Europe's North Korea

0:01 this is Albania a tiny mountainous Nation nestled at the mouth of the Adriatic

0:07 today the unassuming territory is the third poorest in Europe and consistently

0:12 ranks among the most corrupt nations in the region yet even this less

0:16 than ideal position is Paradise compared to what it was a little

0:21 over 30 years ago in the mid 1980s the Albanian state was

0:26 a communist hermit Kingdom that ranked as the third poorest country in the world

0:32 not just in Europe it was ruled by a paranoid dictator who

0:36 carried out Stalin as purges against political dissidents and kept the populace

0:41 docile through a network of prisons and brutal secret police almost completely

0:47 diplomatically and economically isolated the country

0:51 resisted the modernizing influences of its neighbors

0:54 and even the rest of the Communist block and remained a relic

0:58 of a totalitarian past it was Europe's North Korea an equivalent in all

1:04 respects except for its geography and Longevity and here is its Story

1:10 one of the dictator en vosa and his paranoia of a mysterious isolated

1:15 neighborhood in the nation's capital and life within the state stuck in time

1:27 20th century Albania was a nation full forged in The Crucible of conflict

1:32 it was invaded by Italy in 1939 and only managed to free itself

1:37 from fascism 5 years later after a German occupation retreated from the southern

1:42 Balkans in late 1944 what remained in their place was the remnant

1:47 of collaborationists monarchists nationalists and communist

1:51 partisans in this power vacuum a relatively

1:55 unknown variable by the name of enaer emerged at the top of the country's

1:59 foremost political entity the party of Labor of Albania or the pla

2:06 even the country's most well-read chroniclers are puzzled by exactly how

2:11 this unexceptional man achieved such a feat

2:14 he was not particularly intelligent nor

2:17 was he influential in the party his presence at the party's founding

2:22 was speculated to be a bid to meet religious quotas all other

2:26 members were Christian and they needed a Muslim member to be representative

2:31 of the population by all accounts he was just in the right place

2:36 at the right time had a handful of influential allies and crucially had

2:41 the stomach to snatch the opportunity

2:44 with a clinical viciousness his unscrupulous strategies

2:48 would see him become a paranoid despot rivaled only by his contemporary

2:54 in North Korea Kim mils posa's Cutthroat

2:58 approach to ensuring in his political Supremacy

3:01 would be demonstrated as soon as the German occupiers began pulling out

3:05 of the Balkans in late 1944 as the verar retreated northwards the Communist

3:11 controlled National Liberation Army or the nla directed by the 34-year-old HOA

3:16 shadowed them and conducted a political

3:19 cleansing campaign in the abandoned areas where

3:22 all perceived political opponents were liquidated

3:26 in these early days of centralizing

3:28 power hure display a brutality that would become characteristic of his rule

3:34 in the words of one New Republic journalist quote HOA ordered purges like

3:40 other people order out for pizza on numerous occasions he would order the arrest

3:46 torture and killing of former allies and enemies alike as well as people

3:51 he resented on a personal level out of jealousy he once had

3:55 a prominent communist by the name of Lazar fundo tortured to death

3:59 because because he was a successful

4:00 Envoy to Comm turn the supranational organization

4:04 that sought to spark World Revolution and because he had insulted him

4:08 in the past H's personal dislike

4:11 of fundo was Amplified by rumors from Yugoslavia

4:15 that he might be a subversive trotskyist a alleged revisionist that wanted

4:20 to pervert Marxist ideology this was a common charge used in the Communist

4:26 nations of the time and the accusation typically held very little water it

4:30 was usually employed to justify the elimination of a nuisance to the established

4:35 leadership for HOA it was just a convenient excuse to persecute someone

4:40 he already despised and viewed as a potential rival hza must have

4:46 realized though that if he could determine fund's Associates he too could brand

4:51 them trotskyists so he asked that when

4:55 captured the torturers extracted the names

4:58 of fund's allies and the p La HOA was always on the lookout

5:02 for information that could provide him

5:04 leverage over others this political vigilance

5:08 however would end up turning HOA into the most paranoid man

5:12 in Europe over the course of his 41-year rule from 1944 to 1985

5:18 the dictator would kill founding party members so that they could not use

5:22 their seniority to undermine his legitimacy

5:24 and he would have childhood friends executed

5:27 or sent to prison for straying from the party line like Stalin

5:33 the man after which he modeled many of his own policies and his own

5:36 Cult of the personality hoer would further alter the past by expunging

5:42 those who had been purged from the historical

5:44 records to raise evidence of anyone's

5:48 prior involvement with the pla he would have the faces of disgraced

5:52 politicians scratched from photos as if they had never existed eliminating even

5:58 the smallest traces of opposition when his right-hand man and presumed Heir meu

6:06 died due to an apparent suicide in 1981 there was speculation that hza

6:11 had ordered his death not least

6:14 because immediately after his demise the dictator

6:17 announced absurdly that shahu had been a traitor all along and had

6:21 been in fact an agent not just for the Soviets but also

6:25 for the Americans if Shah who's death was indeed a suicide side it was

6:30 one only in name days before his death HOA had forced

6:34 him to engage in self-criticism for allowing his son to be engaged

6:38 to a woman who had anti-communist relatives in America when hza summoned

6:43 the poit bureau Albania's governing body

6:46 to discuss the Scandal shahu must have suspected

6:49 that his time was drawing near and decided to take matters into his own

6:53 hands hja had not pulled the trigger but he had given sheu

6:57 the gun so to say shahu was as close to stubbornly loyal

7:02 as you could get domestic observers

7:04 and party officials testified that he had never

7:07 engaged in policy disagreement with HOA

7:09 and was utterly subservient American intelligence

7:13 sources believe the same they doubted

7:15 that shahu would ever challenge H's Authority

7:18 perhaps the reason for H's actions aside

7:21 from the laughable assertion of the second

7:24 most powerful man in the country being a double agent for two

7:27 rival Powers was that shahu was toying with the idea of tempering Albania's

7:33 isolationism it was reported that he

7:35 had recently conducted diplomacy with the capitalist

7:38 nations of Europe and Yugoslavia

7:41 Albania's longtime rival hja notoriously paranoid

7:45 of foreign influences and favoring isolationism

7:48 may have felt undermined alternatively some intelligence

7:52 reports argue that by 1981 posa was in favor of a degree

7:56 of increased interaction with the Western world if this is the case then

8:00 his targeting of Shu may have been entirely personal something we will

8:04 get into in the last chapter of this video hoa's heavy isolationist slant

8:10 during his time in power is perhaps one of the most obvious parallels

8:13 to North Korea like the Korean

8:15 hermit Kingdom Albania shunned Nations that should

8:18 have been its allies both HOA and kimil sang would break

8:22 with the Soviet Union and China effectively

8:25 alienating the only countries that would have

8:27 any reason to support them Albania already kept Every Nation on Earth

8:32 at arms length a policy manifested in the general hostility to any foreign

8:37 but particularly Western Products ideas art or media the aversion was so

8:42 extreme that in 1979 one artist by the name of Mark V was

8:47 sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in one of the country's

8:51 most brutal prisons just for producing art that showed traces of quote foreign

8:57 influences this alien ination of all allies and suspicion of all things foreign

9:02 meant that hza could present the rest of the world however he wished

9:06 if he wanted to construct a narrative in which the rest

9:09 of the world was working to see Albania fail he could and that is

9:14 what he did when the American reporter Harrison Salsbury visited the country

9:18 in 1957 he noted that albanians believed

9:22 America was orchestrating a plot to place

9:24 the exiled King Zog back on the throne Zog had been deposed

9:29 by the Italian invasion of 1939 and his feared reinstatement would see Albania

9:35 transformed back into a medieval surom this sort of sentiment was a product

9:40 of Albania's propaganda machine now the United Kingdom and the United States

9:46 had tried to overthrow oa's government in the years after World War

9:50 II under the highly classified code name operation valuable fiend but they had

9:56 failed miserably and since 1954 had given up on the prospect of subverting

10:01 Communism in Albania but this operation had two lasting effects it formed

10:06 the basis of H's foreign paranoia and gave him justification to be

10:11 extremely prejudiced when trying to root out subversion it would also lead him

10:16 to grow distrustful of the Soviet Union who after 1954 opened up

10:21 to the West under kustov and China who did the same after 1972

10:27 as more socialist Nations entered rapon with the capitalist World HOSA began

10:32 to believe that Albania was the only true Bas of Marxism left with all

10:37 others having strayed from a path in the words of one Yugoslav

10:41 contemporary in hosa's mind quote the whole

10:45 world conspires against little Albania capitalists

10:49 and imperialists neighboring revisionist Yugoslavia

10:52 and the far off CLE and P King the Moscow revisionists Italian and Spanish

10:57 Euro communists and many others this led

11:01 to a Siege mentality in Albania which HOSA hoped would prompt his subjects

11:06 to adhere to the principles of the state as if their life

11:09 depended on it because otherwise it was implied Albania would be vanquished

11:15 in his own words for Albania to be self-reliant and protect itself from its

11:19 enemies everyone should quote work and live as if in a state

11:23 of Siege this would manifest very literally with HOA embarking on an insane

11:29 campaign to construct 170,000 bunkers around the country between 1975 and 85

11:35 these concrete edifices permanently projected

11:38 an air of unease around the country

11:40 and helped etch into the mind of every Albanian that the world was

11:44 against them and that the pla was in an existential struggle the construction

11:49 of these bunkers also meant that the money that may have gone

11:52 to improving the living conditions of the average Albanian was instead sucked

11:57 up by a paranoia project project between 99.6 to 11.4% of the nation's

12:03 National budget went to National Defense and much of it was spent

12:08 on bunkers this obsession with defense at the expense of the people

12:12 was not a new trend in 1971 then prime minister Meed shahu recalled

12:18 that quote in 1961 we couldn't care less about bread but we were

12:23 desperate for weapons because the revisionist

12:25 Russians could attack Us in the face

12:28 of a received foreign threat the welfare of the citizenry came second

12:32 to the security of the state Albania was already an extremely poor country

12:38 with many of its inhabitants on the verge of starvation and the burgeoning

12:42 military expenses only served to increase

12:45 their misery Albania's poverty was most

12:49 evident in the capital tyana which should have been the country's Crown Jewel

12:54 when the Bavarian Premier franos Strauss visited the country in August of 1984

12:58 before his son noted that at night there were no cars to be

13:02 found using the city streets and that when they had visited Albania's

13:06 Museum of Technology they encountered a tractor from the 1920s and manually

13:12 operated telephone switchboards most of the population

13:15 lived in cramped Flats with 4

13:17 to 10 people crammed in little more than 50 square m just

13:22 1/5th the size of a tennis court but this was not the case

13:26 everywhere in tyan just south of the city Center existed a forbidden

13:30 zone the mysterious and isolated block

13:37 this neighborhood was reserved for the upper

13:39 strata of Albania's poet Bureau and was

13:42 populated with lavish Apartments restaurants clubs

13:45 private clinics and special grocery stores it was as one individual described it

13:51 an oasis presumably implying its surroundings

13:55 to be comparably poorly developed when

13:58 the block was set up in late 1944 to serve as Albania's Forbidden

14:02 City residents were expelled by the Albanian secret police the sigui to make

14:08 room for the incoming party apparat the area started being patrolled by plain

14:13 closed police officers and checkpoints populated

14:16 by armed guards were erected around

14:18 the perimeter of the neighborhood to keep out the riffraff even Enos Street

14:23 was sectioned off to party members one place in the block is

14:27 of particular interest this building adjacent

14:30 to the Central Committee building of the Communist

14:32 Party whose sole purpose was to function as a sort of club

14:36 for party Elites within its walls you could find a Cinema showing ban

14:40 foreign movies lounges billiard rooms

14:43 and party functionaries shmoozing with each other

14:46 while drinking expensive liquor this building

14:49 nicknamed The Party House was the encapsulation

14:52 of the Divide between halves and Have Nots and the hypocrisy of party

14:57 Elites breaking the rules that they themselves had set out for the country

15:01 the building served a unique purpose for the paranoid envera it acted

15:05 as a panopticon allowing him to monitor his subordinates closely the son

15:10 of Albania's trade Minister sharak Nella wrote that HOSA demanded that all

15:16 high-ranking party members attend the club every single day so as to continually

15:20 gauge their loyalty to him he treated this rule with the utmost

15:24 seriousness to the degree that when he set out charges against a minister

15:29 in his government who had requested among other things a democratization

15:33 of the party he cited The Minister's absence at the club over the past

15:37 2 months as additional justification for his arrest the party House's secret

15:42 function reflected the General State of paranoia in the block which seeped down

15:48 from HOSA himself and Spilled Out into the rest of the party

15:52 apparatus to ensure political longevity residents

15:55 of the block would intermar leading

15:57 to a quasi incestuous and highly isolated web of relationships although it was

16:02 insisted that quote close blood Affinity was

16:06 generally avoided it was a shallow gene

16:08 pool regardless in this close-knit but highly

16:12 suspicious Community an atmosphere of unees

16:15 was pervasive everyone was ready to out each other if they detected

16:20 a hint of treachery even if it was a father a husband

16:24 or a son given the inbreeding situation possibly all at the same time elsewhere

16:30 in the block was H's specialized Clinic stocked with Western medicines

16:34 and staffed with foreign trained doctors

16:36 he even employed a renowned French physician

16:39 by the name of Paul M to round out his medical team HOA

16:44 was diagnosed with diabetes in 1948 and had been undergoing treatment ever since

16:50 and it is here in his medical plight that we can see

16:52 his paranoia was selective for all

16:55 his fulmination against and suspicion of foreign

16:57 influences and products his medical team was dominated by expatriate expertise

17:03 and his medical cabinet was stocked

17:05 with foreign drugs expertise and drugs the benefits

17:08 of which did not extend to his own population HOA also drove

17:13 a tricked out Mercedes Benz a product of West Germany a capitalist power

17:19 private property was illegal and private

17:21 Vehicles therefore also prohibited but this did

17:24 not seem to apply to Enver or many of those in his cabinet

17:28 the average person would never see a car with there being only

17:33 1,265 private vehicles in the entire country inside his isolated manner in Tana

17:40 hoa's study overflowed with translated literary

17:43 works from the libraries of the enemy

17:45 n Shakespeare doeski Christie and makavelli all sat on his shelves their spines

17:51 peering out into a world in which they did not belong much

17:55 like how political dissidents under his rule were put behind bars literature too

17:59 was imprisoned hojo's censorship regime verged

18:02 on that of North Korea's infamously

18:04 restrictive system but he made sure his library was free from scrutiny when

18:11 kimil s died in 1994 North Korea entered a prolonged state of mourning

18:17 and the average citizen engaged in public displays of Hysteria as if

18:21 the load star of the North Korean state had been snuffed out similarly

18:26 in Albania hosa's death was accompanied by a period of extreme public distress

18:32 hosa's Cult of the personality had constructed him to be what was

18:36 effectively a God among men the glue that held the nation together

18:40 and its seemingly Eternal and infallible protector

18:43 so upon his passing for those who

18:46 had been submerged in this propaganda for decades it was as if

18:49 the world as they knew it was crumbling before their very eyes

18:53 for dissidents not entranced by his spell they too feigned sad for fear

18:59 of reprisals in parallels to North Korea

19:03 albanians wailed and screamed at the sight

19:05 of their dictators coffin While others

19:08 looked somberly onwards displaying their deference

19:11 to their beloved leader as is evidence by what footage remains

19:15 of the seven days of mourning ordered following hosa's death the funeral rights

19:20 and acts of remembrance were highly

19:22 choreographed throughout hosa's entire life he had

19:25 been careful to present himself as the sole cause of Albania's Good Fortune

19:30 as the Axis powers retreated from Albania he had distributed pamphlets around

19:34 the country that cited him as the architect Behind The Liberation and all

19:38 the victories against the fascists occupi

19:40 it hja never had an official biographer and personally penned in great self-

19:46 congratulating detail the many achievements he had

19:49 heralded in throughout his life the way in which he would be

19:52 remembered was incredibly important to him so much so that it speculated he

19:56 offed his most loyal Ally in presumed air the previously mentioned me shahu

20:02 because he was afraid that shahu might outshine him after he died posa's

20:07 opulent and grandiose funeral was likely

20:10 his final Act of self-deification a last

20:13 gasp in ensuring his legacy would last in the end it did

20:19 it outlasted even the communist state of Albania which fell to ruin

20:22 in 1992 it seemed without hosa's Iron

20:26 Fist the people's socialist Republic of Albania

20:29 lacked the political will to exist the entrenched Elite of the country knew

20:33 loyalty only to hja and without his presence keeping them on a short

20:37 leash they became unored Albania opened up to the world politicians permitted

20:43 foreign broadcasts to be viewed in the country and the fear that kept

20:47 people in line gradually vanished posure could rule from the grave only

20:52 for so long and with his death the collapse of Europe's North Korea

20:57 was almost inevitable hey everyone this video was brought to you not

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