When I read or watched fairy tales as a kid, I was always unhappy about how they ended, “and they lived happily ever after.” For me, the ‘ever after’ is the most interesting part of the story, what happens after the climax of the story. This is one of the reasons why I love A Song of Ice and Fire so much: we see the aftermath of the war or adventure, the good guys winning, and it often plays out the way the fairy tale suggests.
That is the essence of what Modern Albania is about: the aftermath of the good guys winning. The fairy tale of the big bad Stalinist ruler dying which signals the young and energetic to band together, depose the communist government, and start a democracy doesn’t play out as well as one would hope. In the case of Albania, it played out very badly, or rather, as expected when a brutal dictator is opposed: the oppressed become the oppressors, the principle motivations are revenge and power, and corruption runs rampant.
In the same way that when the kid who is brought up in a conservative religious house goes away to college and has no limits tends to go crazy with drugs and sex, Albania treated the transition of democracy as an excuse to do whatever it wanted and not live by any rules. Absent Hoxha’s iron first, the country became a den for illegal activity, including arms deals and smuggling, activity which those in power usually profited from or turned a blind eye to. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in reading about the transition from communism to democracy and all the problems that occur when a long repressed people suddenly gain an amount of freedom that would make the most pure libertarian blush.