Area Handbook for Albania Part 9

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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sumed the characteristics of an oppressed social cla.s.s. 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 pa.s.sive, 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 cla.s.s. After independence in 1912, however, a small Tosk middle cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed their old independent positions. The three major resistance movements that developed during World War II represented the princ.i.p.al social cla.s.ses 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 Les.h.i.+, who was head of state in 1970. The movement derived its main support from the small working cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s structure of the country at the advent of the Communist regime in 1944 consisted of the peasants and workers making up the lower cla.s.s and a small upper cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s; 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 ma.s.se 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 inst.i.tuted in the country with the adoption of the first Communist Const.i.tution in March 1946, which created a "state of workers and laboring peasants." The various const.i.tutional 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 Const.i.tution also was the Marxist tenet "from each according to his ability and to each according to his work." Subsequent revisions to the Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tutional 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 cla.s.s 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 "dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat."

Communist spokesmen listed three princ.i.p.al cla.s.ses prevailing in the early years of the regime: the working cla.s.s, the laboring peasants, and, in their terms, the exploiting cla.s.s, that is, the landowners in the agricultural economy and the bourgeoisie in trade. The exploiting cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, and the collectivization of agriculture, supposedly resulting in the formation of a h.o.m.ogeneous peasant cla.s.s.

After the destruction of the old cla.s.s structure, the Communist regime claimed that only two cla.s.ses 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 t.i.tle "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 cla.s.ses in existence before 1944. The tribulations of this cla.s.s had by 1970 reduced it to a small minority, some members of which were still interned in forced labor camps. It was actually a cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses. Discriminatory measures against this cla.s.s continued to be taken in the late 1960s; in 1968, for instance, the government pa.s.sed a law prohibiting them from receiving money remittances or food and clothing packages from their relatives and friends abroad.

The Communist a.s.sertion of the existence of only two social cla.s.ses did not correspond to the real cla.s.s structure that prevailed in the country in 1970. In fact, there existed different cla.s.ses and gradations of rank and privilege, beginning with an upper cla.s.s, composed of the Party elite, leaders of the state and ma.s.s 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 members.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p role was const.i.tutionally guaranteed. Aside from the prestige enjoyed as Party members, however, their privileges and economic benefits did not differ much from the next cla.s.s in Communist structure of Albanian society, namely the workers.

Const.i.tuting about 15 percent of the total population, the working cla.s.s, styled by the regime as the leading cla.s.s, 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 ma.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s, that of the peasants, represented about two-thirds of the total population and, according to Communist dogma, was allied with the working cla.s.s and led by it. The regime's policy of complete agricultural collectivization has been distressing for the peasant cla.s.s. 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 Const.i.tution 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 s.e.xes, 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 "emanc.i.p.ated."

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 pa.s.sed 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.