12. Post- Zvyarism A Fable about Animals on a Farm( F I .docx

12. Post- Zvyarism: A Fable about Animals on a Farm
( F I C T I O N )
Donkeys live a long time, and in his middle age Sivo began to
contemplate his
own mortality. Sivo believed that life was miserable for all
beasts, and nothing
in his own experience challenged his cynicism. For one brief
moment, in the
days before the great April Uprising, he allowed himself the
small hope that
a farm ruled by fellow animals would improve his lot — less
work, more food,
warmer stalls in the winter. But once the pigs asserted control
of Zvyaria
Farm, replacing their old human master, living conditions
worsened.1 Sivo
would die as he had lived: a slave.
Few of the animals left remembered those days before the
Uprising,
only Pesho the old raven and Zdravka the mare. Before Krum
imposed
the travel restrictions, Sivo used to wander into town and meet
Lilli, the
lovely but frivolous mare who had fled from Zvyaria in the days
following
the Uprising.
“Hello, Lilli,” Sivo said on his last trip away from the farm.
“You’re looking

well.”
“Why, Sivo, thank you. Sugar is wonderful for a horse’s
complexion.”
Sivo studied his old barnmate: her white coat sleek and shiny,
her hooves
polished and clean, her forelock coifed, and green ribbons
plaited in her lus-
Post- Zvyarism / 151
trous mane. She was only three years younger than Zdravka, but
she looked
a decade fresher.
“How are you?” Lilli said.
“Same as always.”
Lilli bowed her head. “It must be hard for you now that
Stakhanski is
gone.”
Sivo nodded.
“Those pigs worked that old stallion to death. Why don’t you
leave?”
“Zvyaria is my home.” Sivo clopped a hoof. “And at least I
don’t work for
humans.”
Lilli huffed. “Not all humans are like Simeonov. There are good
humans
who take care of their animals and treat them with respect.
These days there

are even humans that call themselves animal rights activists.”
“What’s an animal rights activist?”
“Humans who put the needs of animals before the needs of other
humans.”
Sivo shook his head. “Sounds like foreign nonsense to me.”
Lilli stared at Sivo, pitying his sunken flanks. “You know
what’s foreign
nonsense? The idea that animals can run their own farm.”
Sivo twitched his ears. Lilli was there at those early meetings in
the barn
so long ago. The pigs had heard tales of an animal- run farm
somewhere in
a faraway land, and began to spread the idea among the horses,
goats, cows,
hens, and sheep. “In other nations,” they said, “beasts work for
themselves.
They band together and form special animal collectives where
humans do
not profit from their toil.” Few believed the pigs at first, but
Krum and Botev,
the two biggest and smartest boars, kept insisting that another
farm was pos-
sible if they all worked together to overthrow the farmer
Simeonov.
Stakhanski convinced Sivo that it could work. When the time
came, Sivo
joined Stakhanski and the other animals in the great April
Uprising against
Simeonov and rejoiced when they ran him out. Krum and Botev
reorganized
the farm as an animal cooperative. Stakhanski trusted Botev,
and even Krum,

and poured more effort into building the first Zvyaria Dam than
any other
beast. But now Botev and Stakhanski were gone.
“It’s all nonsense,” Sivo said to Lilli. “Nothing changes.”
Sivo recalled this conversation with Lilli a few days later when
the young-
est mare disappeared from Zvyaria, and the pigeons reported
that she was
seen in the company of another farmer across town. Since the
pigs provided
no sugar or ribbons to the mares, Sivo thought it natural that
some would
leave the farm to pursue a life with more creature comforts,
even if this meant
152 / Chapter 12
being owned by a human. But Krum was furious with the mare’s
defection.
It came just two months after five hens conspired to immigrate
to a human-
owned farm where the egg quotas were less demanding.
On the day Krum announced that no animal could leave the farm
without
the special permission of the pigs’ council, a young boar named
Chervenio
paid a visit to the old donkey. “Hello, Sivo,” he said.
“Hello, Chervenio. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
Chervenio snorted. “No point. They never teach us anything
useful. I

want to learn about the great April Uprising.”
“Don’t they teach about it in school?”
“Not the truth,” Chervenio said, lowering his voice. “They
never say any-
thing about Botev.”
“Nothing?”
“They say he was an enemy of the beasts.”
Sivo huffed.
“Did you know him?” Chervenio said.
Sivo studied the young boar. “Why are you so interested in
Botev?”
Chervenio lowered his voice to a whisper. “I found some of his
poems,” he
said. “They were buried in a box, and I dug them up.”
“That could be dangerous,” said Sivo.
“I don’t think he was an enemy of the beasts. I think he was a
great revo-
lutionary,” Chervenio said. “He talked about cooperation and
the equality of
all animals. He never wore clothes and never slept in beds, and
he didn’t need
the dogs to get his way.”
“That’s how I remember him,” Sivo said.
“So it’s true.” Chervenio stared at the ground and stood in
silence for a
moment. “Is it also true that Krum murdered other pigs?”
Sivo closed his watery eyes and opened them. “Krum never
murdered any
beast. The dogs did the murdering.”

“But on his command?”
Sivo simply nodded. It had been a long time since those dark
days after
the Uprising.
Chervenio came closer to Sivo and motioned for the old jack to
lower his
head. “Sivo, Zvyaria farm is in trouble. Krum and the senior
pigs have bor-
rowed money from the humans, and are thinking of selling some
of the cows
to pay their debts.”
Sivo shuddered as he remembered his friend Stakhanski, sold
off to the
knackery when he could no longer work.
“Some of the younger pigs think it’s time for Krum to go. He’s
betrayed the
Uprising, and compromised all the original principles of
Zvyarism. We want
to restore equality to Zvyaria, and we want your help.”
Sivo tilted his head.
“The animals respect you. They know you were there at the
great April
Uprising. That you helped Stakhanski build the dams, and that
you some-
times leave the farm and know about the outside world.”

“I can’t leave the farm anymore.”
“That’s why we have to take back Zvyaria from Krum. He’s
made it a
prison. He’s turned us into his property, to dispose of as he
wishes. Just like
a human.”
“What about the dogs?” Sivo whispered. “There are so many of
them now.”
Chervenio’s voice was so low now that Sivo could barely hear.
“The dogs . . .
tired . . . want . . . change.”
Sivo heard hoof falls outside of the barn, and lifted his head.
Zdravka re-
turned from her day in the fields. “Hello, Chervenio,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you
be in school?”
“Hello, Zdravka,” Chervenio said. “Sivo was just helping me
with a school
project.”
Chervenio turned toward the barn door. “Thanks, Sivo. Is it
okay if I come
back for more help tomorrow?”
Sivo hesitated. But for the sake of the poor cows, and in
memory of his
friend Stakhanski, he nodded.
And so it came to pass that Chervenio and some of his
schoolmates

spread dissent among the beasts of Zvyaria. Yes, he told them,
they should
stay proud that they lived and worked on a farm run by animals,
but he also
argued that the senior pigs had become no better than the
humans and it was
time to return to the original ideals of the great April Uprising.
The animals
didn’t need much convincing. Chervenio organized secret
readings of Botev’s
poetry, verses that gave the animals courage to stand up to the
fearsome dogs.
Of course, the dogs knew what was happening. They had
informers among
every group of animals on the farm and got regular updates on
the doings
of the hens, sheep, cows, goats, and horses. The report that the
young boar
Chervenio was meeting with the old ass in the barn caught the
attention of
a junior pup named Muttro. Muttro worked as a lower- ranking
officer in the
internal affairs department of Canine Security. He disliked the
senior pigs,
whom he saw as lazy and undisciplined, but admired their
ability to work
with humans. Muttro heard about the plan to sell the cows, and
the dog com-
manders warned that there would be unrest on the farm. Muttro,
like many
of his fellow officers, understood that the pigs could not run the
farm without

154 / Chapter 12
them. Dogs were generally loyal, and the pigs treated them well,
but some
pups like Muttro resented the pigs for not giving the dogs a
voice in how the
farm was run. Taking the loans was a stupid idea, Muttro
thought, and selling
the cows to pay them off was worse.
The second great Uprising required no violence. When the day
came,
Chervenio and the other reformist pigs appeared in the dining
room of the
pigs’ house with representatives of all the other animals on the
farm. Sivo and
Zdravka represented the equines. Chervenio demanded Krum’s
immediate
resignation. Krum called the dogs, but the dogs did not come.
Instead, Mut-
tro appeared and stood with the other animals. Dumbfounded
and confused,
Krum and the other senior pigs tried to negotiate, but Chervenio
gave them an
hour to leave the farm, taking nothing with them but the clothes
on their back.
“Everything else,” Chervenio said, “belongs to the beasts of
Zvyaria.”
Krum looked to Muttro. “Junior officer, how can you stand
there and al-
low this treason?”
“The treason began with you, Krum, long ago,” Muttro said.
“You violated all of the laws of Zvyarism and betrayed the
spirit of the

great April Uprising, all for your own gain,” Chervenio said.
“The beasts of
Zvyaria will tolerate this tyranny no longer.”
When Krum and the other pigs realized they had no choice, they
marched
out of the big house in a single file. All of the animals of
Zvyaria lined up to
watch them leave. When the last of the senior pigs passed
through the gate,
Muttro closed it behind them, and shouted, “Never return. You
are welcome
here no longer.”
The animals cheered.
Chervenio suggested an immediate meeting in the barn.
As the animals filed into the barn, the remaining pigs, all of
whom were
young and born after the great April Uprising, interspersed
themselves among
the other beasts, ensuring that no two pigs sat together. The
pigeons and
Pesho, the raven, perched in the rafters. Because it was their
habit, the hens sat
together opposite the cows. The goats and the sheep clustered in
front of the
bovine contingent. The dogs came in last, and Muttro motioned
for them to
disperse like the pigs. The dogs hesitated, and then obeyed,
even those senior
dogs that felt uncomfortable with the recent turn in events.
Muttro himself
sauntered to Chervenio’s side, resting on his haunches, as the
others settled in.

Chervenio cleared his throat. “Today, fellow beasts, we have
returned to
the true spirit of the April Uprising. Beginning today we can
return to the
original principles of Zvyarism. All animals are equal and all
animals deserve
their fair share of the wealth created at Zvyaria.”
The animals hooted, cooed, and snorted their approval.
“From now on, all decisions will be made in common, at weekly
meetings
here in the barn.”
Muttro waited until the jubilation died down before he spoke.
“And who,”
he said, “will be in charge of implementing the decisions?”
Chervenio eyed Muttro. “We’ll all implement the decisions.
Collectively.”
Muttro stood and addressed the animals. “But someone must be
in charge
of Zvyaria, if only to coordinate our trade with the humans. We
can’t produce
everything we need here at the farm. There will have to be some
contact with
the outside world.”
The animals listened.
“And there is the issue of the debts owed to the humans,”
Muttro contin-

ued. “The senior pigs took the loans as the leaders of the farm,
but the money
owed doesn’t disappear because the pigs are gone.”
“We don’t need any leaders,” Chervenio said. “We can make all
decisions
collectively.”
“It won’t work,” Muttro said. “We need to have someone in
charge, but we
can choose that person collectively.”
Sivo, standing in the back, snorted. “What do you mean,
Muttro?”
Muttro pricked up his ears, and made eye contact with the
donkey. He
inhaled. “We must hold elections: free, open, zoocratic
elections. All of the
animals on Zvyaria farm will elect their leader. And we will
hold elections
every two years, and no one animal will be able to remain
leader of Zvyaria
for more than six years.”
A murmur spread among the beasts. Muttro waited until they
settled down.
“Under our Zvyarian zoocracy every animal will have one vote
each, and
you will vote on paper ballots in an enclosed stall so no one
else can see who
you are voting for. After you vote, you will put your ballot in a
box until ev-
eryone has voted. Then the votes will be counted in the open,

and whoever
has the most votes will be the leader of Zvyaria.”
“Why is an election better than a weekly meeting?” Chervenio
said. “A
meeting where every animal can have his say.”
“Weekly meetings take too much time,” Muttro said, addressing
the an-
imals. “We all have so much work to do and Sunday is our day
of rest. Do
we really want to spend every Sunday in a meeting that could
take hours, to
decide how many eggs to sell?”
“How can we ensure the elected leader will not become like
Krum?” Sivo
said.
“Because,” Muttro said, “in our zoocracy, the leader will have
to stand for
156 / Chapter 12
reelection in two years. If the leader doesn’t do a good job,
he’ll be voted out
of office. This way he is accountable to his fellow animals. If
we want to have
true equality and freedom, we have to have elections.”
At this moment, Muttro made eye contact with his informant
among the
sheep, and the informant repeated the word “elections.” The
sheep bleated the

word “elections” until the other sheep joined in. “Elections.
Elections. Elec-
tions. Elections. Elections.” The sheep’s voices filled the barn
for two minutes.
“Are we agreed then,” Muttro said to the animals, “that we will
have elections?”
“Can we have them right now?” Chervenio said.
“No. We must first have candidates and those candidates must
have time
to prepare their campaign.”
Chervenio eyed Muttro. “What is a campaign?”
“A campaign is how a candidate explains to voters why he is the
best
choice. All candidates must explain to the voters what he will
do for Zvyaria,
and convince them to vote for him when the day of the election
comes.”
The sheep bleated the word “election.”
“And who chooses the candidates?” Chervenio said.
“They are nominated,” Muttro said, “or they may volunteer.”
“I nominate Chervenio,” Sivo said, and the other animals
nodded.
“Do you accept this nomination?” Muttro asked the young boar.
Chervenio paused. “I still think weekly meetings would be
better.”
“And if you are elected,” Muttro said, “you can have weekly
meetings with
all of the animals.”
“Then I accept.”
“Are there other nominations?” Muttro said to the assembled
beasts.

“What about you, old Sivo? Would you consider running for
president of
Zvyaria?”
Sivo shook his head. “I’ve already nominated Chervenio. I think
he will
make a fine leader.”
“An endorsement,” Muttro said. “And the campaign hasn’t even
begun. Do
you have other nominations?”
No animal spoke.
“We must have at least two candidates to have a proper
election.”
“Why?” Sivo said. “Why can’t we all vote for Chervenio and be
done with it?”
Muttro shook his head. “Because that’s a coronation, not an
election.”
The sheep bleated the word “election.”
“We need another candidate to oppose Chervenio so that we
animals have
a choice.” Muttro studied the faces of the young pigs scattered
among the
crowd, and then rested his eyes on a cluster of dogs lingering in
the back of
the barn. “Surely, there must be some animal among you who
will contest
Chervenio.”

“What about you, Muttro?” shouted one of the dogs. “Maybe
it’s time we
had a president from a different species. Why does it always
have to be a pig?”
Another murmur spread throughout the barn, and Muttro
nodded. “I ac-
cept this nomination, and I would be honored to contest
Chervenio in the
first free zoocratic elections on Zvyaria.”
The sheep bleated the word “elections” until Muttro motioned
for them
to stop. The animals discussed the election procedures and
agreed that they
would vote in one month’s time. Meanwhile, all animals would
work double
shifts to raise the money necessary to pay off Zvyaria’s debts.
Everyone agreed
that no cows would be sold. The animals decided to lift the
travel ban and
restore freedom of speech. Banned songs, books, and poems
could all be read
and discussed openly. Even old Pesho the Raven could resume
his preaching
about the afterlife that awaited all beasts in Baklava Valley.
The campaigning began the next day. Chervenio called meetings
in the
barn, read selections from the poems of Botev, and discussed
his plans for
running the farm through consensus. The weekly meeting was
the center-
piece of Chervenio’s campaign. In order to return to the true
spirit of the

great April Uprising, the animals needed to work together and
always treat
each other as equals. Krum had granted unfair privileges to the
pigs and
dogs, but Chervenio would ensure those privileges came to an
end. Old Sivo
accompanied the young boar for all of his poetry readings and
speeches, and
they drew a good cross section of the animals who were not
working.
Muttro the dog had a different strategy in mind. Muttro knew
about the
outside world, and was savvy in the ways of the human
equivalent of zooc-
racy. He hired a pretty hen to be his campaign manager and
began negotia-
tions with some pro- zoocracy humans to fund his campaign.
Even the hu-
mans had heard about the terrible abuses of the pigs, and hoped
to improve
the living standards of the animals at Zvyaria. They were eager
to support
experiments with zoocracy, and happily obliged to help Muttro
in his cam-
paign for the presidency, although the dog insisted that their
involvement
remain a secret.
Muttro’s first strategy was to activate his old network of
informants among
the different animals on the farm. Each of these informants was
funded to
create a special association to promote the interests of their own
species.
Within days they formed the Organization for Bovine Rights

(obr), the As-
sociation for the Advancement of Poultry (aap), the Union of
Sheep and
Goats (usg), and the High Council of Pigeon Affairs (hcpa).
Each of these
158 / Chapter 12
groups was charged with asking the candidates tough questions
about how
their leadership of Zvyaria would help their specific
constituents. The dogs,
out of loyalty, would vote for Muttro, and formed no
association. The young
pigs, not wanting to appear speciesist, joined the associations of
the other an-
imals, becoming honorary members. This caused a split in the
obr, with the
original faction accepting pigs as members, and a rival faction,
the Bovine
Rights Organization, refusing to accept nonbovine members.
After a week,
a similar schism occurred among the poultry. The original
organization
changed its name to the Association for the Advancement of
Poultry and Pigs
(aapp), and those who disagreed created the Poultry First
Coalition (pfc).
Muttro ran a two- pronged campaign, helped by his human
backers and his
charismatic and coquettish campaign manager. The first prong
of his campaign
consisted of two key buzzwords that few of the animals

understood: “modern-
ization” and “decollectivization.” In his campaign speeches and
the meetings
he organized on the outdoor steps of the still- vacant big house,
Muttro told the
sheep, goats, cows, and hens that their farm was hopelessly out
of date: their
equipment was old, and they lacked access to the miraculous
new fertilizers
and pesticides that would improve their crop yields. He spoke of
the wonders
of the machines that could milk the cows with the softest touch,
and the special
conveyor belts that could be installed in the hen house.
“On other farms, animals have not only heat in the winter, but
also ma-
chines that keep them cool and dry in the summer months,”
Muttro said.
The animals oohed at the idea of a cool and dry August.
“But all of these things require access to human money, and we
cannot
afford to take any more loans.”
“So how can we buy them?” said a cow, enamored by the idea
of the auto-
matic milking machines.
“We have to increase productivity,” Muttro said. “Our
productivity on this
farm is poor because we do not have the right incentives. If the
hens produce
more eggs, they do not benefit directly. If the cows produce
more milk, it

gets shared among all of the animals. The idea is that every
animal will do
his fair share, but we all know that some animals produce more
than other
animals on the farm. Why should we all benefit from the efforts
of a few hard
workers?”
The animals nodded.
“If you vote for me,” Muttro said, raising his voice and waving
his paws
about the air, “I will decollectivize Zvyaria farm. Ownership of
the hen house
will pass to the hens, and only hens will reap the profits from
their eggs. Full
ownership of the dairy works will be divided between the cows
and the goats
in proportion to their productivity. All profits from milk sales
will accumu-
late to those who produce milk. Similarly, all profits from wool
sales will go
to the sheep. If animals profit from their own labors, there will
be greater
incentives to produce more.”
“What about the horses?” said a young mare.
“The horses plow the fields and do many essential tasks around
the farm.
If you elect me, they will be paid a wage in proportion to the

work that they
do. The same goes for the pigs and pigeons. The independent
enterprises will
pay them a salary for their services.”
“And what about the dogs?” said a goat.
“If you elect me and we modernize Zvyaria, our farm will be the
envy of
all farmers, not to mention that Krum and his senior cronies
might try to
return. The dogs will provide security. The independent
enterprises will pay
them a salary for their services when they are required.”
“What about the dams and the electricity they generate? How
will we share
the electricity? The dams belong to all of the animals since we
all helped to
build them. And the farmland: we all helped to clear and weed
and sow the
land,” said a young pig in the audience.
Muttro paused, studying the faces of the beasts gathered around
him. “It
is true that the dams and the farmland belong to all of us, but
sharing the
electricity and the corn is inefficient. The names of Krum and
the pigs are
written on the deeds to the land and the dams. The only fair way
to distribute
the ownership of these assets is to divide them equally among
all the beasts
that helped to build them.”
“How?” said Kafiava, the campaign manager.

“We will create a system of vouchers dividing up the land and
the dams
on paper. If you elect me, each animal will receive his or her
fair share of
Zvyaria’s assets, becoming shareholders of the farm.”
“What is a shareholder?” said a pigeon.
“If you elect me, you will all be part owners of the farm through
your
shares. When the land or the dams generate income, you will
share in the
profits after the wages of the other animals have been paid,”
Muttro said.
“This is how the most efficient farms are run, and this system
will allow us
to modernize our farm and bring wealth and prosperity to all of
the beasts
of Zvyaria!”
At that moment, the sheep got excited and began to bleat the
word “elections.”
When Chervenio heard of Muttro’s plans, he redoubled his
efforts to
maintain the true spirit of Zvyarism, reading the poems of Botev
and trying
to convince the animals that only collective decision making
would ensure
160 / Chapter 12
their welfare. But once the animals understood that they would

have full
control over the fruits of their own labors, and that their farm
would have
heat in the winter and cooling in the summer, and that they
would become
shareholders of the lands and the dams, the various associations
began to
endorse Muttro. The first to back him were the obr and the usg.
With some
persuasion, the pfc and the hcpa also endorsed Muttro and his
plans for
modernization and decollectivization.
But Chervenio had a stalwart group of supporters who viewed
Muttro’s
plans for Zvyaria with suspicion. Chervenio continued to hold
his meetings
in the barn, discussing the theoretical basis for the equality of
all animals. A
week before the election, Muttro, Kafiava, and the leaders of
the associations
appeared at Chervenio’s barn meeting.
“Welcome, Muttro,” Chervenio said. “Welcome, fellow beasts.
All are wel-
come at these meetings.”
Muttro strode to the middle of the circular congregation and
pointed his
paw at Chervenio. “After everything that we beasts have been
through on
Zvyaria,” Muttro said. “You would cast your one precious vote
for a pig?”
Sivo stepped forward. “Pigs are animals,” he said.
“Pigs are oppressors,” Muttro said. “The pigs want to keep us

ignorant.
They want us to live in the past.”
Chervenio stared at Muttro, dumbfounded. “What are you
talking about?
We all believe in the original principles of Zyvarism that pigs
like Botev died
to defend.”
“It’s a lie!” Muttro said, addressing the animals. “No pig can be
trusted
with the welfare of his fellow animals. They are out to oppress
you. Once
Chervenio is elected president, he will become just like Krum.
Pigs cannot
be trusted!”
Sivo brayed at the top of his lungs, drowning out the words of
Muttro, who
cowered at the force of Sivo’s voice.
“You dogs,” Sivo said, “you dogs were the real oppressors. The
pigs never
murdered anyone, because you dogs always did it for them.”
Sivo turned to the animals. “Don’t you remember who you were
all afraid
of ? The pigs may have owned the farm, but the dogs beat us
into submission.
I was alive then. I remember. Those dogs murdered hens and
sheep, and they
even murdered four young pigs who dared to oppose Krum.”
At Sivo’s words, all of the animals in the room, even Muttro’s
supporters,

felt sickened. They feared the dogs to be sure, but they never
imagined that
the dogs had once killed pigs.
“Lies!” Muttro bellowed. “We dogs were the slaves of the pigs,
just like all
of you. Those evil pigs held our puppies captive and threatened
to kill them
if we did not do their bidding. We hated violence, but we feared
the power of
the pigs! Pigs are the real enemy!”
At that, Muttro stormed out of the barn, followed by Kafiava
and the
sheep. The leaders of the hens, cows, pigeons, and goats stayed
behind to
hear Chervenio and Sivo speak about the original principles of
Zvyarism.
Within a day, Muttro had secured the funds necessary to print a
thousand
campaign posters, which plastered almost every inch of Zvyaria.
The poster
showed an image of Chervenio and Krum’s faces side by side in
profile. A red
circle enclosed the image and a thick red line slashed diagonally
across it.
At the bottom of the poster in blue letters were the words “vote
muttro”
accompanied by the outline of a dog’s paw.

Because Chervenio didn’t have any money for posters, some of
his sup-
porters simply scratched out the word “Chervenio” in the dirt
around the
farm. A handful of industrious spiders also spun his name into
their webs,
but these could only be seen in the early morning when the dew
hung on the
thin fibers.
With the funding from his secret human backers, Muttro
distributed free
ribbons to the mares and gave away imported French seed to the
hens. He made
promises of the newest electric shears to the sheep, and swore
to the cows
that the private profits from their milk would allow them to
import the tasti-
est gourmet grasses from Scotland. When a mare dropped a foal,
Muttro was
the first one to congratulate her. When new chicks hatched from
their eggs,
Muttro celebrated with the hens, never missing an opportunity
to remind
them of the previous tyranny of the pigs.
But Muttro’s greatest convert was old Pesho the Raven, who
still babbled
in the rafters about the future paradise of Baklava Valley. Pesho
had a particu-
larly strong following among the sheep and pigeons, and he
initially preached
that the election meant nothing in the grander scheme of things.
What really
mattered was whether or not an animal had lived a worthy
enough life to

earn passage to Baklava Valley. But two days before the
election, old Pesho
suddenly started castigating those who had stopped him from
preaching his
gospel during their rule. For years, Pesho said, he kept his bill
shut for fear of
persecution by the pigs. “Baklava Valley,” Pesho said to the
assembled beasts
and birds, “is the ultimate destination, but while we live on this
earth we must
live in a world that allows for the freedom of spiritual
expression.”
Election Day came with great pomp and circumstance. Ballots
contained
a rough drawing of a pig and a dog, and all animals were to dip
their hooves,
paws, or talons in a pot of ink and step on the drawing of the
candidate they
162 / Chapter 12
wanted to vote for. The animals agreed that the three oldest
beasts, Sivo, Pe-
sho, and Zdravka, would stand over the ballot box to ensure that
each animal
deposited his own vote. At the end of the day, the three senior
beasts would
open the box and count the votes in front of a full assembly in
the barn.
Almost every animal on the farm voted, save for a handful of
fundamen-
talist pigeons that spent the day praying for passage into

Baklava Valley. The
sheep bleated the word “elections,” and the various associations
organized
private parties to pass the time while the voting was completed.
Chervenio
set up his headquarters in the horse shed and Muttro splurged
for a lavish
hq on the steps of the big house. Young attractive hens provided
voters with
overflowing fresh water troughs. Muttro greeted the animals,
shaking paws
and hooves with confidence.
When the sun set, Zdravka opened the ballot box with her hoof.
Pesho
flew into the box and picked out the first ballot and showed it to
Sivo who
said, “Chervenio.”
Chervenio and his supporters gave a cheer.
Pesho flew in and got the second ballot, showing it to Zdravka,
who an-
nounced, “Muttro.”
Muttro smiled and pumped his paws in the air toward his
followers. The
sheep bleated “elections.”
The procedure continued, with Pesho taking out each ballot for
either
Zdravka or Sivo to read out loud. A goat kept track of the tally.
When all of
the votes were counted, Chervenio had 124 and Muttro had 132.
The goat
declared Muttro the winner, and Muttro led a procession to the

big house.
Muttro opened the doors and revealed a feast waiting inside. His
support-
ers celebrated the first zoocratic elections with great vigor,
while Chervenio,
Sivo, and Zdravka sulked in the barn.
“Are you sure you counted them right?” Chervenio said.
Sivo nodded and placed a hoof gently on Chervenio’s back. “He
won fairly.”
A silence filled the barn. Some of Chervenio’s supporters
slipped out to
investigate the festivities at the big house.
Within days, Muttro made good on his campaign promises. The
farm was
broken up into different enterprises: the egg production
enterprise, the milk
production enterprise, the wool production enterprise, and so
on. Ownership
of these enterprises was transferred to the animals in charge of
production.
Ownership of the rest of the farm (the farmland and the dams)
was divided
equally among all of the animals through a system of vouchers.
Whatever
money the farm made, minus the wages paid to the farm
workers, would be
equally distributed to the owners of the vouchers. The
electricity generated

by the dams would also be distributed among voucher owners.
Muttro, as the
zoocratically elected president, was in charge of making all
decisions regard-
ing the farmland and the dams. He would organize trade with
the human
world and pay off the debts of Krum and the deposed pigs.
The first managerial decision Muttro made was to lay off all of
the pigeons
and pigs. Neither animal, he argued, had a productive use on the
farm. The
laid- off pigeons begged Muttro for some work, but he told them
that there was
little they could do on a modern farm. He only needed one or
two of them
to carry messages back and forth to the outside world. Then he
offered them
food in exchange for their Zvyaria vouchers, and the pigeons
gladly exchanged
the pieces of paper for seed. But once Muttro had the last of
their vouchers, he
stopped feeding the pigeons. They turned to old Pesho for help.
Pesho received
a special food allowance from Muttro, but Pesho refused to
share it with the
pigeons and advised that they go off in search of Baklava
Valley.
Some of the laid- off pigs found work with the hens and the
cows, but the
rest turned to Chervenio for help. “Can we set up our own
enterprise?” said
a now unemployed pig.
“The truth is,” Chervenio said, “most of us pigs only have value

to the farm
when we are slaughtered for meat. A few of the stronger boars
might become
studs, but I’m afraid we have no future on Zvyaria if we want to
stay alive.”
“I have piglets,” said an older male porker. “I would happily
sacrifice my-
self for their sake.”
“Me, too,” said another pig. “If it helps the other pigs survive, I
am happy
to be slaughtered. We have to stick together.”
“No,” said Chervenio. “We have to try to make ourselves useful
on the
farm. Together we own enough of the vouchers that we should
be able to sur-
vive on the income from the dams and the land. We are clever
and can help
the other animal enterprises. Or we can leave Zvyaria and look
for a better
life elsewhere.”
“This is our home,” said the old porker.
“But they don’t want us here,” said another pig.
In the end, about half of the pigs left Zvyaria, transferring their
vouchers
to Chervenio in the hopes that they might someday return to a
pig- run en-
terprise that would create a future for their piglets that didn’t
include being
eaten by humans.
For a while, none of the enterprises employed a dog since

Zvyaria was a
tranquil farm with few disturbances. But less than a month after
the elec-
tions, someone broke into the hen house and stole eggs. A few
days later, milk
disappeared from the dairy. When two lambs went missing, a
general panic
164 / Chapter 12
seized the farm. The dogs offered their protective services to
the various en-
terprises, promising to guard against any future acts of theft or
vandalism.
Every enterprise hired a dog. But as the mysterious attacks
continued, they
hired five or six dogs until all of the dogs were employed on the
farm. Once
they had work, Muttro convinced the dogs to trade in their
vouchers for de-
signer Italian dog beds imported from Rome.
The hens’ enterprise was doing a booming business, and their
nine dogs
guarded the henhouse twenty- four hours a day. But the hens
dreamed of a
modern conveyor belt that would make it easier to gather and
package their
goods for sale. Muttro promised to broker a deal for the hens if
they ex-
changed their Zvyaria vouchers for money, which could be used
to buy the
necessary equipment. The hens happily agreed since they had
their own en-

terprise and cared little for the doings of the farmland and the
dams. They
kept only enough vouchers to ensure that they had electricity to
run the
lights and their future conveyor belt.
A similar deal was made with the cows and goats. Since the
animals took
over Zvyaria, the pigs had been milking the cows, and this
arrangement con-
tinued now that the cows had their own dairy enterprise. But the
cows and
goats were desperate for the chance to get their hooves on a
sparkling new
automated milking machine, and exchanged their vouchers for
the necessary
capital when Muttro offered them the possibility.
The sheep grew their wool and hired some pigs to shear them
with the old
tools, but the idea of electric shears seduced them. A clever
sheep suggested
that they wait to buy the electric shears out of the profits of the
first year’s
wool sales. One more year of manual shears wouldn’t make
such a difference
in the long run. But the sheep were impatient for the
modernization that
Muttro had promised, so they traded in their vouchers for
money just as the
hens, cows, and goats had done before them.
The horses and old Sivo the donkey had more work than they
could han-
dle. They were the sole mode of transport for the goods of the
other animals.

The horses plowed the fields, hauled rocks to repair the dams,
harvested the
apples, and fixed broken things. Several horses from
neighboring farms joined
the Zvyaria horses since the wages were so good, and they could
afford to
buy ribbons and sugar cubes in town. Some of the remaining
pigs worked
with the horses, but Muttro offered them lower wages because
he argued that
they weren’t as efficient. Sivo and the other horses formed a
union with the
pigs to try to force Muttro to pay the pigs a better wage, but
Muttro just hired
different horses from neighboring farms. The horses also
refused to hire dog
security until a one- month foal was kidnapped from the farm.
Then the mares
insisted on hiring a few dogs to look after the young ones while
the horses
were away in the fields. The horses held onto their vouchers,
pooling them
with those of the pigs to ensure that they received their fair
share of electricity.
After six months, Muttro raised the price of electricity by 400
percent.
The president claimed he needed to increase electricity
production to plan
for the future needs of the farm. This required “new capital
investments.” The

animal enterprises that had sold their vouchers protested that
the new prices
were too high. But Muttro argued that he was only looking out
for their long-
term interests. Since he had full control over the dams, they had
no choice
but to pay the price he set.
At the same time, crime increased in Zvyaria: theft, assault,
even mur-
der. Much of this was blamed on foreign wolves, and the animal
enterprises
hired ever more dogs for security. Trade disputes also broke out
between
the different animal enterprises, and between the enterprises and
their pig
and horse laborers, who always demanded higher wages to keep
up with the
skyrocketing costs of food and dog security. The common areas
of the farm
fell into disrepair since none of the animals cared for anything
but their own
enterprises. Rather than resting on Sundays, the animals worked
harder than
they had worked under Krum, hoping they could earn more
money to pur-
chase the next piece of modern farm equipment. Only the horses
and the pigs
surrounding Chervenio continued to meet in the old barn,
wondering what
would happen to Zvyaria Farm until the next elections.
A year into Muttro’s term as president of Zvyaria, several cars
full of hu-
man men in business suits drove into the farm and filed into the
big house.

The animals hadn’t seen humans on the farm since Krum and
the senior
pigs left. For five hours the humans stayed in the house, and all
of the ani-
mals wondered if Muttro was finally purchasing the machines
they needed to
make the farm modern. When the humans left, Muttro
announced that there
would be an important meeting on Sunday in the barn.
Sunday came and all of the beasts assembled, but Muttro and
the dogs
never appeared. Instead several humans came, waving formal-
looking docu-
ments at the animals. Sivo tried to understand what was
happening, but it
was Chervenio who finally managed to communicate with the
humans. After
the humans explained the situation to the pig, they left the farm.
Chervenio returned to the barn to address the animals. “My
fellow beasts,”
he said. “The farm has been sold to these humans. All of the
land and the dams.”
“But how?” said Zdravka.
“It seems that Muttro owned 80 percent of the farm,” Chervenio
said.
The animals murmured in confusion.
166 / Chapter 12
Chervenio pointed at them. “He bought all of your vouchers.”
“But we were supposed to get a conveyor belt,” said a hen.

“And we were supposed to have electric shears,” said a sheep.
“And what about our automatic milking machines?” said a cow.
“I don’t know what he promised you,” Chervenio said, “but
Muttro is gone,
and he has taken all of the money the humans paid him.”
“What about the horses and the pigs who still own vouchers?”
Sivo said.
“They are going to buy us out.”
“And what about our enterprises?” said a hen.
“The humans are giving you sixty days to relocate.”
“Why can’t we stay here?” said a cow.
Chervenio looked down at the hay on the floor of the barn. “The
humans
are going to build a shopping mall next door. They need our
land.”
“For what?” several animals said at once.
“A parking lot,” Chervenio said.
Sivo brayed. “What about Zvyaria?”
Chervenio did not answer. He hung his head and walked slowly
out of the
barn.
And so within sixty days, Pesho the Raven flew off to preach
his gospel
of Baklava Valley to other beasts. The hens left to find another
farm where
they might lay their eggs. The cows wandered into town and
sold themselves
to the highest human bidder. The goats decided to strike out
into the wild.
They disappeared into the mountains. When the humans came to
bulldoze
the buildings and flatten the farmland, the sheep wandered

around in a daze,
bleating the word “elections” to no one in particular.
The humans kept their promise and paid money for the
remaining Zvyaria
vouchers. Some of the younger horses and more adventurous
pigs set off to
find work on other farms. Chervenio took his money and said
his farewells,
telling Sivo and the horses that he planned to travel abroad until
he found
another collective farm to join.
On the day the humans came to pave, only a few animals
remained: three
black sheep, one old goat, Zdravka the horse, and Sivo the
donkey, who still had
a long time to live. They stood together on a hill watching the
machines spread
thick black sheets of tarmac over the land where the big barn
once stood.
A human in a car driving past shook his head and said to his
companion,
“Aren’t those the animals from Zvyaria Farm?”
The companion nodded.
“Can you believe that some of those poor beasts are actually
nostalgic for
the pigs?”

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C H A P T E R 8
PRISONS OF HISTORY
Communism and militarism, 1949–89
The Cazin rebellion: Yugoslavia
In March 1950, a Serb farmer, Milan Božić, set out from his
hamlet
in north-western Bosnia to visit his friend, Ale Čović, a Muslim
who lived in a village 5 kilometres away. The two had met
during
the war, fighting in the same Partisan unit around Bihać. After
the
war, their friendship helped build bridges between the Serbs and
the
Muslims of Cazin District, where relations between the two
com-
munities were strained. Fratricidal conflict among Serbs, Croats
and
Muslims had been intense in north-western Bosnia and the
neigh-
bouring Croatian districts, Kordun and Banija. Božić and Čović,
however, used their influence to encourage reconciliation. Both
were respected by their peers as successful farmers, and Božić
even
joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička
Partija
Jugoslavije – KPJ). But the optimism which the two men shared
had
dissipated when the spirit of Partisan resistance made way for

com-
munist reconstruction. Six years after Tito had taken power in
Yugoslavia, Božić called on his old comrade, Čović, to persuade
him to take up arms once more.
Both men belonged to the peasant farmer class which made up
three-quarters of Yugoslavia’s population. The countryside had
contributed the majority of recruits to Partisans, Ustaše and
3
40
Balkans_ISTC_int_p478-774.indd 545 12-08-15 2:52 PM
546 THE BALKANS 1804–2012
Chetniks alike. They suffered much more than their cousins in
the
cities. After liberation, however, the orthodox Marxists of the
KPJ
proved no better at accommodating the peasantry than the
liberals
of nineteenth-century Serbia or the Yugoslav autocrats of the
1930s.
Instead, the new communist leadership diverted political and
eco-
nomic resources into ambitious industrial projects while
neglecting
rural investment. The aim was to strengthen the country’s small
working class at the expense of the peasantry, the symbol of
back-
wardness in communist eyes. Rural labourers were expected to
embrace their subordinate position in the socialist order. Their
job

was to produce enough food to satisfy the needs of a growing
pro-
letariat.
This rule applied throughout the communist Balkans, and party
leaders were quick to curb independent political activity in the
countryside. First they ordered the destruction of the
peninsula’s
influential peasant movements, the most serious threat to the
com-
munists’ monopoly on power.* They then turned their attention
to
the peasants’ economic interests. Collectivization promised an
eventual end to private holdings, large or small. The scheme
would
leave control of the production and distribution of food in com-
munist hands. Yet the leaderships faltered. They were so
apprehensive about the peasant’s reaction to collectivization
that
even in Albania, Europe’s most ruthless police state, the
commu-
nists hesitated to implement the policy. Only Yugoslavia defied
the
trend and began collectivization immediately.
There were several reasons for this. Until the summer of 1948,
Yugoslavia was considered the Soviets’ most faithful East
European
satellite. It announced the start of collectivization as early as
1947 to
underline its Stalinist credentials. Then, in June 1948, the
country
was expelled from the Cominform (the Communist Information
Bureau). Stalin accused Tito of deviating from socialism in the
dir-
ection of both Trotskyism and capitalism. Central to its betrayal

was Yugoslavia’s alleged soft treatment of the peasants. Soviet
com-
munists denounced the KPJ as a ‘Party of kulaks’, a transparent
nonsense as the Yugoslav Party’s behaviour towards its
peasantry
was worse than that of most of its counterparts. To disprove the
claim of revisionism, the leadership in Belgrade decided instead
to
* See chapter 7.
S
N
PRISONS OF HISTORY 547
speed up collectivization, demonstrating that it was not
Yugoslavia
but the Soviet Union and its allies that had strayed from the
path of
Stalinist orthodoxy.
The Yugoslavs were able to justify the temporary imposition of
strict state controls over agriculture on economic grounds. The
Soviet Union and its East European allies imposed a
comprehensive
trade ban on Yugoslavia after the split while ties with the West
were
still non-existent. There was a genuine threat of invasion from
Eastern Europe and tension with the West over the Trieste
dispute
remained high.* After years of devastation caused by
occupation

and civil war, agricultural production was down by more than
half
over pre-war figures. In Cazin District, for example, ‘56% of
the
agricultural inventory had been destroyed, 20.7% of all houses .
. .
the number of horses had fallen by 60%, sheep by 63.2%, cattle
by
55.6%, swine by 58.7%. The herds were exhausted, undernour-
ished, ill.’1 Despite its significant potential, Yugoslavia was
unable
to feed itself in the immediate postwar period. The state had to
intervene to provide the necessary investment and incentives to
stimulate production. It forced peasants to hand over their
holdings
to unwieldy agricultural conglomerates, the collective farms.
Those
who refused to join were subject to a harsh régime of
requisition.
The number of collective farms rose in 1949 from 1,318 to
almost
7,000. The Party increased the requisitions to unrealistic levels,
often demanding more from peasants than they could produce in
a
year. Some farmers had to use their savings in order to buy
produce
on the black market which they would then hand over to the
requi-
sitioning agent. The consequences of this policy were dramatic.
Peasants unable to fulfil their quotas risked losing everything
(the
so-called ‘total confiscation’ régime). Failure could also result
in a
spell at a work camp, where they would join political prisoners
and

students on construction or mining projects. Some resorted to
the
age-old resistance tactics of hoarding their produce and
slaughter-
ing their livestock rather than hand it over to inspectors. Instead
of
stimulating agricultural production, the policy led to a drop in
output. In the countryside, some communities began to go
hungry.
Protest assumed ingenious forms. A farmer in the Bijeljina
region of
eastern Bosnia led his cow to the steps of his local government
* See chapter 7.
S
N
office. At the top of his voice, he then invited the bureaucrats to
impregnate his animal themselves as this was the only way he
could
meet his quota. By 1950, however, others, like Milan Božić and
Ale
Čović, were considering more radical forms of resistance.
The gentle green hills of north-western Bosnia are reminiscent
of
England’s South Downs, in contrast to the forbidding rocks of
the
nearby Dinaric mountains. Cazin District, or the Bihać Pocket

as it
is also known, is unique not just for its verdant landscape. For
most
of the Ottoman period, the area was the Empire’s furthest
European
outpost. It was a restricted military zone similar to the
Habsburg
Vojna Krajina, or Military District, which lay at the other side
of the
narrow Korane river. Because of its strategic importance, the
sultans
secured Cazin District’s loyalty by encouraging the settlement
of
Muslims and the conversion of the local population to Islam. As
a
result, Cazin still boasts the highest concentration of Muslims
in
Europe. Like their counterparts in the Military District, the
menfolk
of Cazin were trained to take up arms in defence of the Empire
whenever so ordered. This helped develop an identity distinct
from
the Muslims of Sarajevo, not to mention Istanbul. Throughout
the
nineteenth century, the Muslims of north-western Bosnia
resisted by
force the imposition of reforms by the imperial centre. During
the
Bosnian uprising of 1850–2, they offered the most stubborn
chal-
lenge to the military dictator sent by the Sultan, Omer Paša
Latas.*
Cazin’s independent traditions re-emerged during the Second
World War when a local guerrilla commander, Huska Miljković,
formed an army that at its peak numbered 3,000 fighters.

Miljković
was a remarkable opportunist who cooperated alternately with
the
fascist Ustaše and communist Partisans in order to protect the
inhabitants of Huskina država (Huska’s state). Relations
between
Miljković and the Serbs were generally good but some Muslims
joined the Croat Ustaše and joined in atrocities against the local
Serb population. Some Muslim fascists formed small groups, the
Green Cadres, who took to the forests at the end of the war. In
the
six years following the communist takeover in 1944, they killed
sev-
eral dozen people in Cazin, and the last group of outlaws
evaded
capture until 1950. The communists found Cazin more difficult
to
control than most parts of the country.
* See chapter 2.
S
N
The Cazin Muslims were conservative and devout. Polygamy
survived well into the Titoist period, and the patriarchal social
system was underlined by the highest rate of female illiteracy
among
Bosnia’s Muslims. The communist authorities were deeply
suspi-
cious of Cazin’s autonomist tendencies. After the war, they

cracked
down on all religious hierarchies, Muslim, Orthodox and
Catholic,
provoking much ill-feeling. Tensions were exacerbated by the
requisition policy. The inspectors who demanded that peasants
hand over their produce bore an unmistakable resemblance to
the
tax farmers of the Ottoman Empire,* except that in the 1940s
and
1950s they had the authority of a repressive communist state
behind
them.
A drought in 1949 had led to a sharp drop in production and by
January 1950 the Cazin District inspectors had collected
800,000
kilos less than their annual quota. The figures were worse for
cattle
and swine. In response, the communists mounted a renewed
confis-
cation drive. This was too much for Milan Božić and his friend,
Mile Devrnja, a Serb who lived over the Korane river in the
Slunj
district of Croatia. They met secretly at Božić’s home in mid-
March
to lay the groundwork for an armed rebellion against the
Yugoslav
state. For this to have any prospect of success in Cazin, the
Serbs
would have to persuade the Muslim peasantry to join in: hence
Božić’s visit to his old comrade, Ale Čović.
The Muslim did not hesitate. ‘Popular dissatisfaction with the
requisitions was rising everywhere and more and more were
going
hungry’, Bejza Čović, Ale’s wife, remembered later. ‘My

husband
couldn’t sleep at night for worry and he became ever more with-
drawn . . . There had been a terrible drought that year and the
shortages meant the cattle were weak and scrawny.’2
The economic conditions were sufficient to overcome resent-
ments which had lingered since the war between Muslim and
Serb
peasants. Both communities were keen to make common cause.
Over the next six weeks, the peasant army attracted hundreds of
recruits from their friends and extended families in both Cazin
and
the neighbouring Croat districts. Some of the leaders were so-
called
prvoborci (founding fighters) of the Partisans who recognized
the
need to instil discipline and organization. However, in three
critical
* See chapter 2.
S
N
respects the men of the Cazin rebellion belonged to a long
tradition
of Balkan jacqueries: they were gullible; they were poorly
armed;
and their tactical ability was restricted to a single manoeuvre –
the

panicked retreat.
Their naivety manifested itself in wild exaggerations about the
movement’s strength. At the first planning meeting, Božić’s
son,
Nikola, announced that an influential sympathizer ‘somewhere
in
the district’, was in radio contact with exiled royalist forces.
With
the backing of Great Britain, monarchist troops were massing on
Greece’s border with Yugoslavia, Nikola reported, ready for
inva-
sion. Meanwhile, others claimed that peasants in Vojvodina
were
also preparing to rise. As the date set for the uprising
approached,
many peasants believed they were the vanguard of a great
rebellion
which would engulf all Bosnia, if not Yugoslavia. In this unreal
atmosphere, unit leaders vied for primacy by overestimating the
numbers of their units and the quality of their weaponry.
Despite these boasts, the local UDBa (secret police) failed to
notice that plans for an uprising were afoot. This was an
astonishing
indictment of a ruthless secret police force, which can be
explained
by the fact that all UDBa officers in Cazin were Serbs while
almost
90 per cent of the rebels were Muslims. UDBa’s network simply
did
not penetrate the closed society of local Muslims. The day
before
the uprising, a rumour of trouble finally reached UDBa’s
regional
headquarters in Banja Luka, where it was dismissed as nonsense

–
the police simply could not believe that the peasantry would be
so
bold, or stupid, as to rebel.
The uprising itself was a disaster. The rebels succeeded in
cutting
most of the telephone lines between the major towns in the
district
but news of the disturbances soon reached Banja Luka.
Aleksandar
Ranković, the Interior Minister in Belgrade, immediately
ordered
an overwhelming counter-attack. After a few skirmishes with
the
army and special police, the peasants retreated while some of
the
leaders fled into the forests. Over a hundred held out for several
weeks and it was not until the army was sent in that they were
even-
tually rounded up. The leaders were executed and a reign of
terror
imposed on the district.
Despite the ignominious outcome, the rising was significant.
Over 1,000 peasants heeded the call to arms, prepared to risk
every-
thing in order to make their protest known. For fifteen hours,
they
S
N

took their revenge against the most important symbol of the new
order – the collective farm. They trawled through farms and
agri-
cultural warehouses, looting everything they found before
distributing the foodstuffs and tobacco among their families and
villages.
What they could not have known is that during 1949 and 1950,
several other attempted uprisings took place, mainly in Bosnia
and
Hercegovina but also in Croatia and Macedonia, all detailed in
UDBa’s archives. Some of these were provoked by Chetnik and
Ustaše outlaws but there was usually a high incidence of
prvoborci
and active Party members in their ranks.
Overnight, it was forgotten that all of us leaders were from
villages, no further removed than the second generation, if not
the first. It was forgotten that without the peasant – who lived
in poverty and backwardness, suffering and sacrifice – we
Communists could not have overthrown the old order and
seized power. All of a sudden, interest in the peasants was
reduced to herding them together for meetings; pressuring
them into selling to the state at set prices and donating their
‘voluntary’ labour; or, at best, sympathizing with individual
cases of hardship and talking with peasant relatives and former
village neighbours on holiday visits home.3
In the long term, the rash of armed peasant resistance forced the
leadership to rethink its agricultural policy, slowing and
eventually
reversing collectivization.

Western interest in the Balkans subsided soon after the impos-
ition of communist rule. It was not long before the heroic stands
of
East Germans and Czechs in 1953 and of Poles and Hungarians
in
1956 overshadowed the fate of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia
and
Albania. Having asserted for decades that the Balkans were
inher-
ently violent, journalists and writers now dismissed the nations
of
the region as docile people who lacked the initiative and
courage of
their north-eastern neighbours. Yet the resistance to Stalinism
in the
Balkans went largely unnoticed because it lacked coordination
and
was centred on the countryside and not in cities like Berlin and
Budapest. Furthermore, since the collapse of communism in
1989,
the archives have revealed that Stalinism in the Balkans was
applied
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N
with much greater brutality than even western scholars have
previ-
ously assumed.

The iron fist: Romania and Bulgaria
The notoriety of Romania’s last communist dictator, Nicolae
Ceauµescu, has obscured the role of his predecessor, Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej, in constructing a state based on fear and
coercion.
Among the ‘little Stalins’, Dej was the worst thug of all. Even
before
the Soviets had installed communism in Romania, Dej was
murder-
ing his party comrades to clear a path to power. Born in the
Moldavian town of Bîrlad on 8 November 1901, Gheorghe
Gheorghiu (as he was born – he added the Dej later) was already
working at Galaøi docks as an eleven-year-old. He completed an
apprenticeship as an electrician and became a working-class
party
activist, a genuine rarity in Romania. In the 1930s and 1940s he
experienced strikes, prison and internecine warfare in the Party.
The
leadership was divided between the ‘home communists’, of
whom
Dej was the most prominent and the ‘Muscovites’, whose
leading
representative was Romania’s first communist Foreign Minister,
Ana Pauker.
In the wake of the Soviet–Yugoslav split, bitter struggles broke
out in the leaderships of the East European parties as Stalin
ordered
a witch hunt to root out potential Titos, so-called ‘national com-
munists’ like Władysław Gomułka who spoke of a ‘Polish road’
to
socialism. Dej was victorious in the Romanian Party over the
coun-
try’s best-known communists, Lucreøiu Pătrăµcanu, Ana Pauker
and Vasile Luca. For a long time, most western scholars

interpreted
this as an exceptional case. They argued that in Romania it was
the
home communists (cadres like Dej who had spent the war in
Romania) who had won at the expense of people like Ana
Pauker
who had spent many years exiled in the Soviet Union and were
regarded as Stalin’s agents. The apparent success of Dej and the
home communists was seen as the beginning of Romania’s
defiance
of Soviet dictates, which matured two decades later when Dej’s
suc-
cessor, Nicolae Ceauµescu, was courted by both China and the
West
while implementing the most repressive domestic policy in the
Warsaw Pact.
In fact, Dej sought to flatter Stalin with as much zeal as his
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N
counterparts like the Bulgarian dictator, Vŭlko Chervenkov.
His
immediate entourage was full of NKVD agents or communists
with
close links to the Ukrainian and Russian parties. His opponent
in
the early years, Pătrăµcanu, was not a Moscow communist.
Indeed,
Pătrăµcanu had long since condemned himself in Soviet eyes by

his
attempts to establish better relations with the British and
French.
By the time Dej engaged Ana Pauker in a second round of the
power struggle, she was already isolated in the party. The attack
on
Pauker, who was Jewish, coincided with Stalin’s manufacture of
Jewish conspiracies. Far from distancing Romania from the
Soviet
Union, Dej flattered the Soviet leadership by the most
meticulous
imitation. The process of separation between the Romanian and
Soviet parties did not begin until the late 1950s when
Khrushchev
finally crushed Stalinist opposition in the CPSU (Communist
Party
of the Soviet Union). Khrushchev’s revisionism implicitly
threat-
ened Romania’s economic interests and Dej’s political position.
The
new leader wanted Balkan communists to concentrate their
efforts
on developing the agriculture sector to help feed the Soviet
Union.
Dej wanted the prestige and wealth that a strong industry
promised.
The Romanian leader exploited the Sino-Soviet split to carve
out an
autonomous niche for Romania while remaining inside Comecon
(the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the communist
trading block) and the Warsaw Pact.
Dej’s fanatical Stalinism entailed harsh consequences for one
class above all, the peasantry, many of which made up the
largest
subset of a miserable social group, the political prisoners. But

the
countless victims of Romanian Stalinism hailed from all back-
grounds and professions. The prison and camp system in
Romania
had no rivals in the people’s democracies. The first inmates
were
pre-war politicians and businessmen. Then came the religious
lead-
ers. From 1949 to 1952, ‘in the name of the struggle against the
kulaks’, Dej reported to the Central Committee in late 1961,
‘more
than 80,000 peasants, most of them working peasants, were sent
for
trial; more than 30,000 of these peasants were tried in public
which
provoked great concern among the peasant masses brought to
attend these infamous frame-ups’.4 Dej used the opportunity of
the
Central Committee meeting in 1961 to shift his own
responsibility
for the assault on the peasantry from his shoulders on to Ana
Pauker’s. In fact, she had tried to slow down collectivization
and, in
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January 1951, she had demanded that the Central Committee
arrest
the Party members who had forced peasants into collectives,

declaring that ‘those who acted in this fashion are not
humans’.5
As in Yugoslavia, there was resistance in the countryside.
Spontaneous unarmed uprisings were reported from all over
Romania. The militia responded by shooting rebels, burning vil-
lages and confiscating livestock and grain. Throughout the late
1940s and 1950s, armed resistance groups took to the forests
and
mountains in northern and central Romania. Many evaded
capture
for years, engaging in occasional shoot-outs with special
Securitate
units and, in one case, escaping arrest until 1976. No single
protest
reached the scale of the Cazin uprising in Yugoslavia, but the
resist-
ance lasted much longer.
These fugitives were heroic exceptions to the rule. For most
Romanian citizens, the 1950s were bleak years of state terror.
At the
apex of this régime stood the Danube–Black Sea Canal, the
cutting
of a huge channel south of the Danube delta from Constanøa on
the
Black Sea coast 56 kilometres inland to Cernavodă on the river.
This
would have spared boats from the final 290 kilometres and
allowed
larger vessels on to the Danube. The scheme was reminiscent of
the
vast construction programmes of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Decreed in May 1949, it was one of the first projects backed by
Comecon. Romania’s communists proclaimed it the dawn of
modern industry; western commentators believed it was inspired

by the Red Army’s strategic requirements; Soviet diplomats
praised
it as the embodiment of socialist internationalism and
cooperation.
In fact, its most significant role was to create a giant camp for
forced
labour. During the most intense phase of construction in 1952,
the
fourteen camps scattered around the marshlands of Dobrudja
housed 19,000 political prisoners (or ‘Labour Resources of the
Ministry of the Interior’ as they were officially known), 20,000
‘vol-
untary’ civilian workers and 18,000 conscripts from the army.
‘The
inmates had to work 12 hours daily, seven days a week’, one
Transylvanian Hungarian writer recorded. ‘The work they per-
formed was heavy manual labour digging ditches, carting soil
by
wheelbarrow, loading trucks. The scene was similar to the
Egyptian
or Roman Empires of the past, when slaves were used to build
pyr-
amids or roads.’6 Underfed, maltreated and working in
appalling
conditions, men died at a rate that reached a hundred a month.
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In 1951, the Interior Ministry extended the ‘Re-education

Programme’ to the Danube–Black Sea Canal labour camps. This
complicated form of institutionalized torture was the Romanian
Communist Party’s unique contribution to Stalinist terror.
Devised
by the Deputy Interior Minister, Alexandru Nicolski, ‘re-educa-
tion’ involved prisoners agreeing to betray their friends and
then to
torture them on behalf of the Securitate:
It progressed in four stages. The first was known as ‘external
unmasking’ by which the prisoner had to show his loyalty . . .
by revealing everything he had hidden from the Securitate
interrogators . . . In the second phase, called ‘internal unmask-
ing’, the tortured student had to reveal the names of those who
had behaved more kindly or leniently towards him in prison,
be it a fellow inmate or a member of staff. The third and fourth
stages had another purpose: the destruction of the prisoner’s
personality and moral fibre . . . Only when his moral collapse
seemed . . . complete . . . was the student subjected to the final
stage, the one which guaranteed no return: the re-educated
figure was forced to conduct the process of re-education on
his best friend, torturing him with his own hands.7
Each ‘re-educated’ prisoner was allotted a number of prisoners
to
‘re-educate’, using the techniques of extreme physical and
psycho-
logical violence which he had acquired during his own ordeal.
In
this way, the Interior Ministry was able to impose a reign of
terror
throughout the prison and labour camp network, using minimal
resources. The imprisoned were victims and perpetrators
simulta-
neously. In 1951, a former medical student from Cluj was
administering ‘re-education’ to a prominent doctor at the

Danube–
Black Sea Canal network, provoking the victim to hurl himself
on
to the barbed-wire perimeter fence where he was shot by camp
guards. The incident was reported by the BBC and other foreign
stations. ‘Their reports prompted a Ministry of Interior inquiry
at
the peninsular camp. Here is a vivid illustration of the iniquity
of
the communist régime’s machinery of repression: the very body
which, in the person of Nicolski, implemented the programme,
on
realising that its details could no longer be kept secret, set up
an
enquiry to absolve itself of responsibility.’8
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Stalin’s death in March 1953 unnerved both Dej and his
counter-
part in Bulgaria, Vŭlko Chervenkov. The latter was another
slavish
imitator of the Soviet Union; Stalin had been the only source of
his
political legitimacy. Having spent over twenty years of exile in
the
Soviet Union following his involvement in the Sveta Nedelya
bomb
plot of 1925,* he enjoyed a narrow band of support inside

Bulgaria
itself. Chervenkov did more damage to the agrarian sector than
any
other East European dictator. In a matter of three years, he
destroyed the system of smallholdings that had fed Bulgarian
towns
and villages without serious interruption since Ottoman times:
‘The
greatest paradox was the lack of popular Bulgarian produce on
the
market’, remembered the journalist, Georgy Markov, from his
exile
in London (where he was eventually killed by a poison-tipped
umbrella). ‘Bulgaria was a country famous for its vegetables
and
fruit, but in the markets there was a constant shortage of them .
. .
Chervenkov’s régime reduced the villages to penury. Those
years
[1950–6] will be remembered as the most wretched in the
existence
of our peasants. The enforced collectivization, which caused the
disappearance of male labour from the fields, plus the abolition
of
personal smallholdings, inevitably brought famine to the
country . . .
Thus we townspeople no longer had the reserves of the
countryside
behind us.’9
Industrialization went hand in hand with collectivization.
Without sufficient resources of their own, Romania and
Bulgaria
became highly dependent on the Soviet Union for raw materials
and
plant machinery. Stalin’s demise and the emergence of the

collective
leadership in the Soviet Union posed serious problems for
Bucharest
and Sofia. Faced with an economic crisis of its own, the Soviet
Union slowed down or ceased deliveries of vital supplies to her
Balkan allies. The most spectacular victim of Soviet belt-
tightening
was the Danube–Black Sea Canal. Tired of pouring resources
into
this white elephant, the Soviet leadership withdrew its engineers
after Stalin’s death, leaving an unusable basin left empty for
over a
decade, until Nicolae Ceauµescu resurrected the idea both as a
symbol of Romania’s industrial prowess and as a forced labour
camp.
The Bulgarian and Romanian leaderships responded differently
* See chapter 6.
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to the reformist wind blowing from Moscow and to the East
European economic crisis. Dej played tough. He offered lip
service
to the criticism of Stalinist practice that culminated in
Khrushchev’s
attack on Stalin in the Secret Speech given to the 20th Congress
of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February

1956. But he refused to relinquish any power to a collective
leader-
ship, as happened everywhere else. Chervenkov, by contrast,
went
quietly, handing over the post of First Secretary to a young war
hero, Todor Zhivkov, who for a short while threatened to
breathe
some life into Bulgaria’s moribund Communist Party. The limits
of
Zhivkov’s liberalism were demonstrated in 1956 when the BCP
joined the Romanian Party as the only communist organization
in
Eastern Europe not to publish the Secret Speech. The Bulgarian
leadership did at least release a large number of political
prisoners.
The Romanians stalled on the issue.
On the economic front, Dej pushed successfully for the dissol-
ution of the Sovroms, the joint stock companies used by
Moscow as
an instrument of colonialist control over the Romanian
economy.
The two most important joint enterprises – responsible for oil
and
uranium extraction – were finally dissolved by November 1956.
Here lay the beginnings of Bucharest’s dispute with Moscow in
the
late 1950s and early 1960s, concerning Romania’s role in the
inter-
national ‘socialist division of labour’. When the Hungarian
Revolution exploded in October 1956, Dej discovered he could
exchange unswerving support for the Soviet Union’s broad
strategic
interests in Eastern Europe for a certain flexibility in domestic
policy. He gave the Soviet Politburo ideological and practical
sup-

port in its crushing of the Hungarian uprising. In return, he was
exempted from introducing reformist practices – Stalinism
remained
the Romanian norm. Neither Khrushchev nor Dej could tolerate
the spread of the Hungarian revolution into Romania via the
Hungarians of Transylvania. Nonetheless, students throughout
Romania, and not just the Hungarian minority, added their
voices
to the protests and resistance which had engulfed Poland and
Hungary in the autumn of 1956. This was an unwelcome
develop-
ment for Dej, and the Securitate responded zealously, breaking
up
demonstrations in towns as far apart as Iaµi and Timiµoara. The
Romanian leadership did, however, make one concession to the
stu-
dents – Russian was abolished as a compulsory subject in
Romanian
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universities and was replaced by the more traditional
languages,
French and German. This was a small but significant step
towards a
more independent policy.
Although the Bulgarian Party leadership considered it unwise to
publish the Secret Speech, it did respond to Khrushchev’s attack

on
Stalin with a Central Committee Plenum in April 1956 that
prom-
ised all manner of reform and liberalization. The April Plenum
was
in fact a prophylactic, designed to dissipate the rising pressure
of
popular and intellectual discontent in Bulgaria. But it did
finally
bury Chervenkov. Associates of Traicho Kostov, the main
victim of
the Stalinist show trials of 1949, were rehabilitated and the
Bulgarians had a genuinely collective leadership for a short
period
with Zhivkov as primus inter pares. The thaw lasted less than
two
years but writers and journalists exploited the atmosphere of
toler-
ance to the full. Nikola Lankov, a hitherto uninspiring
communist
writer, shocked Sofia by composing an indictment of
Chervenkov
which summed up the contempt in which most Bulgarians held
their ‘Little Stalin’:
Did I live through this night
of cult oppression?
Did I live?
Oh, no!
I dare not admit that
a certain person, who some called ‘9,’
in a disgusting epoch
shot Communists
to clear his own path
to a throne and personal power . . .

The door opens
the investigator enters
and begins to rail:
– What are you talking to?
My head shakes
My sleep is broken
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and on this late evening
I hear again:
– To interrogation,
to interrogation!10
In July 1957, Khrushchev succeeded in ousting the ‘anti-Party
group’, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Shepilov. The
period
of collective leadership came to an abrupt end. Both Dej and
Zhivkov used this opportunity to carry through purges in the
Romanian and Bulgarian parties to shore up their positions.
While
Khrushchev still intended to pursue a reform programme in the
Soviet Union, Zhivkov now decided to put an end to Bulgaria’s
lit-
erary thaw. Journalists were expelled, controversial writers no

longer published and tedium descended once again on Bulgarian
society. Khrushchev was too distracted to care unduly about
Bulgaria’s return to neo-Stalinist orthodoxy while Dej remained
confident of his power in Romania. One small group of Balkan
communists, however, were becoming ever more unhappy about
Khrushchev’s apparent deviation from the path of righteousness.
A world of his own: Albania
I first heard those five dear letters at the dawn of my life.
Ever since, your name became as dear to me as my paternal
home,
As precious as socialism,
As lofty as the mountains,
As vital as light . . .
We shout ENVER!
And the sky seems to us loftier than ever,
The space around us vaster,
The sun bigger,
And our perspectives ever more magnificent.
We shout ENVER!
And our days take on colour and meaning
As they fall in like soldiers
Into the great ranks of the revolution.
From Sulejman Mato’s poem ‘Enver’, published
in the literary monthly, Nëndori, September 197911
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Communism, like nationalism, came belatedly to Albania. When
the Communist Party (ACP) was finally established on 8
November
1941, it was under the guidance of two Yugoslav agents,
Miladin
Popović and Dušan Mugoša, who united three small groups –
one
pro-Italian from Shkoder, one pro-Soviet from Tirana, and the
third
pro-Greek from Korçe. This vanguard of Albania’s phantom
work-
ing class boasted seventy members and a few hundred
sympathizers
at most. Yet within a decade the tiny organization had
transformed
the country into one of the most inflexible totalitarian edifices
of
the century. Until the communist-led Partisan victory in
November
1944, Albania’s modern history had been one of chaos and
instabil-
ity. Although King Zog had forged a semblance of order for a
decade, this crumbled quickly under the pressure of Italian
expan-
sionism. The legacy of the fascists and the Nazis meant that the
communists were obliged to draw on indigenous traditions much
more powerful than the alien ideology of Marxism-Leninism to
attract sympathizers. Enver Hoxha, the strongest of communist
strongmen, admitted this freely, quoting the nineteenth-century
Albanian poet, Pashko Vase Shkodrani: ‘The religion of the
Albanian is Albanianism.’ With the exception of Stalin and
Hoxha
himself, the icons of socialism in the country were drawn
almost
exclusively from Albania’s national struggle – the medieval

king
Skënderbeu, the brothers Frashëri and Ismail Qemal.
Hoxha underpinned his vision of Albanian unity with a formid-
able xenophobia. The warmth with which he embraced foreign
powers was outdone only by the ferocity with which he subse-
quently rejected them. Hoxha wooed, then spurned the British,
the
Americans, the Yugoslavs, the Russians and the Chinese,
turning
the full force of a defensive nationalism on the perceived
heretic.
Fear of invasion inspired outlandish policies that became a
focus of
fascinated disbelief outside the country. Here was a Balkan
régime
that seemed stranger than the fiction of Bram Stoker. Its very
iso-
lation gave rise to a kind of cultish logging of craziness: the
construction of pill-boxes every few yards along the entire
length of
its borders; the ban on private car ownership; the compulsory
shav-
ing of beards; and, above all, the deification of two men – Josef
Stalin and Enver Hoxha – whose memory remained sacred until
1990 when Albania was torn apart by half a century of pent-up
popular anger.
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Hoxha’s xenophobia had a sound historical footing – the
Ottoman Empire, the European great powers and Albania’s
neigh-
bours, Serbia and Greece, had sought to deny the country its
independence ever since the League of Prizren first raised the
idea
in 1878.* And after Hoxha came to power, foreign states did
indeed
try to bring him down. In 1948, Stalin had told Milovan Djilas
that
Yugoslavia should swallow up Albania. A year later, the British
and
American intelligence services concocted a plan to destabilize
Albania by infiltrating supporters of King Zog into the country.
This preposterous scheme failed in part because Kim Philby
leaked
the details to Soviet agents. When the Soviets themselves were
spurned by Hoxha in the 1960s, the Khrushchevites (Hoxha’s
great-
est bêtes noires) tried to topple the Albanian dictator.
The foreign threat was genuine but exaggerated. The embellish-
ment of external foes had an additional purpose – to expose the
internal enemy. No ruling communist party thrived on a diet of
purges like the Albanian Party of Labour. Rising to a position
of
influence under the scrutiny of Hoxha brought great risks.
Official
sources concede that after the first great purge, which followed
the
break with Yugoslavia, a quarter of Party members were
expelled or
arrested. Politburo and Central Committee members were
periodi-
cally arrested or shot. Nikita Khrushchev claimed that one

Politburo member, Liri Gega, was pregnant when executed as a
Titoist agent in 1956. During Hoxha’s forty-one years in power,
the
seven interior ministers directly responsible for the carrying out
of
purges were all themselves purged. Founded in 1941, the ACP’s
first major purge was instigated in 1942, a year after its
founding,
establishing a pattern which continued unbroken for over four
dec-
ades, a self-perpetuating mechanism fed by Hoxha’s intense
paranoia.
The dictator never relaxed his fear that frustrated ambition in
the
Party must lead to conspiracy. In 1981, his most trusted
comrade,
Mehmet Shehu, the man who built the Albanian People’s Army
and
made the Sigurimi into the most feared secret police in Eastern
Europe, ‘committed suicide’. For forty years, Shehu and Hoxha
had been blood brothers in the struggle against revisionism.
Then,
* See chapter 3.
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quite unexpectedly, Hoxha exposed Shehu’s plan to marry his

son
to the daughter of a family of ‘war criminals’. Unable to bear
his
own treachery, the world was told, the perfidious Shehu took
his
own life. Once his old comrade was buried, Hoxha was at
liberty to
reveal the terrible truth – Shehu had been working for the CIA,
the
KGB and KOS (Yugoslav military intelligence) throughout his
career. Marrying his son into a family of ‘war criminals’ was
the
signal to begin the destabilization of Albania, a plan that had
matured over almost half a century. ‘[I]t was done precisely
with the
aim of attracting public attention and causing a sensation’,
Hoxha
later wrote. ‘The Yugoslavs could use this to . . . discredit the
lead-
ership of the Party of Labour of Albania and especially Enver
Hoxha.’12
The blood-letting inside the Party was often akin to a deadly
family feud. After Hoxha had sided with Beijing in the Sino-
Soviet
split in 1960, Khrushchev’s propagandists hit back in a Moscow
radio broadcast:
Half, or more, of the 53 members of the Central Committee of
the Albanian Party of Labour are related. First, we have four
couples: Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije Hoxha; Mehmet
Shehu and his wife Fiqrete Shehu; Hysni Kapo and his wife
Vito Kapo; and Josif Pashko with his wife Eleni Terezi. The
wives of Manush Myftiu, Politburo member, and of Pilo
Peristeri, candidate-member of the Politburo, are sisters. Kadri
Hasbiu, candidate-member of the Politburo and Minister of

Internal Affairs, is the husband of Mehmet Shehu’s sister.13
Notwithtstanding Radio Moscow’s factual errors (Hasbiu, for
example, was not married to Mehmet Shehu’s sister), the
incestuous
make-up of the communist elite in Albania was significant.
Enver
was a Tosk, born in October 1908 into a family of civil servants
and
Muslim clerics in the southern town of Gjirokastër. In the
interwar
years, this handsome young man went to study in France where,
according to official communist histories, he wrote articles for
the
French Party newspaper L’Humanité (despite assiduous
research,
nobody has ever succeeded in tracking down any examples of
his
youthful journalism). Hoxha then returned to Albania to teach
French at the Lycée in Korçë, also in the south. After its
formation,
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the ACP drew virtually all its support from the down-trodden
Tosk
peasantry in the south and centre of the country. Almost all
leading
cadres were southerners, a pattern which sustained itself

through-
out the communist period. Ironically, the only Gheg who
reached
the Politburo and survived was Ramiz Alia, who assumed
control
of the Party of Labour following Hoxha’s death in 1985. Hoxha
made a concerted effort to include northerners in the Central
Committee and Politburo. He also made clear gestures by
sending
teachers and doctors to the deprived areas of the north, and inte-
grating the region into his industrialization programme. He went
some way to overcoming suspicions between north and south by
stressing his commitment to Albanianism.
Nonetheless, in some regions the Party still had difficulty in
extending its influence. The strength of Catholicism is the
Shkoder
region and the exceptional courage of many Catholic clerics in
the
face of Hoxhaist repression meant that Tirana considered this an
unreliable area throughout the communist period. Further,
Ghegs
in the north had supported the struggle of their brethren in
Kosovo
during the Second World War. The ACP was regarded as a
creation
of the Yugoslavs and therefore hostile to the interests of
Kosovo
Albanians. In addition, communist ideology made no secret of
its
contempt for the traditional social structure of the north. The
atom-
ized clan system; the blood feuds and the Canon of Lek; the
miserable position of women in Gheg society; the greater
religiosity
in the north – these were all targets for the modernizing zeal of

Hoxha and his comrades.
Once the borders with Yugoslavia were closed in 1948, Hoxha
used the country’s geographical isolation to implement a pro-
gramme of unprecedented social engineering. The radical
ambition
of Albanian communism reflected ‘the crushing poverty, the
over-
whelming illiteracy, rampant superstition, blood feuds, and
ravaging
epidemics, above all malaria and syphilis’14 which Hoxha’s
régime
inherited. In a population of just over a million in 1944, only
15,000
could be described as working-class in the Marxist sense. By
1976
the official figure stood at 370,000, a 24-fold increase. Male
life
expectancy in the late 1930s was forty-two. Thirty years later it
had
risen to sixty-seven. The programme of transformation had
begun
with the reclamation of large tracts of malaria-infested swamps.
Arshi Pipa has written that ‘the drainage of the Maliq marsh,
from
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which Albania’s sugar now comes, has been carried out mainly

by
political prisoners. “Our sugar smells of blood,” they say in
Albania’.15 Then came Albania’s electrification. The last
village was
attached to the national grid in the early 1970s although one
experi-
enced observer of Albania has pointed out that ‘the system has
been
on the blink ever since’.16 By 1955, textile factories and
processing
combines were working in several major towns and cities. With
the
assistance of Soviet technicians, Albania soon became one of
the
world’s largest producers of chrome. Within less than two
decades
almost all children were attending secondary schools and
illiteracy
rates dropped to as low as 10 per cent.
The industrialization of Albania was astonishing but, like every-
where else in the Balkans, it was achieved at a heavy cost to
agriculture and the peasantry. Unlike its neighbours, Albania
was
not self-sufficient in food production even though almost 90 per
cent of the population made their living off the land in the late
1940s. With mountains covering almost three-quarters of the
coun-
try, ‘Albania has from 50 to 100 per cent less arable land per
capita’,17 compared to other Balkan countries. In the 1950s,
Albania
was importing 50–60,000 tonnes of grain annually from the
Soviet
Union and other East European countries to meet its needs.
Collectivization was postponed until the mid-1950s but it was
then

introduced mercilessly and without regard to the consequences.
Intimidation of the kulaks surpassed even the ferocity of the
Romanian campaign.
The combination of agricultural neglect and the ideological con-
flict with the Soviet Union almost proved fatal to Albania’s
fragile
economy in the early 1960s. There was both an economic and a
political aspect to its steady alienation from the Soviet Union in
the
late 1950s. Politically, Khrushchev’s revisionism was anathema
to
Hoxha. The Albanian leader was especially offended by
Khrushchev’s denigration of Stalin, Hoxha’s great hero, in the
Secret
Speech in 1956. More pragmatically, Khrushchev’s policy
implied
an end to absolutist rule in Tirana which Hoxha would not
contem-
plate. Mehmet Shehu best summed up Albania’s attitude to the
Soviet Union’s collective leadership when he told Mikoyan with
alarming candour: ‘Stalin made two mistakes. First, he died too
early and second, he failed to liquidate the entire present Soviet
leadership.’18
S
N
On the economic front, Khrushchev’s programme of a ‘socialist
division of labour’, devised in the late 1950s, required Albania

to
concentrate on agricultural production. The Albanian leadership
saw this as an attempt to roll back its industrial achievements.
Hoxha later remembered one of his economic summits with
Khrushchev:
‘Fish,’ he [Khrushchev] said, ‘is another great asset for you. In
the Scandinavian countries, in Norway, for example, they have
created great wealth with fish . . . The question of citrus fruit
is important for you,’ he said. ‘They, too, should become a
great asset for you, because lemons, grapefruit, oranges, etc.,
are in great demand.’
These were his instructions for the ‘construction of socialism’
in Albania . . .
Now everything was becoming more clear. The Council of
Mutual Economic Aid [Comecon] recommends that we solve
the economic problems with Khrushchev. Khrushchev recom-
mends that we solve them with cotton, sheep and with . . . the
miracle of fish!’19
Insulted by these suggestions and fearful of what Soviet
revisionism
might do to his domestic omnipotence, Hoxha was quick to side
with the resolute leadership of the Chinese. Every time Albania
broke with a communist partner, however, severe consequences
soon followed. The Soviet Union cut all economic cooperation
with
Albania. By the early 1960s, Tirana was importing almost
100,000
tonnes of grain annually from the Soviet Union. Much of
Albania’s
industry, especially its only foreign-currency earner, mineral
extrac-
tion, was dependent on Soviet engineers and technology. The
Chinese provided ideological consolation for the Albanians but
the

technological and economic assistance they offered could not
com-
pensate for the stagnation and then decline of the Albanian
infrastructure. As the standard of living fell in Albania during
the
1960s, Hoxha began to feel unsure of his position. To restore
confi-
dence, he resorted to repression and, taking his lead from the
Chinese, announced Albania’s ‘cultural revolution’ in 1966.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the reduction in tension between
the
United States and the Soviet Union that followed the Cuban
crisis
S
N
led to a modest liberalization. But for Albanians, the mid-1960s
heralded a period of grim ideological rectitude.
In 1967, Hoxha seized on a so-called ‘popular demand’, first
made by school students in Durrës, to transform Albania into
the
world’s ‘first atheistic state’. This resulted in the closure of all
churches and religious institutions and the arrest of clerics. A
decade later, the Albanian leadership took this philosophy to an
absurd conclusion:
A decree, dated September 23, 1975, and published in Gazeta
zyrtare in Tirana on November 11, 1975, stated: ‘Citizens who

have inappropriate names and offensive surnames from a pol-
itical, ideological, and moral viewpoint are obliged to change
them.’ The decree added that persons affected by the edict
were expected to comply with it voluntarily and that those
who did not would be given ‘appropriate names’ by social
organizations in their locality.20
No amount of state-organized repression, however, could resist
the
independent vigour of youth. The 1960s saw the maturation of a
generation with no direct experience of the war. The Partisan
strug-
gle had been a key source of political legitimation for the
communists, but its ubiquitous glorification meant little to
young
Albanians in the 1960s. Their rebellion was modest even by
East
European standards. By 1970, hair was growing a little longer;
Beatles’ records were played at parties, particularly those
thrown
by the children of the ‘red bourgeoisie’:
It was . . . a sort of dissent and it started mainly among these
communists’ children. We wanted to hear foreign music. I
started to write and to read foreign authors who were not
allowed here like Sartre and Camus . . . Then I went to work in
a factory among the working class. It was the first time that I
have seen them with my own eyes. You must remember that at
the time we assumed that the best people were the proletariat.
Intellectuals, students, on the other hand, they were people with
defects! And when I saw the workers – poor people, ignorant
people, frightened people – I began to be in touch with
Albania’s
reality and my first reaction was, ‘I have been cheated!’21
S

N
There was no organized opposition in Albania, but the circles of
café intellectuals and students quietly raising forbidden issues
grew
wider. At the same time, Hoxha had launched an attack on
‘conser-
vatism and bureaucratism’ in the Party and among intellectuals.
One
consequence was a half-baked Maoist programme whereby
writers
and artists ‘volunteered’ to leave Tirana for the countryside in
order
to learn from the masses. But some dramatists, novelists and
even
Party members took it as a signal to experiment with
progressive
ideas. The ensuing liberalization in the arts, which lasted from
1969
to 1972, would have been imperceptible to all but the keenest
obser-
ver of Stalinist systems. But it did appear that Hoxha was
distracted
temporarily, probably by illness, thereby allowing a gentle
ferment
of ideas. By 1972, he believed that matters were running out of
con-
trol. In January 1973, he unexpectedly attacked the head of
Albanian
Radio and Television, Todi Lubonja, a Central Committee

member
and former President of Albania’s Union of Labour Youth.
Lubonja’s crime had been to organize a music festival in Tirana
which Hoxha labelled ‘degenerate’. A campaign against
liberalism
was launched in the press, and in June, Lubonja and Fadil
Paçrami,
a highly respected dramatist and former Minister of Culture,
were
stripped of their Party membership and expelled from Tirana.
At 5 o’clock in the morning on 25 July 1974, a year after the
expulsions, three men knocked at the door of the Lubonja
house-
hold in Lezhë, 65 kilometres north of Tirana on the road to
Shkodër.
Instead of asking for Todi Lubonja, they asked for his twenty-
three-year-old son, Fatos, a student of theoretical physics at
Tirana
university. ‘They assured me nothing was wrong, that I was
only
required for some discussions in Tirana and that then they
would
bring me back’,22 Fatos recalled. They drove him in a Chinese-
built
jeep to a charmless modern building in Myslim Shyri street in
cen-
tral Tirana. Fatos had already begun to suspect that it was a
serious
matter because his minders would not even allow him to urinate
on
his own. When he met his two interrogators in the police
station, it
dawned on him how grave his situation was – they refused to
shake
his hand, a striking breach of custom. It emerged that in the

Sigurimi’s zeal to destroy his father, its agents had searched the
attic
of Fatos’s uncle and found the young man’s personal diaries.
Here
he detailed his clandestine thoughts and the books he had read.
From this interrogation, he was taken to a solitary confinement
cell
S
N
where he was kept for five months before being sentenced to
seven
years for ‘agitation and propaganda’.
Fatos, however, did not see outside the walls of a prison or
labour
camp for seventeen years, and had it not been for the collapse of
communism he would have remained inside for even longer.
With
just over two years of his original sentence left to serve,
Lubonja
was embroiled as a ‘defendant’ in a bizarre trial. In 1978, at the
labour camp where he worked in a coalmine, he heard how two
inmates had sent a letter to Hoxha demanding a change in Party
policy. He heard nothing more of the incident until six months
later
when he was taken without explanation from his prison camp to
Tirana and again placed in solitary confinement. Within weeks,
and

12. Post- Zvyarism A Fable about Animals on a Farm( F I .docx

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