A childhood in Stalinist Albania
On a bookshelf in our front room there’s a picture of my partner and me, half-empty glasses raised in the air. It is New Year’s Eve, 1989, and we are drinking to celebrate the death of Stalinism across much of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall had just come down and the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had just been put against a wall and shot, during a brief civil war as Romanian Stalinism crashed. The bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were liberations, for sure. The new freedom meant elections, new political parties, the ability to form free trade unions and an end to...