Captain Frank Waddams, the British liaison officer to Tito’s Partisans during the war, saw the abuses himself. When he returned to England in 1946, he talked about “the all-powerful OZNa,” which was, he thought, “responsible for the murder of thousands of Yugoslavs, for the maltreatment in concentration camps of thousands more and for the permanent terror in which the vast bulk of the population lives.”34 Not much changed when the secret police got a new name, UDNa (Administration for State Security). It was still headed by Ranković, and concentration camps became a fixture of the regime.35 The harrowing tales told of the notorious Goli Otok camp on an island in the Adriatic, created in 1949 for “Stalinists” who opposed Tito, read like something out of the Third Reich or Stalin’s Gulag.36
Ranković admitted some things about the repression in the camps, and these were reported in the press.37 In spite of the great deal that was known about the terror, it did not stop the West from being charmed by Tito and bending over backwards to overlook the fact that this regime was brutally crushing civil and legal rights.38
The British representatives in Belgrade at war’s end misleadingly reported to London that Tito “puts Yugoslavia first and his subordinates put communism first,” and that it was the latter who pushed the terror. U.S. ambassador Richard Patterson told President Truman a similar half-truth on a brief return to Washington in August 1945. He claimed to be “good friends” with the leader; the two had already made plans to go hunting together. The ambassador thought Tito was certainly a “thorough Communist” but intelligent, and he jovially suggested to the president that they might “bring him back to America for a month of indoctrination.”39
Yugoslavia became the most Stalinized country in all of Eastern Europe. Later on, when Stalin attempted to exert still more control there, it was also the first to break from his grasp. Part of the reason for the split was Tito’s ambitions toward neighbors like Albania.
THE ALBANIAN STALINISTS
Albania is a tiny country that in 1944 had a population of only 1.1 million, a majority of them Muslim. The land is squeezed between combative Yugoslavia to the north and spirited Greece to the south. The Albanian “working class,” in the sense of industrial employment, was estimated at around 15,000 in the 1930s. Illiteracy was the norm, and the life expectancy of males forty-two.40 The country was so poor that when Ilya Ehrenburg visited in 1945, he was shocked to see the army march past in bare feet.41
Wealthier and more powerful neighbors coveted Albania, and already in the 1920s it was dominated by Fascist Italy. Hitler’s successes in the 1930s prodded Mussolini into believing that victory came to the bold, and on March 25, 1939, he issued an ultimatum to Albania. It could either accept shelter as Italy’s protectorate or face invasion, which in any case soon followed. The Albanian army was defeated quickly, and the king fled to London. Thereafter, Mussolini became more ambitious, and on October 28, 1940, he ordered the invasion of Greece. Here the Italians ran into stout resistance and in short order were fought to a standstill. That left Hitler feeling that he had little choice but to invade both Albania and Greece in early 1941, even though those military operations would take valuable time and resources away from the planned attack on the Soviet Union. However, in the meantime, Italy was able to consolidate its hold over Albania.
In November 1941, Tito sent advisers to help establish a new Albanian Communist Party. It had perhaps seventy members and several hundred sympathizers. Enver Hoxha emerged as the leader, a reasonably well-educated person, having studied at Montpellier University in France. Rumor had it that, while there, he had written for the Communist Party’s prestigious newspaper, L’Humanité, though all efforts to find any such articles have come up empty. Nevertheless, it was in France that he began to believe that Stalinism was the way of the future.42
The first directives to the small Albanian party arrived from Moscow in December 1942, with orders to create a broad people’s front of all patriots and to attack the German and Italian occupations. Tito’s Partisans helped, but resistance only got up and running in mid-1943. They soon created an Anti-Fascist Committee for National Liberation, similar to the one in Yugoslavia.
Frictions also emerged, at least according to Hoxha’s memoirs, because the imperious Yugoslavs sought to direct not only Albania’s military effort but its Communist movement, ultimately to incorporate Albania and make it Yugoslavia’s seventh republic. Hoxha drank deeply from Moscow’s cup of inspiration and became one of the most ardent Stalinists.43 He recognized that having friends in the Kremlin was helpful for a small country with such a powerful and ambitious neighbor.
The Albanian Anti-Fascist Committee of National Liberation elected Hoxha as president of a provisional government in May 1944, and he was confirmed in October as national president. The Communists here could claim that they had liberated their country on their own; in bitter fighting the next month, they drove the Germans from the capital, Tirana. In elections on December 2, 1945, the Albanian Democratic Front—a disguised Communist Party—took 93 percent of the vote. The new assembly transformed the country into a people’s republic early in the new year.44 They already had a secret police, the Directorate of Security (Sigurimi), created on March 20, 1943, which became one of the most fearsome in the Balkans.45 It invaded the private sphere with spies and informers and used labor camps to “reeducate” the politically wayward.
Tito had already let it be known in January 1945 that he wanted to incorporate not only Albania but Greek Macedonia, as well as parts of Hungary, Austria, Romania, and Bulgaria. To the Kremlin, these aims appeared overambitious and “unreasonable.”46 When Yugoslav representatives pressed for Stalin’s agreement, all they got was his sage remark that if they continued, they would find themselves “at loggerheads with Romania, Hungary and Greece” and would have to “do battle with the whole world; such a situation would be absurd.”47
For the time being at least, the Kremlin was content to seek control of Albania by issuing orders and directives through Yugoslavia.48 When one of the top Yugoslav politicians, Milovan Djilas, visited the Albanian capital in May 1945, he was impressed by what the Italians had constructed during the occupation. He was there to formalize diplomatic relations and found Hoxha, the thirty-five-year-old leader, eager to learn.
Djilas was unsettled by Hoxha’s habit of breaking into “a sudden and strangely cruel smile.” Behind the man’s Europeanized exterior, there “loomed a personality bent on its own course, turned in on itself, and inaccessible.” The Yugoslav leaders regarded him as suffering from intellectualism and also as a petit-bourgeois—he opened a tobacco shop when times were tough at the start of the Italian occupation. Djilas recalled hearing later that Hoxha eventually turned modest, “except in matters involving power and ideology. But those were different times. We imitated the Russians in management; the Albanians imitated us in management and autocratic luxury.”49
Tito let his ambitions show on May 27, 1945, just over a month after his return from his long visit in Moscow. In a meeting, he expressed his dissatisfaction that his country was being held back from expanding its borders. He was not at all pleased that Stalin was calling the shots on that score; nor was he happy that Dimitrov was having second thoughts about Yugoslavia’s absorbing of Bulgaria as the seventh republic. Tito was denied support from Moscow for his claims to Carinthia (in Austria) and Venezia Giulia (in Italy). There had been a just war, Tito said, “but we now seek a just conclusion. Our goal is that everyone be the master in his own house.” He came close to putting the Soviet Union in the same category as the Western Allies for denying the Yugoslavs what he saw as rightly theirs, and he swore that the Yugoslavs “would not be dependent on anyone ever again, regardless of what has been written and talked about.”50