Title: 21 vjet burg komunist, 1961-1982
First published: 2001
Description: Uran Kalakulla spent twenty-one years in the terrible gulags of Stalinist Albania, fourteen of them in the infamous prison of Burrel. He was released in 1982, but was again arrested in 1983 and was sent to internal exile until 1988. During the whole period his family was severely persecuted. 
 The following pages are an extract from the book “My twenty one years of communist prison,” which he published shortly before passing away on May 2001.  
In 1960 Albania was in every sense a hopeless country. Those were the years of the break-up with the so-called Socialist camp while with the West the Albanian Communists had severed their ties since 1946. At that time it was generally assumed that by having an interesting geopolitical position for the two opposing blocks, Albania would inevitably end up by falling under the influence of one of the superpowers. This was also the way we thought and in this context we foresaw ahead of us two basic alternatives:
The first alternative involved a intervention from the Soviet Union in Albania. This was not a remote possibility due to the fact that the country was still a formal Warsaw pact member. In that case, the so-called “liberal revisionism” course would be adopted; a Communist mono-party system that would leave at least a possibility to “breathe”. The dictator with his close collaborators would be removed from power. According to Soviet practices, he would surely end up somewhere in Siberia or in prison.  It would have been then quite possible to gradually start some forms of political dissent through literature and cultural movements, with the purpose of widening them to activities and practices like those of the “Prague spring” or “Solidarnost”, which occurred years later in Czechoslovakia and Poland. 
The second alternative envisaged some sort of Western (mainly American) intervention. During the first decade of Communist rule in Albania there were some British and American sponsored efforts to topple the regime, thus the assumption that these efforts would continue seemed at that time realistic. If this would be the case, surely Democracy would follow. Political parties would appear and grow like mushrooms, as in fact happened decades later. At that time nobody ever assumed that Hoxha and its clique would find an extremely precious ally in Mao Tse Tung’s China.  Again, like in the case of the relations with Tito, destiny was benevolent to Hoxha and he exploited to its utmost on this occasion. Undoubtedly this was a merit that should go to his credit. Perhaps he knew or he sensed that neither the Soviet Union nor the West would intervene in Albania, in full materialization of a political philosophy that can be shortly summarized by the notion of no man's land.
Subjects: Politics and government, Political prisoners, Biography, Political persecution, Albanian Authors
Places: Albania
People: Uran Kalakulla (1929-)
Time periods: 1944-1990
LC classification: DR977.25.K35 A3 2001