Koço Tashko

Tashko remained inside the leadership after the war, but his loyalty was not uncritical compliance. Max Brym's review of Ervin Levin's biography reports that even before the 1948 break with Yugoslavia he opposed Albania's vassalage toward Belgrade, criticized a situation in which no large investment could be made without the consent of Yugoslav advisers, and argued for self-reliant economic development and cooperation with other states on the basis of full equality. His signature stood on laws on land reform, the expropriation of Nazi-fascist collaborators and foreign investors, and he worked especially for literacy across the country. After 1948 he served for years as Deputy Foreign Minister and as ambassador in Moscow and Sofia. In 1960, as chairman of the Party Control and Revision Commission, he refused in the Central Committee to break with the Soviet Union; in September of that year he lost all his party functions, and soon after his parliamentary mandate as well. Until 1969 he endured an internee's life and heavy physical labour on the edges of Albania, while his family was interned and dismissed from its jobs. On 25 June 1969 he was arrested at the age of 70, after nine years of internment. Every family appeal was refused: on his daughter Tefta's letter Hoxha wrote with his own hand, 'Let the court judge why this traitor filled the cup', and his wife Pavlina's letter was passed to Hysni Kapo with the instruction, 'No response to the wife of the enemy Koço Tashko.' His wife and children were sent to the Seman camp with their internment extended by five more years, and he remained in Burrel prison until his release in 1980 at 78. The sources record his death in 1984; they do not describe it as an execution.