Wandering statues in Tirana

The spectre of communism still haunts Tirana—today not through ideology, but in the form of wandering statues with no place to call home.

Before the fall of socialism, monumental bronze statues of Stalin and Lenin dominated Tirana’s two central squares. Stalin stood on the main square, on the very pedestal where Skanderbeg now sits astride his horse. (As I once noted in a post, pedestals from toppled regimes have often served as ready-made foundations for the symbols of the new.) Lenin, meanwhile, gazed over Dëshmorët e Kombit, or the Avenue of the Martyrs of the People

When the regime collapsed in 1991, protesters pulled the symbols of dictatorship from their pedestals. Unlike in Budapest in 1956, however, no one had the foresight to cut them into pieces. The literally fallen leaders were instead dragged into the back courtyard of the nearby Academy of Arts, in the shadow of the old royal palace and opposite the pyramid built as Enver Hoxha’s mausoleum. There they lingered through the turbulent decades of Albanian democracy, hoping that the people would one day return to the personality cult most in line with their traditions, and then their day would dawn again. Meanwhile they were out of sight, yet never entirely hidden. Anyone who knew the way could wander into the yard and photograph them.

The other large statue of Stalin on the right side of the picture stood not in the city center, but in a similarly prominent location, in front of the city hall of the southwestern Kombinat district, home to the large textile factories, as the photo below shows:

But then came Covid, and as in many places, Tirana changed unnoticed. Yesterday, when, after five years, I returned to the courtyard, the scene was unrecognizable. A skeletal concrete frame of a new building towered over the site; the statues had vanished. I asked the policeman across the street, but at the mention of their names his face froze, and he muttered in English—ironically—that he did not understand English.

Next to the bunker-museum dedicated to the victims of communism, a self-styled guide was lecturing to Italian tourists. He pointed me instead toward Mehmet Shehu’s villa.

Shehu is one of Albania’s most tragic figures: a mullah’s son, then a fiery revolutionary, volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and fanatical disciple of Stalin. After 1944, as commander of the People’s Army, his ruthless purges won Enver Hoxha’s trust. Following the downfall of Koçi Xoxe, Shehu became interior minister in his place, and for decades remained the regime’s number two, a hardliner to the end. During one visit to Moscow, Khrushchev asked him what he considered Stalin’s greatest crime. Shehu, blunt as ever, replied: “That he didn’t get rid of you in time.” He also brokered the unlikely brotherhood between Albania and China, the last two Stalinist fortresses, a bond that lasted until communism itself collapsed.

But Shehu did not live to see that collapse. On December 17, 1981, he was found dead in his villa with a bullet wound in his chest. Officially, he had committed suicide. Soon after, his brother, wife, son, and two daughters were arrested; all died in prison during the 1980s. Only his younger son, Bashkim, survived, later insisting that his father had been assassinated for political reasons. He explained on television that behind the affair lay, as myths often suggest, a woman. Shehu’s brother had fallen in love with someone from the wrong family —relatives abroad in the U.S., others languishing in Albanian jails. When the feared secret police, the Sigurimi, asked Shehu to intervene, he simply replied: “He’s young. Let him love.”

After Shehu’s death, Hoxha smeared him in his 1982 book The Titoists, devoting entire chapters to portraying him as a Yugoslav, American, and Soviet spy, which confirms Bashkim’s claim, that his father was a victim of political murder.

Another, far more readable book about Shehu’s downfall and death appeared long after the events and the collapse of the regime: Ismail Kadare’s novel The Successor (Pasardhësi). Many regard it as perhaps the author’s greatest work. The reason for this is, of course, the personally lived experience of that era.

And yet, it is in Shehu’s garden that Stalin and Lenin have now found their final home. The last faithful servant shelters the last faithful statues. At the entrance of the service road to the villa a sign warns against entry, reinforced by the stern gestures of an armed guard. The villa, is allegedly used by the government for protocol events. As we watch, a black armored car rolls out, saluted by the guard. One wonders if the secret police still operate here—fitting company for the bronzed ghosts of Stalinism.

Though visitors are kept from the gate, the statues can still be seen and potographed from the neighboring park. Beneath the trees Lenin’s head juts out unmistakably; just inside the entrance stands Stalin, flanked by the Sigurimi’s infamous black car—a Soviet ZIS, now a collector’s antique. Do they still use it, one wonders, to fetch elderly communists, ensuring they feel immediately at home?

However, the regime must have learned something from the methods of the opposition. To justify the statues’ presence, the regime now claims they are merely an art installation. It is a curious argument in an age when art is increasingly defined by interactivity, when a work becomes complete only through the viewer’s eye. Hidden in a villa garden, guarded from public view, these statues fulfill instead a medieval definition of art—visible only to God.

But I am not sure I wish to see the brave new world, already in the making, in which this installation will return to full public view again.