir Lifting the Iron Curtain.

The book reveals what it was like to serve a regime that was simultaneously using you and watching you, and how a handful of quiet diplomats working across enemy lines helped end Albania’s forty-five years of isolation.

Available now:

English Edition on Amazon ↗
Albanian Edition ↗

Communist Heritage Sites to Visit

Most sites are accessible via public transport from Tirana. Rental car recommended for remote locations like Spaç.

House of Leaves (Tirana): Former Sigurimi headquarters, now an award-winning museum
Bunk'Art 1 dhe 2 (Tirana): Nuclear bunkers converted to historical exhibitions
Cold War Museum (Gjirokastër): 800-meter underground tunnel system
Spaçi Prison (Mirditë): Former political prison camp, now memorial site
The Pyramid (Tirana): Controversial monument transformed into technology center

You can visit these sites year-round, though spring and fall offer mild weather for outdoor bunker exploration. Local guides are essential for context and personal stories—many are former political prisoners or their families.

Rreth Autorit

Enri is the Albanian voice behind AlbaniaVisit.com, where he writes to spotlight the country’s natural and cultural beauty. He grew up in Tirana during the final years of communist Albania. His father, Ilia Zhulati, played a key role in secretly restoring diplomatic relations between Albania and the United States.