Dictatorship condemned art as a political enemy!

In the Communist Albania political rivals and war traitors were not the only ones that were sentenced but also writers, artists, books, readers, dramas, song festivals, libraries, even the metaphor itself, and although it seems impossible they went to such extremes as sentencing dead writers (the case of Gjergj Fishta). The “sentenced” books were removed for ideological reasons and were taken into factories to be recycled into paper.

The theatre became court. Before the universities were built, prisons were established.

As soon as the winners rose to power, after 1944, the existing theatres and cinemas were transformed into courtrooms. In the national theatre a panel not with actors but with commissars and war commanders was set. Meanwhile hundreds of prisons were built in the city even though we still had no university. Intellectuals, deputies, journalists and writers were sent to trial. While out on the road the trials were broadcasted with loudspeakers, a new form of threat had taken shape.

The Dictatorship produced the propagandist writers

Meanwhile the dictatorship took care of its writers and artists and treated them the same was it treated the Security of State, the factories or farms. Violence in the dictatorship was not applied only by the police but also by intellectuals, propagandists, or writers, whose works well-served to the “ideocracy” of the totalitarian system. They created a new genre which later was called the literature of socialist realism, a propaganda genre filled with flattery for the system and transforming the writers as the poet V.Zhiti says “lucky victims of the system”.

Artists violated by the dictatorship

The revolt for the murdered poets was a big one: Trifon Xhagjika, a young boy who recited in his trial “Our Homeland is Naked”, in his last words he asked, as an atelier that he was, a cannonball, to demolish the Central Committee. The poet Vilson Blloshmi before being executed refused the request to become a collaborator, better ash, he said, than your ally. Meanwhile Havzi Nelaj, wrote in prison poetry about Helsinki and the human rights, when the free people did not even know what they were.

The tomb of the great Albanian poet, Gjergj Fishta who was nominated for the “Nobel” prize was destroyed and his bones were thrown in the river Drin because he was considered an anti-bolshevist priest and nationalist, who did not even deserve peace after death. The author of the first Albanian novel, Dom Ndoc Nikaj was imprisoned when he was 82 years old as an enemy of the regime and died in prison after 5 years. The tragedian Ethem Haxhiademi was poisoned a week before release, while the dramaturge Krist Maloku died in prison. Mitrush Kuteli the founder of the modem Albanian novel was sentenced too. Even the first woman writer, Musine Kokalari, graduated in Rome, the first dissident woman in all the communist empire, founder of a democratic party, was imprisoned, then interned, worked as a construction worker and died alone. The hearse which was a truck, without a funeral, threw her body into a hole dug for her.