Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 9,001
Albania is free! Free...?
On November 29, 1944, units of the Hitler Wehrmacht...
... and their local helpers...
... evacuate the city of Shkoder, the last piece of Albania that they still occupy...:
Albanian communist partisan groups advance...:
Albania is free again - and the 29th of November since the country's national holiday...:
People on the streets cheer and congratulate each other...:
I think if they had known that they were facing the bloody and leaden period of a dictatorship that lasted until 1990, the jubilation would have been much more restrained.
The total repressive regime of the ruler Enver Hoxha...
... who ruled from 1944 until his death in 1985, called himself "communist", but over time degenerated into a grotesque caricature of communism, in which even the skirt length for women and the haircut for men (the hair was allowed to fall below the shirt collar do not touch!) was prescribed by the state.
Private car ownership was forbidden! In general, almost everything was forbidden - even if it was expressly allowed on paper!
In 1971 Hoxha (pronounced "Hodja") declared Albania the "first religion-free country in the world", isolated it completely from the outside world and took turns with all other communist sister states until the country had become a pariah among the "people's democracies". ...:
The already poor Albania was pushed into the abyss economically by its rulers, from which it has not recovered to this day!
The only notable (and visible) "achievement" of the Albanian tyrant was to pave the entire country in the 70s and 80s with hundreds of thousands of completely useless and standardized bunkers for fear of an enemy invasion, which the local population had to build by force... :
The number of these bunkers is estimated at at least 700,000 - with a total population of the country of 2.1 million people in 1970...:
From a purely mathematical point of view, the entire population (3 people each) would have found space in these things - if they had all fit into the narrow housing...
Albania is to this day - by far! - the poorest country in Europe.
On November 29, 1944, units of the Hitler Wehrmacht...
... and their local helpers...
... evacuate the city of Shkoder, the last piece of Albania that they still occupy...:
Albanian communist partisan groups advance...:
Albania is free again - and the 29th of November since the country's national holiday...:
People on the streets cheer and congratulate each other...:
I think if they had known that they were facing the bloody and leaden period of a dictatorship that lasted until 1990, the jubilation would have been much more restrained.
The total repressive regime of the ruler Enver Hoxha...
... who ruled from 1944 until his death in 1985, called himself "communist", but over time degenerated into a grotesque caricature of communism, in which even the skirt length for women and the haircut for men (the hair was allowed to fall below the shirt collar do not touch!) was prescribed by the state.
Private car ownership was forbidden! In general, almost everything was forbidden - even if it was expressly allowed on paper!
In 1971 Hoxha (pronounced "Hodja") declared Albania the "first religion-free country in the world", isolated it completely from the outside world and took turns with all other communist sister states until the country had become a pariah among the "people's democracies". ...:
The already poor Albania was pushed into the abyss economically by its rulers, from which it has not recovered to this day!
The only notable (and visible) "achievement" of the Albanian tyrant was to pave the entire country in the 70s and 80s with hundreds of thousands of completely useless and standardized bunkers for fear of an enemy invasion, which the local population had to build by force... :
The number of these bunkers is estimated at at least 700,000 - with a total population of the country of 2.1 million people in 1970...:
From a purely mathematical point of view, the entire population (3 people each) would have found space in these things - if they had all fit into the narrow housing...
Albania is to this day - by far! - the poorest country in Europe.
