Albanian liberation and establishment of the republic

Occupation and the growth of resistance

Italy’s invasion in 1939 displaced King Zog, and German occupation followed Italy’s surrender in 1943. The Communists had not entered the war as a large established party. The Albanian Communist Party formed in 1941 with organizational assistance from Yugoslav Communists. Enver Hoxha expanded his leadership through a coalition presenting its struggle as Albanian national liberation. Source 1

The National Liberation Movement organized in 1942 included non-Communist resistance groups. Cooperation with the nationalist and anti-Communist Balli Kombëtar collapsed over Kosovo’s postwar status, relations with Yugoslavia and control after liberation. Some Balli units subsequently cooperated with German forces, while royalists maintained another organization. Resistance to foreign occupation thus overlapped with an internal struggle over the future state. Source 1

1944: from military victory to governing institutions

The partisan leadership created governing bodies before German forces had fully withdrawn. The May 1944 congress at Përmet established an Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation claiming legislative and administrative authority, with Hoxha leading its executive and the army. A provisional government followed at Berat in October. By the November withdrawal from Tirana and other major areas, Communist-led military and administrative organizations already held the advantage over their rivals. Source 2

The victory rested on domestic partisan warfare but also involved British arms, Allied operational support and links to Yugoslav Communists. The new government inherited damaged housing, transport and productive facilities, alongside urgent food needs. Liberation therefore opened a struggle to rebuild administrative capacity and mobilize scarce resources rather than delivering immediate prosperity. Source 2 · Source 3

1945–1946: the republic and concentrated power

The December 1945 election offered only the candidate list of the Communist-dominated Democratic Front. In January 1946 the assembly abolished the monarchy and proclaimed a people’s republic; the subsequent constitution drew on Yugoslav and Soviet institutions. The proclamation established a new legal framework without creating competitive party politics through which the government could be replaced. Source 4 · Source 5

Hoxha combined leading party, government and military offices, while Interior Minister Koçi Xoxe helped consolidate power through the security apparatus. Punishment of wartime collaborators intertwined accountability for collaboration with the elimination of political rivals. Imprisonment, forced labor and exile affecting opponents and their families were forms of state violence requiring evaluation in their own right. Disagreement inside the leadership likewise did not develop into open political competition. Source 6 · Source 4

Land redistribution and expanding state ownership

The 1945 agrarian reform broke up large estates and distributed land to landless and smallholding peasants. Agricultural debts were canceled, while forests and pastureland were nationalized. For recipients this changed livelihoods and social standing; for the government it built a rural constituency. Redistribution to small farms must nevertheless be distinguished from the later completion of agricultural collectivization. Source 4 · Source 7

State control expanded rapidly over industry, transport and foreign trade. Expropriation of occupation-era assets and cancellation of foreign concessions were followed by industrial nationalization and planning bodies directing investment. Industrialization started from a small industrial base and depended heavily on external finance, equipment and expertise. School reconstruction, literacy work, teacher training and wider female participation accompanied the transition, while curricula and educational opportunities were also subject to political criteria. Source 7 · Source 8

Cooperation with Yugoslavia and the later rupture

Early Albania differed from the isolated, self-reliant state of later decades. The 1946 friendship treaty and economic agreements with Yugoslavia promoted joint enterprises, coordinated planning and economic integration. Tirana needed assistance, but disputes grew over industrial priorities and economic sovereignty. Planning official Nako Spiru’s criticism and Xoxe’s pro-Yugoslav alignment show how external dependence became entangled with internal power struggles. Source 9 · Source 3

After the Soviet–Yugoslav split in 1948, Hoxha’s leadership aligned with Moscow; Xoxe was purged and executed in 1949. This was a redirection after the state-forming period of 1944–1946. Distinguishing liberation and land reform from subsequent collectivization, party purges and still later relations with China makes it possible to examine both change and continuity in Albanian socialism. Source 9 · Source 6

The single-list election: international recognition and the silencing of opposition

The Constituent Assembly election of 2 December 1945 was nominally held on a 'general, equal, direct and secret' ballot. The electoral law adopted by the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council at its third session that September proclaimed these four principles, yet the path to candidacy was in practice a single one. The Democratic Front, which in August had succeeded the National Liberation Front, put forward one list, while independents were permitted only to stand individually. Education Minister Gjergj Kokoshi attacked the law at that session, arguing that independent candidates were 'doomed to failure': an individual with no party, no press and no propaganda could not contest Front candidates who held every lever of state power. Hoxha replied that the law recognised the right of independents to stand, but Kokoshi was later accused of trying to organise opposition with the help of the British Military Mission.

Western attitudes shaped the election's form. Britain and the United States extended provisional recognition on the condition that free elections be held and Western journalists be admitted to observe them. On election day the American representative Jacobs, the British Military Mission and ten foreign correspondents visited the polling booths in Tirana. Because illiteracy was widespread, voting was done by dropping a rubber ball stamped with a black eagle into a red box (for the Front) or a black box (against it), the voter putting a hand into both boxes to conceal the choice. Jacobs reported to Washington that the election was 'conducted by secret methods without evidence of threats or intimidation' and that Hoxha's assurances had been fulfilled. The British Military Mission likewise concluded the election could be accepted as the expression of the will of the majority.

Yet this verdict of fairness coexisted with the Front's systematic pressure on its opponents. Of 603,000 registered voters, about 90 percent reportedly cast ballots and 93 percent chose the Front. Brigadier Hodgson of the British Military Mission reported different figures: 85 percent turnout, 505,842 votes for the Front (79.3 percent) and 37,024 against (5.8 percent). Either way the margin was overwhelming, but the discrepancy shows what 'opposition' meant in a single-list election: with no real party in the field, dissent was the act of dropping a ball into a nameless black box, while figures like Kokoshi who objected openly became targets for purge. The election conferred international legitimacy on the new regime while setting the template for the single-list ballots that continued until 1990.

The day the crown came down: the January 11 proclamation and the constitution still to come

The Constituent Assembly elected on the single December 1945 list convened for its first session in Tirana on January 11, 1946. Omer Nishani, chairman of the Anti-Fascist Council, opened it, and Petraq Popa, a Korça physician and the assembly's oldest deputy, took the chair as presiding officer. The first order of business was neither king nor state form. A twenty-member verification commission chaired by Koço Tashko scrutinized the mandates of the deputies returned in December. As Gjergj Kokoshi, the Front delegate who had attacked the election law four months earlier, had foreseen, no independent candidate had a place to begin with, and the credential check was the procedure that legally sealed that single list.

With the mandates confirmed, the assembly abolished the monarchy and dethroned Zog I in a single measure. The crown Zog had placed on his own head in 1928 was ended in one sentence. Zog, in exile in London, was barred from returning. A declaration proclaiming Albania a People's Republic followed. Diplomatic missions of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Yugoslavia watched from the chamber. Before the Cold War had drawn its lines through international recognition, the new regime formalized its own state form in the presence of the major powers' representatives.

What mattered then, and what is easiest to blur now, is that the proclamation and the constitution were not the same event. What was declared on January 11 was the state form, the name of a republic. The constitution was another matter: the Communist Party presented its draft as submitted to the judgment of the whole people. Only after two months of acrimonious debate did the assembly adopt it, on March 14, 1946, and its contents were modeled on the Yugoslav and Soviet constitutions. For the two months before its articles were settled, Albania was legally a republic but a republic without a constitution. When Hoxha read out the government program on March 24, he called this document the Founding Constitution and announced that a new stage had opened. Unlike the abolition of the monarchy, one day's work, turning the republic into a country's institutions went on long after that day.

How the state took the economy: the 1946 constitution, nationalization, and the condition named Belgrade

The proclamation of the republic on 11 January 1946 did not by itself change the economic order. What fixed the new state's property relations was the constitution the Constituent Assembly adopted on 14 March of that year. On paper it guaranteed private ownership, inheritance and private economic initiative (Article 9), but it also designated mines and other subsoil resources, waters, natural resources, forests and pastures, air transport, postal, telegraph, telephone and radio services, and the banks as 'the common property of the people' and placed foreign trade under state control (Article 5). Article 6 stipulated that the state directs economic life and development according to a state economic plan and exercises general control over the private sector; Article 10 declared that 'the land belongs to those who work it' and that large landholdings could for no reason remain in private hands. Private property was retained, but a planned and state-owned sector was laid on top of it. The text was modelled on the Yugoslav and Soviet constitutions.

These articles largely ratified measures already taken. In December 1944 the provisional government passed laws letting the state regulate foreign and domestic trade, commercial enterprises and the country's few industries; it expropriated German- and Italian-owned property, nationalized transport enterprises, and cancelled all concessions granted to foreign companies by earlier governments. The Agrarian Reform Law of August 1945 confiscated the estates of large and absentee landlords and transferred them to those who worked them, limited religious institutions and peasants without machinery to 20 hectares and peasants with machinery to 40, and gave landless and small peasants up to 5 hectares. In 1946 the remaining industries were nationalized, foreign trade became a government monopoly, almost all domestic trade came under state control, and land sales and transfers were banned; the Economic Planning Commission founded that year emphasized industrial development.

The turn was not a purely domestic decision. Albania received US$26.3 million from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, but depended on Yugoslavia for investment and development aid, and around 20,000 tons of Yugoslav grain staved off famine. In return, after Hoxha's visit to Belgrade in July 1946, a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance and an economic cooperation agreement were signed, creating 30-year joint companies in railways, petroleum, minerals, electricity, shipping, import-export and banking. The decisive instrument was the Economic Convention of 27 November 1946, signed for Albania by Nako Spiru, Minister of Economy and head of the Planning Commission, and for Yugoslavia by Boris Kidrič. It provided for coordinating the two countries' economic plans, a customs union, a single customs territory, and the unification of currency and prices.

Here the split inside the Albanian leadership surfaced. The Albanian government opposed currency unification in principle. The dispute was the rate at which the lek would be fixed to the dinar: Albania argued for 1 franc to 12.5 dinars, Yugoslavia demanded 1 to 8, and the compromise settled at 1 to 9. The Albanian side held that the rate damaged its economy and reduced the population's purchasing power. On the customs union, Albania understood an exchange of goods free of duty, while Yugoslavia, in the Albanian reading, intended open borders so that Yugoslav traders could buy cheaply in Albanian towns and resell in Yugoslavia. Spiru became the leading critic of Yugoslavia's efforts at economic control, and that conflict led into the purges of 1947-1948, Spiru's death in 1947, and Koçi Xoxe's execution in 1949.

The text of the 1946 Economic Convention was not published when it was signed. How far it actually subordinated the Albanian economy therefore remains disputed: between the Albanian account, written in the newspaper Luftëtari after the 1948 break, that the core purpose of the Yugoslav nationalist leadership was 'exploitation and colonization', and scholarship that stresses the Yugoslav intention to coordinate planning. What is certain is that the nationalization and planning of 1946 was a domestic decision taken while its financial conditions depended heavily on Belgrade.

What was settled and what was not: the argument over this transition that has not closed

What the 1944–1946 transition settled is comparatively clear. The monarchy was abolished; foreign capital's privileges and the great landlords' property were dismantled by law; and the Communist Party converted its military predominance into a legal monopoly by way of an election and a constitution. It also obtained international recognition. Whereas Communist parties elsewhere in postwar Eastern Europe nominally shared coalition governments for several years before establishing one-party states, in Albania the victor of the war and the bearer of state power were the same organization from the outset. What this period did not settle is equally clear. Collectivization, the antireligious campaigns, and the later turn to Beijing and to self-reliance were not products of these few years but policies worked out over subsequent decades. What the 1946 constitution founded was a direction toward the socialization of property, not its completion.

The historical interpretation of this transition remains divided. The official Albanian war history of the socialist era defined 1941–1944 as a war of national liberation, cast the Communist Party as the struggle's sole organizer and the architect of victory, and cast non-Communist formations such as Balli Kombëtar and Legaliteti as collaborators with the occupiers. In that account the British military missions' support was barely mentioned, or treated as an attempt at imperialist interference. Yet in the 1975 compilation of the official war history, the Politburo ordered that individuals who had held leading roles in the war but were later purged by the party be removed from the manuscript, reasoning that "if they are mentioned, they remain in history." The war history thus mirrored backward the later power struggles.

The opposing objection treats the armed clashes of the war's end not as liberation but as civil war. In his 1999 study, Bernd Jürgen Fischer treated the victory of 1944 not only as the product of ideological conviction but also as the outcome of an internal power struggle, and demonstrated that British and American military aid had been substantially diminished in earlier accounts. Scholarship on the historiography has argued that the British missions' aid was in fact important for the partisans' supplies and training, and that while not decisive it worked to end the civil war rather than prolong it. A 2007 study, by contrast, claimed Britain prolonged a "nasty civil war" by supporting Balli Kombëtar, a conclusion criticized for insufficient contextualization of the sources. Out of the same documents one reading sees British aid as the condition that hastened the Communist victory, and another as unnecessary to it.

Albanian scholarship is itself unsettled. In the early 1990s a right-wing government dismantled the National Liberation War research department at the Institute of History, and after 1997 a left-wing government in effect restored it. The repeated reorganization of research institutions with each change of government shows that the war remains a matter of politics as much as of history. Post-socialist Albanian historians have come to acknowledge that Yugoslav Communist Party emissaries did indeed play a role in founding the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, but they position internal and external factors together: as the historian Paskal Milo put it, the party's paternity was Albanian, and the midwife who assisted the birth was Yugoslav.

In the end this event leaves two unsettled arguments. First, was November 1944 a liberation or the end of a civil war that carried a change of regime with it? Second, how much weight should be given to the fact that the regime was built on a Yugoslav condition? Neither question has been closed by a single answer, and it was in that unclosed state that they shaped everything that followed from this event.