History of Communism

Albania's Cultural Revolution: The First Atheist State

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Ruined concrete and brick prison buildings on a barren, terraced mountainside under a blue sky
Ruins of Spaç prison, Mirditë, Albania, 2018. Photo: Pasztilla aka Attila Terbócs; resized. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.

In the mid-1960s, as Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in China, Albania’s communist dictator Enver Hoxha launched his own. Albania’s Cultural and Ideological Revolution purged the bureaucracy, sent officials to the fields, pushed collectivization into the remotest mountains — and set out to abolish religion altogether. In 1967 the regime proclaimed that Albania had become “the world’s first atheistic state” (Library of Congress, Albania: A Country Study).

Copying Mao

Albania’s revolution was modelled on Mao’s. Its leaders aimed to reform the military, the bureaucracy and the economy and to build support for Hoxha’s Stalinist system. Officials were denounced for a “white-collar mentality”; the salaries of mid- and high-level officials were slashed; six ministries, including the Ministry of Justice, were abolished; and administrators and specialists were sent from their desks to work in “the factories and fields.” Farm collectivization spread even to the remote mountains (Library of Congress).

The party also pushed women into work outside the home, in a country where about 90 percent of women had been illiterate before the Second World War. Hoxha declared that anyone who violated the party’s edict on women’s rights should be “hurled into the fire.” The overall effect, the Library of Congress study concluded, was to reinforce Albania’s isolation from European culture (Library of Congress).

The war on religion

Hoxha called for “an aggressive cultural-educational struggle against ‘religious superstition’” and gave the task to Albania’s students. By May 1967 religious institutions had been forced to give up all 2,169 churches, mosques, cloisters and shrines in the country. The literary monthly Nëndori hailed the youth for having “created the first atheist nation in the world.” More than 200 clerics of various faiths were imprisoned; others were executed or starved to death (Library of Congress).

The ban was then written into law. The 1976 constitution prohibited “fascist, religious, warmongerish, antisocialist activity and propaganda,” and the 1977 penal code imposed prison terms of three to ten years for “religious propaganda and the production, distribution, or storage of religious literature.” Citizens whose names did not conform to “the political, ideological, or moral standards of the state” were required to change them. In 1980 a Jesuit priest was sentenced to “life until death” for baptizing his nephew’s newborn twins (Library of Congress).

Nearly two decades after the campaign, a retired missionary couple who had worked in Albania before the war returned for a ten-day visit. Officials told them: “Those who persist in religious practices are enemies of the state and traitors.” One added: “All traitors must be shot” (Mumper, Christianity Today, 1987).

The cost of Hoxha’s rule

The Cultural Revolution was one campaign in four and a half decades of repression. According to Albania’s Institute for the Study of Communist Crimes and Consequences, between 1944 and 1991 5,577 men and 450 women were sentenced to death and killed (BunkArt). Over the years only about a hundred bodies of the dead have been found, some still unidentified (BunkArt).

Why it matters

Albania went further than any other communist state in attacking religion: it did not merely persecute believers but declared belief itself abolished, and made a baptism a crime punishable by life in prison. The campaign shows the logic of a regime that claimed to own its citizens’ minds.

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