Chapter 5: Social System (1)

The Communist regime was still striving in 1970 to alter the traditional tribal and semifeudal social patterns of the country and to restructure the whole system to fit Marxist-Leninist principles of a socialist society. Until after World War II the strongest loyalties of the people had been toward family and larger kin groups, which have been the most important units in Albanian society. Kin groups had been held together by strong spirit and loyalties, as well as by economic factors. The head of the family, usually the eldest male member, historically exercised patriarchal authority, with general responsibility for the welfare and safety of the members. In this patriarchal society, respect for parental authority was dominant.

Local autonomy and suspicion of central authority had for centuries been a way of life for Albanian society. This way of life persisted until the twentieth century, despite the foreign cultural and political influences to which the society was subjected during the long domination by the Ottoman Turks.

Of particular social importance during this domination was the conversion of the majority of the people to the Islamic faith. Even before this conversion, however, the people had been segmented by the schism between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches. The people in the north were usually Roman Catholic, and those in the south, Eastern Orthodox. Tolerance, however, has been a marked feature of the people and, accordingly, religious divisiveness has had no great effect on the tribal and semifeudal structure of the society. Indeed, the three religious faiths in the country--Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox--have represented traditional loyalties rather than living creeds for the Albanians.

Until the Communist takeover in 1944, there had been two broad social classes in the country, an upper and a lower class. The upper class was composed of the landowning _beys_ (see Glossary); some _bajraktars_ (relatively well-to-do tribal chieftains); and a smaller number of rich Christian farmers, merchants, small industrialists, some intellectuals, and the higher clergy. The lower class, amounting to about 90 percent of the population, was composed of a small group of workers, the peasant masses, livestock breeders, and the lower clergy.

The Communist regime's political, social, and economic measures aimed at redirecting the traditional social patterns have resulted in more social transformations than at any time since the Turkish invasions in the fifteenth century. Collectivization of agriculture, industrialization and the consequent migration from rural to industrial areas, and a widespread educational system have done much to transform the tribal character of the society.

Although in 1970 the patriarchal system was still a way of life in the countryside, especially in the highlands, the authority of the master of the house had been considerably reduced. Marriage customs in particular had changed. As a result, the position of the close-knit family had been altered. Radical changes had occurred also in the life of women. Many of them have had to work outside the home to compensate for the generally low wages of their husbands. Day-care nurseries had been set up to make it easier for mothers to work and also to give the regime an early opportunity to indoctrinate the children.

Despite such transformation, however, the family was still the most significant unit in the society. The allegiance given to the family, coupled with the individualism characteristic of the people and the traditions of political autonomy in local affairs, had made it difficult for the regime to fully implement its policies for restructuring the society in general and the family in particular.

Reflecting the influence of the standard Marxist-Leninist dogma, the regime officially recognized only two classes--one composed of workers and considered the leading class and the other consisting of the working peasants, a third group usually being referred to as the people's intelligentsia. Actually, a distinct new upper class, constituting less than 10 percent of the total population, emerged under Communist rule to replace the upper ruling and middle classes that existed before the Communist takeover. This new upper class was composed of the top ruling elite that controlled all facets of society and its supporting echelons, made up of officials of the Party and state apparatus; mass organizations; and professional and technical people, such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers of state enterprises.

Membership in the Party or sympathy toward communism was the chain that linked this upper class together. All its segments had benefited from the Communist system, having enjoyed considerable advantages over the rest of the population; they formed practically the only social group with a vested interest in the perpetuation of the system. The rest of the population--peasants, workers, and remnants of the upper and middle classes--were only cogs in the Communist apparatus, all used for the purpose of implementing the Party policies for the building of a Communist society.

Under Communist rule the stabilization of the class differentiations had lessened social mobility both upward and downward. In 1970 it was difficult to alter one's social status except through a long process of training and education. Educational opportunities, however, had been greatly expanded, although they were still limited in the rural areas. The best opportunities were offered to the children of the Party elite and Party faithful. But because of the great demand for qualified personnel to manage the growing socialist sectors of the economy, some children of worker and peasant backgrounds had opportunities to continue their education to the highest levels and to fully develop their abilities and capacities. The whole educational system, however, was geared to the demands of the Party, and its first objective was the inculcation of the youth with Communist ideology.

Perhaps the most radical change in the whole social system had been effected in the area of religion. By 1970 the country's three principal religious faiths had been eliminated as organizational bodies. All churches and mosques had been closed; the clergy was not permitted to function; and the country had been declared by the official media to be the first atheist nation in the world. Top Party and government officials admitted, however, that the closing of the houses of worship and the action against the clergy had not eliminated the religious feelings and beliefs of the people.

TRADITIONAL SOCIAL PATTERNS AND VALUES

The social structure of the country was until the 1930s basically tribal in the north and semifeudal in the central and southern regions. The highlanders in the north retained intact their medieval tribal pattern of life until well into the twentieth century and were considered the last peoples in Europe to preserve tribal autonomy. In the central and southern regions, however, increasing contact with the outside world and invasions and occupations by foreign armies had reduced the tribes to tenure peasants.

Traditionally, there have been two major groupings or sub-cultures in the country: the Gegs in the north, probably numbering slightly over half the total population, and the Tosks in the south. Although the terms _Geg_ and _Tosk_ have disappeared from the vocabulary because they connote division rather than Communist unity, Tirana officials and the press have often implied in recent years that the old differences and contrasts between the two groups still existed. These differences were marked not only in the physical appearance of the people and in dialect but also in the way of life in general.

The Gegs, partly Roman Catholic but mostly Muslim, lived until after World War II in a mountain society characterized by blood feuds and fierce clan and tribal loyalties. The Tosks, on the other hand, were considered more civilized because of centuries of Greek and other foreign influences. Coming under the grip of the Muslim landed aristocracy, the Tosks lost the spirit of individuality and independence enjoyed for centuries by the Gegs, especially in the highlands.

Until the end of World War II society in the north and, to a much lesser extent, in the south was organized in terms of kinship and descent. The basic unit of society was the extended family, usually composed of a couple, their married sons, the wives and children of married sons, and any unmarried daughters. The extended family formed a single residential and economic entity held together by common ownership of means of production and common interest in defense of the group. Such families often included scores of persons, and as late as 1944 some contained as many as sixty to seventy persons living in a cluster of huts surrounding the father's house.

Extended families were grouped into clans, the chiefs of which preserved, until the end of World War II, patriarchal powers over the members of the entire group. The clan chief arranged marriages, assigned tasks, settled disputes, and decided what courses should be followed in such basic issues as blood feuds and politics. Descent was traced from a common ancestor through the male line, and brides were usually chosen from outside the clan. Clans in turn were grouped into tribes.

In the Tosk regions of the south the extended family was also the most important social unit, although patriarchal authority had been diluted by the feudal conditions imposed by the _beys_. The clan and tribal systems had disappeared at a much earlier period in the south and were retained into the mid-twentieth century only among the northern highlanders.

Leadership of society in the lowlands was concentrated in the hands of semifeudal tribal _beys_ and _pashas_ (see Glossary). The general Tirana region, for example, was controlled by the Zogolli, Toptani, and Vrioni families, all being Muslim _pashas_ or _beys_ and all owning extensive agricultural estates. Ahmet Zogu, subsequently King Zog I, was from the Zogolli family. Originally the _pasha_ class ranked slightly higher than that of the _bey_, but differences gradually diminished and all members were called _beys_. In the northern highlands the _bajraktars_ were the counterparts of the _beys_ and enjoyed similar hereditary rights to titles and positions.

The Geg clans put great importance on marriage traditions. Marriage customs and prohibitions designed to perpetuate these traditions were still practiced at the end of World War II. According to the custom a young man from a given clan always married a young woman from outside the clan but from within the same tribe. In some tribes marriages between Christians and Muslims were tolerated even before the advent of the Communist regime, but as a rule such marriages were frowned upon.

A variety of offenses against women served as an igniting spark for blood feuds. Many girls were engaged to marry in their infancy by their parents. If later the girl did not wish to marry the man whom the parents had chosen for her and married another, in all likelihood a blood feud would ensue. Among the Tosks, religious beliefs and customs, rather than clan and tribal traditions, were more important in regulating marriages.

The family had for centuries presented the basic, most important unit in the social structure of the country. One aspect of this was the deep devotion of a person to his parents and family. This feeling took a striking form because the family was a social unit occupying to a great extent the place of the state. Children were brought up to respect their elders and, above all, their father, whose word was law in the confines of his family.

Upon the death of the father the authority of the family devolved upon the oldest male of the family. The females of the household, with the exception of the mother, occupied an inferior position. The unwritten law of family life was based on the assumption that a daughter was part of the family until she married. When the time came for sons to set up their own households, all parental property was equally divided among them; the females did not share in this division.

Geographical conditions affected Tosk social organization. The region's accessibility led to its coming much more firmly under Turkish rule. This rule in turn resulted in the breakup of the large, independent family-type units and their replacement by large estates owned by powerful Muslim landowners, each with his own retinues, fortresses, and large numbers of tenant peasants to work the lands. Their allegiance to the sultans in the period before 1912 was secured by the granting of administrative positions either at home or elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire.

The large estates were usually confined to the plains, but the process of their consolidation was a continuing one. Landowning _beys_ would get peasants into their debt and thus establish themselves as semifeudal patrons of formerly independent villagers. In this way a large Muslim aristocracy developed in the south, whose life style was in marked contrast both to that of the chieftains of the highlands in the north and to that of the peasantry, the majority of whom assumed the characteristics of an oppressed social class. As late as the 1930s two-thirds of the rich land in central and southern parts of the country belonged to the large landowners.

There was a sharp contrast between the tribal society of the Geg highlanders and the passive, oppressed Tosk peasantry, living mostly on the large estates of the _beys_ and often represented in the political field by the _beys_ themselves. This semifeudal society in the south survived well into the twentieth century because of the lack of a strong middle class. After independence in 1912, however, a small Tosk middle class began to develop, which in the 1920-24 period, having common interests with the more enlightened _beys_, played a major role in attempts to create a modern society. But the advent of Zogu in 1925 as a strong ruler put an end to Tosk influence and, from that time until the Italian invasion in 1939, Zog cemented his power in the tribal north by governing through a number of strong tribal and clan chiefs. To secure the loyalty of these chiefs, he placed them on the government payroll and sent several of them back to their tribes with the military rank of colonel.

In the 1939-44 period general anarchy prevailed throughout the country, and in the north the tribal chieftains assumed their old independent positions. The three major resistance movements that developed during World War II represented the principal social classes then in existence in the country. The Communist-dominated National Liberation Movement was composed chiefly of low-level Tosk intellectuals and bureaucrats, some labor leaders, and a few chieftains from the Geg areas, such as Haxhi Leshi, who was head of state in 1970. The movement derived its main support from the small working class and the poor peasants.

The nationalist Balli Kombetar (National Front) was composed of nationalist _beys_ and Orthodox intellectuals and derived its support from well-to-do peasants, merchants, and businessmen. The Legality Movement, a pro-Zog organization, was headed by a chieftain from Mat, and its supporters were confined to that region. Farther north the resistance groups were led by the local chieftains, such as Muharem Bajraktari and Gani bey Kryeziu. The collaborators with the Italian authorities were composed of reactionary _beys_, Geg chieftains (both Muslim and Catholic), and a small group of intellectuals that had embraced the fascist ideology. This group had little or no popular support.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION UNDER COMMUNIST RULE

The general class structure of the country at the advent of the Communist regime in 1944 consisted of the peasants and workers making up the lower class and a small upper class. The peasants represented over 80 percent of the total population, most of whom lived at or below subsistence level. Chiefly because of the old grievances against the landowning _beys_ and the promises made by the National Liberation Movement (which presented itself as a purely patriotic, democratic movement for agrarian reforms), a large number of peasants, especially the tenant and landless ones, sided with the movement (see ch. 1, General Character of the Society).

Nonagricultural workers numbered about 30,000 persons, most of whom worked in mines and in the small handicraft industries. The movement found strong support from this group also. The upper class comprised professional people and intellectuals; medium and small merchants; moneylenders; and well-to-do artisans, whose capital was invested mostly in trade, commerce, and the Italian industrial concessions. The industrialists also belonged to this class; they owned very small industries and workshops. Both the _beys_ and the tribal chiefs of the north had been somewhat reduced in importance politically and economically during Zog's rule, but it was chiefly from these two groups that Zog created the ruling elite that helped him to control the country until the Italian invasion in 1939.

The clergy of the three religious denominations did not form a distinct social group. The higher clergy was intellectual and upper class in structure; it supported the ruling elite but did not mix in politics after Bishop Fan Noli, leader of a short-lived reformist government, was driven out of the country in 1924. The income from the fairly extensive church estates and the state subsidies provided a good, but not luxurious, living for the higher clergy. The rank-and-file clergy, however, were derived from peasant origins, and most of their parishes were as impoverished as the peasant households they served.

The events immediately preceding and following the Communist seizure of power forebode the doom not only of the _beys_ and tribal chiefs but also of most of the upper class and intellectuals, who had refused to collaborate with the National Liberation Movement. In the summer and fall of 1944, while civil war was raging between the Communist-controlled partisan formations and anti-Communist bands, nearly all the influential _beys_ and _bajraktars_ either fell in battle or fled the country; those who remained were quickly rounded up by the Communist security forces and subsequently tried as "enemies of the people" (see ch. 2, Historical Setting).

The whole leadership of the two nationalist organizations, the Balli Kombetar and the Legality Movement, fled to Italy. Influential patriots and intellectuals who had remained neutral during the so-called War of National Liberation but who were considered potentially dangerous to the Communist regime were apprehended and tried en masse in the spring of 1945. Some were executed; others were sent to labor camps, where most of them died from malnutrition and lack of medical care.

A new Communist social order was legally instituted in the country with the adoption of the first Communist Constitution in March 1946, which created a "state of workers and laboring peasants." The various constitutional articles dealing with the new social order abolished all ranks and privileges that had derived from reasons of origin (such as the tribal chiefs and the _beys_), position, wealth, or cultural standing. All citizens were considered equal regardless of nationality, race, or religion.

Marriage and family were brought under the strict control of the state, which determined by law the conditions of marriage and the family. Marriages could be considered legal only when contracted before competent state organs, and only state courts had jurisdiction on all matters connected with marriage. Included in the 1946 Constitution also was the Marxist tenet "from each according to his ability and to each according to his work." Subsequent revisions to the Constitution gave legal sanction to the existing situation that the Party and its members were the leading, or vanguard, group in the country.

_E Drejta Kushtetuese e Republikes Popullore te Shqiperise_ (The Constitutional Right in the People's Republic of Albania), published in 1963 by the Faculty of Jurisprudence of the State University of Tirana, stated that the War of National Liberation was actually class warfare, a civil war whose purpose was as much national as it was social liberation--that is, the establishment of the "people's power" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Communist spokesmen listed three principal classes prevailing in the early years of the regime: the working class, the laboring peasants, and, in their terms, the exploiting class, that is, the landowners in the agricultural economy and the bourgeoisie in trade. The exploiting class was liquidated through a rapid revolutionary process in the early stages of the regime. The middle and high bourgeoisie was destroyed as a result of the nationalization of industry, transport, mines, and banks and the establishment of a state monopoly on foreign commerce and state control over internal trade. The feudal landlords disappeared with the application of the agrarian reforms in the 1945-47 period. These steps were followed by a program of rapid industrialization, with the consequent creation of a strong working class, and the collectivization of agriculture, supposedly resulting in the formation of a homogeneous peasant class.

After the destruction of the old class structure, the Communist regime claimed that only two classes existed in the country, the workers and the working peasants. A somewhat different social composition of the population, however, has been given by the government's statistical yearbooks, based on the last official census, taken in 1960. Under the title "Social Composition of the Population," for instance, the 1965 statistical yearbook listed, in order, the following groups; workers, employees (civil servants), collective and private farmers (officially called villagers), collective and individual artisans, collective and private traders, free professions, clergymen, and unemployed and unknown (see table 4).

In the 1967-70 period several of these groups disappeared. The individual farmers were all collectivized; the artisan collectives were converted to state industrial enterprises; the private traders, except the peasant open markets, were reduced to a minimum, and members of the clergy were sent to work either in industrial plants or agricultural collectives.

The number of families almost doubled in the 1945-60 period. In the cities they grew from 48,800 to 95,500 and in the countryside, from 148,000 to 184,305. The greatest rate of increase, almost 8 percent, occurred during the 1950-55 period in the urban sector; this was attributed primarily to the creation of an industrial base.

The expansion of the existing cities, especially the capital city of Tirana, caused by the establishment of a number of industrial projects, drew people from the rural regions into the urban centers. This new migration was reinforced by the relocation of entire families. In addition, new family units were formed by the younger migrants once they settled in the newly developing industrial centers. During the decade of the 1950s the trend was toward larger families.

_Table 4. Social Composition of the Population of Albania_*
_(according to the 1960 official census)_

Average
Number of Number of number per
Social Groups families persons Males Females family

Workers 79,804 433,040 237,307 195,733 5.9 Employees (civil servants) 36,891 182,913 98,279 84,634 4.3 Collective farmers 105,778 670,422 331,269 339,153 6.8 Private farmers 44,419 275,169 136,683 138,486 6.4 Collective artisans 5,255 35,056 17,304 17,752 5.3 Individual artisans 1,846 8,950 4,683 4,267 5.4 Collective traders 431 2,328 1,216 1,112 5.0 Private traders 751 3,474 1,880 1,594 5.0 Free professions 166 889 498 391 4.1 Clergymen 831 2,785 1,668 1,117 n.a. Unemployed and unknown 3,633 11,289 5,507 6,782 3.0

Total 279,805 1,626,315 836,294 791,021 5.8

n.a.--not available.

* According to 1965 data, the family of seven or eight members was then typical in the villages for the agricultural collectives that were researched and, in the peasant families as a whole in 1965, the average family had 6.2 persons.

Source: Adapted from _Vjetari Statistikor i R. P. Sh._, Tirana, 1968, pp. 74-77; and _Ekonomia Popullore_, Tirana, November to December 1965.

Aside from the workers and peasants, the only group to which the Tirana authorities have continued to give special attention has been the so-called intelligentsia. Usually termed a layer or stratum of the new social order, the intelligentsia was considered, in 1970 to be a special social group because of the country's needs for professional, technical, and cultural manpower. To justify this special attention, the ideologists have often quoted Lenin to the effect that "the intelligentsia will remain a special stratum until the Communist society reaches its highest development."

In the development of the social structure under the Communist regime, basic transformations have occurred in the social composition of the intelligentsia. This transformation, during the 1944-48 period, involved not only the purging of a number of Western-educated intellectuals whom the regime considered potentially dangerous but also some top Communist intellectuals who were suspected of having anti-Yugoslav or pro-Western feelings. The remaining old intellectuals were reeducated and reoriented and were utilized for the preparation of new personnel for the bureaucracy and industry. Finally, a new intelligentsia was created, thoroughly imbued with the Communist ideology and recruited generally from among the children of the Party leaders, workers, and peasants.

The Communist regime created another social group at the bottom rung of the ladder. This group was composed largely of elements of the upper classes in existence before 1944. The tribulations of this class had by 1970 reduced it to a small minority, some members of which were still interned in forced labor camps. It was actually a class of outcasts, discriminated against politically, socially, and economically.

Most of the members of this group were used as so-called volunteer laborers on construction projects and in other menial tasks, and their children did not enjoy the same rights to higher education and other opportunities open to the other classes. Discriminatory measures against this class continued to be taken in the late 1960s; in 1968, for instance, the government passed a law prohibiting them from receiving money remittances or food and clothing packages from their relatives and friends abroad.

The Communist assertion of the existence of only two social classes did not correspond to the real class structure that prevailed in the country in 1970. In fact, there existed different classes and gradations of rank and privilege, beginning with an upper class, composed of the Party elite, leaders of the state and mass organizations, and the leading members of the armed and security forces. The top Party elite itself was composed of two distinct social groupings, the higher group consisting of the Political Bureau (Politburo) of eleven regular and five candidate members and the chiefs of the Directorates of the Central Committee the lower group being made up of the rank-and-file members of the Central Committee.

Family connections played a key role in the composition of the Politburo in 1970. The top three families were those of First Party Secretary Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije, who headed the Directorate of Education and Culture in the Central Committee; Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu and his wife, Fiqrete, who headed the top Party school; and Party Secretary Hysni Kapo and his wife, Vito, who headed the politically and ideologically important women's organization. General Kadri Hasbiu--minister of interior, head of the security forces, and a Politburo candidate member--was a brother-in-law of Mehmet Shehu. Similar family relationships existed between the other Politburo members. About half of the sixty-one members of the Central Committee were also related.

Just below the Politburo and the Central Committee were the vast Party and government bureaucracy, professional people and intellectuals, and managers of state industrial and agricultural enterprises. There were some basic social differences between the top Party elite and the lower Party functionaries and state officials in terms of privileges, influence, authority, and responsibility. This group of lower Party and state officials was bound together by the economic privileges and prestige that went with their positions and membership in, or sympathy for, the Party; they all benefited from the regime and enjoyed educational and economic advantages denied the rest of the population. Below this group were the rank-and-file Party members, whose leadership role was constitutionally guaranteed. Aside from the prestige enjoyed as Party members, however, their privileges and economic benefits did not differ much from the next class in Communist structure of Albanian society, namely the workers.

Constituting about 15 percent of the total population, the working class, styled by the regime as the leading class, was created mostly after the Communist seizure of power and was composed almost wholly of peasant stock. This group, probably more so than the peasant masses, has been under constant pressure to work harder, to produce more, and to work longer, often even after their normal schedules were completed. Although the regular work schedule was eight hours, workers were called upon to perform volunteer labor and to overfulfill norms. There was very little chance for rest and recreation.

Before 1967 the workers could take advantage of religious holidays, which provided some time for recreation, but since then all religious holidays have been banned. The only legal holidays were New Year's Day; Republic Day, on January 11; May Day; Army Day, on July 10; and Independence and Liberation Days, on November 28 and 29, respectively. There were, however, a few local socialist holidays connected with the liberation of the areas by the partisan formations in 1944. The workers also received two-week paid vacations annually.

The largest class, that of the peasants, represented about two-thirds of the total population and, according to Communist dogma, was allied with the working class and led by it. The regime's policy of complete agricultural collectivization has been distressing for the peasant class. A lover of his land, irrespective of its size, and of his independence, the peasant was deprived of his farmland, except for a tiny plot, and herded into a collective. His income in the collective was only on the subsistence level. Collective peasants were called upon to perform 300 to 350 workdays a year.

A constant complaint of the regime has been that the peasants have not been "freed from the psychology of the small owner, the concept of private property." As of 1970 there were actually no social differences between the workers and peasants because nearly all the workers were of peasant stock and still had close ties with relatives in their native villages, and indeed some workers continued to keep their families in the villages.

Soon after the adoption of the Constitution in 1946, a number of laws were adopted regulating marriage and divorce. The law on marriage, adopted in 1948, provided that marriages had to be contracted before an official of the local People's Council, and strong penalties were prescribed for any clergyman performing a religious ceremony before a civil ceremony had taken place. The legal age for contracting marriage was set at eighteen for both sexes, but persons as young as sixteen years of age could enter into marriage with the permission of the people's court. In such cases the minors did not need parental consent, and the law considered them "emancipated."

Marriage was based on the full equality of rights of both spouses. Thus the concept of the head of the family, recognized by pre-Communist civil law and so important for Albanian family life, was eliminated. Each of the spouses, according to the 1948 law, had the right to choose his or her own occupation, profession, and residence. Marriage with foreigners was prohibited unless entered into by permission of the government.

The laws on divorce were designed to facilitate and speed up divorce proceedings. The separation of spouses was made a ground for divorce under the law, and in such cases a court could grant a divorce without considering related facts or the causes of the separation. The basic divorce law, which was originally passed in 1948 and, after some modifications, was still in effect in 1970, provided that each spouse may ask for divorce on grounds on incompatibility of character, continued misunderstandings, irreconcilable hostility, or for any other reason that disrupted marital relations to the point where a common marital life had become impossible. Certain crimes committed by the spouse, especially political crimes, the so-called crimes against the state, and crimes involving moral turpitude, were also made causes for divorce.

In the 1950-64 period the total number of marriages averaged about 12,000 annually, except in 1961, when 18,725 marriages were registered; for the whole fourteen-year period marriages averaged about 7.8 per 1,000 population annually. During the same period there were about 1,000 divorces a year in the whole country; this represented about 0.2 percent of the total married population.

The problems still facing the Communist regime in its efforts to change the traditional character of society, especially in the countryside, were highlighted in a strong editorial in the February 8, 1970, issue of _Zeri i Popullit_ (The Voice of the People), the Party's official daily. According to the article, the most dangerous antisocial phenomenon in the social life of the country was patriarchalism. This phenomenon was particularly strong in the mountainous north where it was firmly entrenched and involved people from rank-and-file villagers to Party members.

The basic difficulty derived from the fact that the local Communist leaders entertained patriarchal notions about the Party; they considered the Party organization as one in which they found a reincarnation of the clan. There was a tendency therefore for the Communists to admit to the Party organization people from their own _bajrak_, or clan, in order to have a dominant position in, and exercise command over, such socialist organizations as agricultural collectives. In a Party organization the head of one _bajrak_ was put in command so that he could rule over the other, just as if he were the head of the clan. As in the old clan society, quarrels often occurred in basic Party Organizations when one _bajraktar_ attempted to wrest control of the organization from another.

Entrance into the Party was considered by the patriarchal-minded highlanders as penetration into places where they could enjoy privileges and prestige. A similar situation prevailed in the agricultural collectives, in which the presidents of the collectives, imbued with the traditional idea of chieftainship, behaved toward the property of the collectives as if it were their own. The problems of the collectives were not submitted to either the basic Party organizations or to the general assembly of the collective. According to official criticism, everything was settled in the "clan style, in the spirit of family interest, of the clan, of the entity, precisely because they formed a family within which defense and support of their interests, right or wrong, had become the rule."

Enver Hoxha stated in a speech in 1968 that the position of the secretary of the Party organization or of an agricultural collective was considered in many areas as inheritable, just as the chieftainship in the tribal society has been inherited. The difficulties faced by the regime's attempts to eradicate the persistent patriarchal notions were succinctly phrased by Hoxha in his address to the Democratic Front Congress in September 1967. Declaring that the social problems in the country were complex in the towns and more so in the countryside, he lamented the fact that the rural areas:

have their own written and especially unwritten laws, which
are often expressed in various regressive and harmful
customs, in norms that are alien to our Communist morals.
These are very dangerous and obstinate; they insistently
resist the new and are liquidated with difficulty. These
customs and norms have their own economic, ideological,
religious, and ethical basis; they have their own class
roots from capitalism to feudalism, indeed from the _bajrak_
and the tribe.

In an obvious effort to root out some of the old prevailing customs and traditions, the Party inaugurated in 1967 a movement aimed at revolutionizing the family and, in Party jargon, liberating it from the remnants of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. The targets have been directed toward the youth, both boys and girls. In resolutions adopted by the Party's Central Committee it was charged that in some families, because of the conservative and patriarchal mentality of the parents, the children were still not allowed to participate in parental conversations, especially the girls, on the pretext that they were too young and immature.

Discussions on morals, such as relations between boys and girls, love, and the creation of a socialist family, were particularly limited. It was the parents' view that they should not discuss such things with their children since this would undermine the traditional respect and authority of the parents. As stated in the January 30, 1970, issue of _Zeri i Popullit_, the need to strengthen the struggle against alien concepts that still plagued families became clearer when one considered some negative concepts that were evident in young people. Families of intellectuals were particularly singled out for criticism because, according to the Party journal, they manifested liberal attitudes in their attempts to satisfy every petty bourgeois craving and desire of their children; they instilled in them their own intellectual tendencies and fed and dressed them beyond their means.

Evidence of the Party's failure to detach the people completely from their traditional habits and customs was forcefully presented by the Party in a book published in 1968 under the title _Party Basic Organizations for Further Revolutionizing the Life of the Country_. It was freely admitted that much remained to be done in the struggle to emancipate the women and to draw boys and girls from the tutelage of their parents.

When the wife of a Party member decided to join the Party, for example, her husband addressed a note to the secretary of the basic Party organization saying that should the secretary enroll his wife in the Party, he would be destroying a family because he could not possibly live with his wife on an equal basis. Similarly, when a woman in a village was proposed as a member of the council of the agricultural collective, her brother-in-law objected strenuously, saying that her candidacy should be rejected since it was advanced without obtaining his permission as the head of the family and that in any case the "men of that family were not yet dead."

In a village in Kruje the first woman to become a Party candidate was asked to leave the Party because she did not belong to the same clan to which the Party secretary belonged. In another case, when a candidate was proposed for Party membership, someone reportedly stated that "we must enlist one from our clan also" in order to maintain the clan equilibrium in the Party.

The problem of social and family relations was still a major concern for the regime at the end of 1969. For example, in a major speech on family and social relations in November 1969, Hysni Kapo, the third-ranking man in the Party hierarchy, blamed the class enemy for the slow progress the Party had registered in creating a new social structure. The class enemy, Kapo admitted, was found everywhere, in and outside the Party, and it was striving hard to obstruct the path of socializing the family and emancipating the women.

Kapo bemoaned the fact that the men of the socialist society had not shaken off the vestiges of the past and that there were yet a large number of people who, with their behavior and actions at work, in society, and at home, were in contradiction to the requirements of the personality of the new man in the socialist society. Villages, agricultural collectives, artisan and trade cooperatives, and work centers daily faced such social problems as betrothals and marriages that did not follow guidelines set by the Party, conservative attitudes toward women and youth, and widespread tendencies toward clannishness.

According to Kapo, there were a large number of Communists who made little effort to implement the Party social line because the customs inherited from the old society still existed in the minds and hearts of the people and because the Party had been unable to divest people of all that was "hostile and reactionary and clothe them with the Party ideology." Kapo considered the most disturbing feature of this state of affairs to be the religious and patriarchal aspects that prevented the youth from creating a new socialist society and that continued to exist even among Communist cadres.

Western correspondents reporting from Tirana, in commenting on Kapo's speech, stated that what actually disturbed the Party most was the persistent opposition of the parents to new social standards set by the Party to regulate and control family life in general and the life of the youth in particular. Standards for dating, mixed Muslim-Christian marriages, engagement of boys and girls within socially accepted classes (the aim being to isolate the children of the former upper classes), and working and living together in various so-called volunteer construction projects were objectionable to parents.

EDUCATION

Pre-Communist Era

As late as the 1940s over 80 percent of the people were illiterate. The principal reason for this was that schools in the native language were practically nonexistent in the country before it became an independent state in 1912. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottoman rulers prohibited the use of the Albanian language in schools. The Turkish language was used in the few schools that existed, mainly in cities and large towns, for the Muslim population. The schools for Orthodox Christian children were under the supervision of the Istanbul Ecumenical Patriarchate. The teachers for these schools were usually recruited from the Orthodox clergy, and the language of instruction, as well as that used in textbooks, was Greek. The first known school to use the native tongue in modern history was in a Franciscan seminary that was opened in 1861 in Shkoder, where the Jesuits in 1877 founded a seminary in which the native tongue also was used.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, a number of patriots who were striving to create a national consciousness founded several elementary schools in a few cities and towns, mostly in the south, but they were closed by the Turkish authorities. The advent of the Young Turks movement in 1908 encouraged the Albanian patriots to intensify their national efforts, and in the same year a group of intellectuals met in Monastir (Bitolj), Yugoslavia, to formulate an Albanian alphabet. Books written in Albanian before that date used a mixture of alphabets, consisting mostly of a combination of Latin, Greek, and Turkish-Arabic letters.

The Monastir meeting developed a unified alphabet based on Latin letters. As a result, a number of textbooks were written in the new alphabet, and elementary schools were soon opened in various parts of the country. In 1909, to meet the demands for teachers able to teach in the native tongue, a normal school was inaugurated in Elbasan. But in 1910 the Young Turks, fearing the emergence of Albanian nationalism, closed all schools that used Albanian as the language of instruction.

Even after the country became independent, schools were scarce. The unsettled political conditions caused by the Balkan wars and World War I hindered the development of a unified educational system. The foreign occupying powers, however, opened some schools in their respective areas of occupation, each using its own language. A few of these schools, especially the Italian and French, continued after the end of World War I and played a significant role in introducing Western educational methods and principles. Of particular importance was the French Lycee in Korce, founded by the French army in 1817.

Soon after the establishment of a national government in 1920, which included a Ministry of Education, the foundations were laid for a national educational system. Elementary schools were opened in the cities and some of the larger towns, and the Italian and French schools opened during the war were strengthened. In the meantime, two important American schools were founded--the American Technical School in Tirana, established by the American Junior Red Cross in 1921, and the American Agricultural School in Kavaje, sponsored by the Near East Foundation. An important girls' school was also founded by Kristo Dako, an Albanian-American, whose teaching language was English. The two top leaders of the Country in 1970, Party First Secretary Enver Hoxha and Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, were educated in these foreign schools; Hoxha graduated from the French Lycee in 1930, and Shehu from the American Technical School in 1932.

In the 1920s, the period when the real foundations of the modern Albanian state were laid, education made considerable progress. In 1933 the Albanian Royal Constitution was amended, making the teaching and educating of citizens an exclusive right of the state. Education was thus nationalized, and all foreign-language schools, except the American Agricultural School, were either closed or nationalized. The reason for this move was to stop the rapid spread of schools sponsored directly by the Italian government, especially among the Catholic element in the north.

The nationalization of schools was followed in 1934 by a far-reaching reorganization of the whole school system. The new system provided for obligatory elementary education from the ages of four to fourteen; the expansion of secondary schools of various kinds; the establishment of new technical, vocational, and commercial secondary schools; and the acceleration and expansion of teacher training. The obligatory provisions of the 1934 reorganization law, however, were never enforced in the rural areas because of the economic conditions of the peasants who needed their children to work in the fields and because of the lack of schoolhouses, teachers, and means of transportation.

The only minority schools operating in the country before World War II were those for the Greek minority of about 35,000 living in the prefecture of Gjirokaster. These schools too were closed by the constitutional amendment of 1933, but Greece referred the case to the International Permanent Court of Justice, which forced Albania to reopen the schools.

There was no university-level education in prewar Albania. All advanced studies were pursued abroad. Every year the state granted a number of scholarships to deserving high school graduates who were economically unable to continue their education. But the largest number of students were from well-to-do families and thus privately financed. For instance, in the 1936/37 academic year, only 65 of the 428 students attending universities abroad had state scholarships. The great majority of the students attended Italian universities because of geographic proximity and because of the special relationship between the Rome and Tirana governments. The Italian government itself, following its policy of political, economic, military, and cultural penetration of the country, granted a number of scholarships to Albanian students recommended by its legation in Tirana.

There are no reliable prewar statistics on school population. The 1967-68 Albanian official statistical yearbook placed the total 1938/39 school enrollment at 56,283. Other sources placed it at over 60,000. Soon after the Italian occupation in April 1939 the educational system came under complete Italian control. The Italian language was made compulsory in all secondary schools, and fascist ideology and orientation were inserted into the school curricula. After 1941, however, when guerrilla bands began to operate against the Italian forces, the whole educational system was paralyzed. In fact, secondary schools became centers of resistance and of guerrilla recruitment, and many teachers and students went to the mountains and became members or leaders of resistance bands. By September 1943, when Italy capitulated and German troops occupied the country, education came to a complete standstill.

Education Under Communist Rule

Immediately upon seizure of power in November 1944, the Communist regime gave high priority to opening the schools and organizing the whole educational system along Communist lines. The Communist objectives for the new school system were to liquidate illiteracy in the country as soon as possible, to struggle against "bourgeois survivals" in the country's culture, to transmit to the youth the ideas and principles of the Party, and to educate the children of all classes of society on the basis of these principles. The first Communist Constitution (1946) made it clear that the intention of the regime was to bring all children under the control of the state. The state, constitutionally, took special care for the education of youth, and all schools were placed under state management.

The Educational Reform Law of 1946 provided specifically that Marxist-Leninist principles would permeate all school texts. This law also made the struggle against illiteracy a principal goal of the new school system. A further step in this direction was taken in September 1949, when the government promulgated a law requiring all illiterates between ages twelve and forty to attend classes in reading and writing. Courses for illiterate peasants were established by the education sections of the people's councils. The political organs in the armed forces provided parallel courses for its illiterate military personnel.

The 1946 education law, in addition to providing for seven-year obligatory schooling and four-year secondary education, called for the establishment of a wide network of vocational, trade, and pedagogical schools to prepare personnel, technicians, and skilled workers for the various social, cultural, and economic fields. Another education law adopted in 1948 provided for the further expansion of vocational and professional courses to train skilled and semiskilled workers and to increase the theoretical and professional knowledge of the technicians.

A further step was taken in 1950 to expand technical education. Secondary technical schools were established along Soviet lines by the various economic ministries. In 1951 three higher institutes of learning were founded: the Higher Pedagogic Institute, the Higher Polytechnical Institute, and the Higher Agricultural Institute, all patterned along Soviet models. The Council of Ministers said that their purpose in founding these institutes was to create conditions for further development "according to the example of science, culture, and technique of the Soviet Union."

In the 1949-54 period the school system was given a thorough Soviet orientation both ideologically and structurally. Most textbooks, especially those dealing with scientific and technical matters, were Soviet translations. Soviet educators were attached to the major branches of the Ministry of Education. The Russian language was made compulsory as of the seventh grade, and Soviet methodology was applied. Large numbers of students and teachers were sent to Soviet pedagogical schools for study and training.

Courses for teacher preparation were established in which the Russian language, Soviet methods of pedagogy and psychology, and Marxist-Leninist dialectics were taught by Soviet instructors. A law adopted in 1954 reorganized the Ministry of Education, renamed it the Ministry of Education and Culture, and, among other things, provided for the dissemination of Communist principles "supported by the school experience of the Soviet Union." In 1957, when the State University of Tirana was opened, a team of Soviet educators laid its structural, curricular, and ideological foundations.

Parallel with the Sovietization of the school system in the 1950s, the government made a concerted effort to implement the idea that education must be directly connected with daily living. A large number of white-collar and blue-collar workers were registered in evening and correspondence courses in the various trade and professional schools. According to government statistics, in the late 1950s one out of every four workers was taking some kind of course. Importance was particularly given to improving polytechnical and related work experiences and to the dissemination of manual work in most of the schools. Attempts were made to build vocational workrooms in most elementary and secondary schools. Emphasis was placed on technical and agricultural subjects.

By 1960 the system of elementary and secondary education had evolved into an eleven-year program made up of schools of general education and of vocational and professional schools. The schools of general education consisted of primary grades one to four, intermediate grades five to seven, and secondary grades eight to eleven. In October 1960, however, as the Soviet-Albanian conflict was reaching the breaking point, the Party adopted a resolution calling for a reorganization of the whole school system, the real aim being to purge the schools of Soviet influence and rewrite the textbooks. One more year was added to the eleven-year general education schools, and the whole school program was integrated more closely with productive work so as to prepare youths to work in industry to replace some of the Soviet specialists should the latter be withdrawn, as they actually were in January and April 1961.

Another far-reaching school reform became effective on January 1, 1970. Two factors seemed to have accounted for the new reorganization: the apparent lack of success in completely ridding the schools of so-called revisionist Soviet influences and the decision, evidently related to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to introduce military training in the whole school system. The reform was decreed by the Party's Central Committee in a special plenum held in June 1969. At the plenum the principal speakers were Party First Secretary Hoxha and Prime Minister Shehu, the latter in his capacity as chairman of a special education commission attached to the Central Committee. Hoxha charged that the old school system had left vestiges of the past in the consciousness of many intellectuals, teachers, professors, and men of science.

According to Hoxha the aim of the reform was to revolutionize the schools so that the new generation would be imbued with scientific and theoretical concepts of Marxism-Leninism and to combine these concepts with physical and military training. The new educational system was to persist in its struggle against old customs in society and in its efforts to inculcate youth with atheistic ideas. The new system, Hoxha declared, was intended in particular "to safeguard our schools from the Soviet revisionist school," which in a "demagogic way was degenerating into a bourgeois school." Accordingly, the Soviet concept in pedagogy was to be eradicated from the Albanian schools.

As reorganized on January 1, 1970, the system was divided into four general categories: preschool, general eight-year, secondary, and higher education (see fig. 5). On December 23, 1969, the government submitted to the People's Assembly a draft bill on educational reform, which was approved and became effective on January 1, 1970. The preamble to the law set the ideological tone of the new system. Its aim was to make "a decisive contribution to the training and education of the new man with comprehensive Communist traits, loyal to the end to the Party's cause," closely linking "learning with productive work and with physical and military education, giving absolute priority to Marxism-Leninism." In presenting the bill on the school reform to the People's Assembly, Minister of Education and Culture Thoma Deljana listed the three components of the reorganized school system as academic education, production, and military education.