Tag Archives: enver hoxha

1974: Beqir Balluku, Albanian Minister of Defence

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On this date in 1974, the deposed Albanian Defence Minister Beqir Balluku was shot … a bit of an occupational hazard for the post considering a like fate for a predecessor 25 years before.

Balluku (English Wikipedia entry | Albanian | German) fought as an anti-Nazi partisan during World War II and ascended to the brass of the postwar communist state by the late 1940s. Thus positioned, he aided the dictator Enver Hoxha in a notable 1956 purge that earned him a derisive namecheck from Nikita Khrushchev.

The Albanians are worse than beasts — they are monsters. Only later did we learn how the Albanian Communist leaders punished and eliminated members of their own Party. They had a sort of troika: Hoxha, Shehu and Balluku. These three used to bring someone to trial, and Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu would sentence the accused to death themselves, without ever putting anything in writing; then they would look for an opportunity to have their victim murdered secretly, and Balluku would personally carry out the execution. It was all very similar to the system used by Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria.

The unrepentant Stalinism of this “troika” would lead Albania to its strange Cold War alliance with China against Moscow and the power of Hoxha et al would long outlast that of Khrushchev.

But such things never last forever, after all. By the 1970s, friction between the party and the military (and between Albania and China, a relationship that closely implicated Balluku) led Hoxha increasingly to fear a coup d’etat. Hoxha struck first in 1974 by suddenly felling the entire top ranks of the armed forces: not only Balluku but also generals Hito Cako and Petrit Dume.* Balluku had been 22 years the trusted Minister of Defence and 26 years a member of the Politburo, a dependable ally of the chief the entire time but it needed mere weeks to “eat him alive”. (Albanian link)

* These generals would be executed one month after Balluku.

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1949: Koci Xoxe, Titoist

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On this date in 1949, Albania’s former defense minister was purged.

One of the first purge victims in the Soviet satellites — though scarcely the last — Xoxe was induced to admit having labored “against the Party and the people.”

The ethnic Macedonian’s real offense had been a pro-Yugoslav orientation.

That put Xoxe on the wrong side of the emerging rift in the Communist bloc, between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and independent-minded Yugoslav strongman Josip Tito.

After Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, Moscow froze the naughty Yugoslavs out of the international communist club and began suppressing “Titoist” elements whose national political or economic orientation augured potential annoyance for Soviet supremacy.

Albanian chief Enver Hoxha in later years would become somewhat notorious as the last unabashed Stalinist leader in Europe. (Hoxha took an “anti-revisionist” stance on Khrushchev’s later denunciation of Stalin.) So you can see the bind Koci Xoxe was about to be in.

Hoxha’s own pro-Soviet orientation was akin in its way to Tito’s anti-Soviet orientation: for Tito, Moscow meant domination, but for Hoxha, Yugoslavia was the resented aspiring regional hegemon. Albanian economic ministers complained that trade links disproportionately benefited Belgrade, and Yugoslavia once high-handedly marched troops into Albania to contain a conflict in neighboring Greece.

At any rate, Hoxha went energetically along with Uncle Joe on the Tito question … whose answer, on this date, was a bullet for Hoxha’s former Defense Minister.

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