They were an inherent part of the fears well known to the Albanians: over the centuries, Albania had been invaded and occupied by the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Bulgarians, the Venetians, the Turks, the Italians, the Austrians, the Germans, the Serbians, and finally the modern Greeks.
“Hoxha appealed to a sensitive spot for Albanians,” says Izhara. “The bunkers were built for us, rather than for foreigners—to frighten us and to instill discipline. To rule us more easily. Nowadays it might seem absurd, but people of my parents’ age—now around seventy—truly believed the whole world wanted to invade us.”
“The propaganda worked the way it now does in North Korea; they persuaded us that the first thing the Americans, Russians, or Greeks thought about on waking up each day was how to conquer Albania,” adds Elton Caushi. “We were completely cut off from information; my uncle went to prison for twenty years because he watched a movie on Yugoslav TV and told a friend about it, who informed on him. The majority preferred not to take the risk. They listened to Radio Tirana and tried not to stick their necks out.”
And so for years on end the Albanian government built fortifications rather than roads or apartments. Up to twelve people lived together in areas of five hundred square feet, because all the engineers were working for the army, and all the concrete went to build bunkers, which were never actually used for military purposes.
So what were they used for?
“We most often use them to lose our virtue,” jokes Izhara. “I never had the experience, but I’ve heard lots of stories. Not long ago on holiday in Sarandë, a friend of mine had an adventure in a bunker with a girl he met at a disco. What was it like? He said it was awful. He got frozen to the marrow, and he ended up stepping on a turd.”
3.
Hoxha died in 1985. A month before his death, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and the winds of change began to blow in all the Communist countries—except for Albania. Here, in 1990, Hoxha’s successor Ramiz Alia was still using the propaganda machine to persuade Albanians that life in Poland following the change to a capitalist system had considerably worsened.
But by then the Albanians knew their stuff. The system began to founder more and more, until in 1992 Alia handed over power to Sali Berisha, former head of the party organization at the medical academy in Tirana, who had a better sense than any of the other apparatchiks about which way the winds of history were blowing. Berisha became president, and later served as prime minister for eight years, until 2013.
But for years on end, neither he nor anyone else in power touched Hoxha’s bunkers. “No one had any idea what to do with them. So it was—until 1999, when the Serbs started to bombard Kosovo,” says Caushi. “In the process Albania was hit too, and so were the bunkers. And suddenly it turned out that these structures, which were supposed to survive an atom bomb, had just fallen apart as if they were made of clay! For lots of people, it was a shock. Suddenly, they could see that the power of Communism was a matrix, a delusion, not the truth.”
At that point a second civilian life began for the bunkers. People lost respect for them. In the countryside the Albanian farmers started keeping cows, goats, and pigs in them; in the cities, until recently, they served as cold stores. Now that Albania has grown rich, almost everyone has a refrigerator at home, so people have started throwing trash into the bunkers.
It’s different in the capital. Blokku is a district of Tirana that in Communist times was completely closed off and guarded. This is where the bigwigs lived—Enver Hoxha, his ministers and comrades. Every building had a concrete shelter in the basement.
“These days, Blokku is the biggest rave in Tirana,” jokes Kamelja, a law student. “There are several really great bars and discos in the old shelters. For people of my age, twenty-year-olds, these places have a completely different meaning than they had for our parents.”
Right next to Enver Hoxha’s abandoned villa, there is a trendy café and an elite English-language school. Opposite, there is a gambling arcade.
Members of the generation that only knows the bunkers as strangely shaped concrete mushrooms have been developing new uses for them. Elian Stefa, an Albanian architect of the younger generation, did his diploma project on them. “As we have to live with them, let’s think up some new uses for them,” he says. In his project he drew bunkers made into minihotels, and even cellars for cooling wine. “I’d be happiest of all if someone opened a hostel in a bunker,” he says. “We did a visualization of what such a place could look like. Everyone likes it, but there’s no one brave enough to be the first to do it.”
Elton Caushi knows very well what they’re talking about: “My tourists would pay anything to stay the night in something like that.”
4.
In downtown Tirana there’s a different bunker: it’s a great big pyramid, built just after Hoxha died. It was meant to be both his tomb and a place of pilgrimage for schools, the military, and workers.
Today the pyramid is empty, covered in feeble graffiti. The bravest of the local skateboarders ride down its steep walls. “I pass it every day on my way to work,” says Gjergj Ndrecën, a political prisoner in the Communist era who was locked up by Hoxha’s regime for seven years for “enemy propaganda.” “I just distributed a few antigovernment leaflets,” says Ndrecën, who now works for a foundation that helps former political prisoners who are in a difficult financial situation. “I would have been inside for far longer if Communism hadn’t collapsed. That’s why every time I pass this monstrosity my blood boils. No one has ever answered for the hell they made us live in.”
It’s a fact. The Communists, who killed some fifty thousand people in Albania and set up reeducation camps for thousands more, have never been brought to task. Ramiz Alia died in 2011, at the age of eighty-six. A few of them did serve time in prison, but the sentences were only for abuse of power and financial fiddling, not for the crimes of the system. Toward the end of his life, the former dictator gave an interview to the BBC in which he admitted that not all the death sentences in the Communist era were justified. He said he regretted that.
The situation is different for Nexhmije Hoxha, the dictator’s wife. In 2012, at age ninety-two, she appeared on a show that is extremely popular in Albania, presented by Janusz Bugajski, an American political scientist with Polish roots. During the ninety-minute conversation, she refused to show the slightest remorse. “I don’t regret anything,” she said. “Our country was very poor. It had lots of enemies. All those actions were necessary.”
“So what should be done with the pyramid?” I ask Ndrecën.
“The same as they’re doing with the bunkers! Pack it with fertilizer and tires, and set it on fire. Blowing up the bunkers is the start of our mental release from Communism. As long as we go on living in the world invented by the Communists, the spirit of Hoxha will continue to prevail here.”
Will it happen? “Sure it will, as long as the price of steel stays high,” says Ndrecën bitterly. “Especially since the army has started blowing them up, as well as civilians.”
5.
While Djoni, the construction worker from Berat, is destroying bunkers using his own makeshift methods, the army is doing it in a much more methodical way. “They have special pneumatic drills,” says Djoni, almost whistling in admiration. “Apart from that, they’re allowed to fire at them from tanks and mortars. They can do as many as ten bunkers a day. That’s three thousand euros! I wonder what they do with the money?” he muses.
I tried to find out all about it at the Albanian Ministry of Defense, but my questions ran aground somewhere between departments. More facts were established by some Albanian journalists who found tanks destroying half-submerged bunkers at an Albanian tourist resort in the Seman district.
“We have to do it because they’re causing whirlpools and people are being drowned,” said one of the officers in charge of the operation, anonymously. “T
ourists are very important for our country now.”
The demolition of the bunkers proved complicated, and the army had to get help from some private construction firms. Besnik Lasku, the owner of one of them, turned out to have served in the army as a young man, and had built the bunkers.
“It brings a tear to my eye,” admitted Lasku. “The bunkers are a part of my life. I never imagined that one day they’d disappear. And it feels odd to me that we’re blowing them up for the sake of capitalists who are going to build expensive hotels and restaurants in their place.”
V. Instincts
We sit in our observatory and watch how they behave, and we work it out—how much aggression we can allow them, whether they’ve already crossed the boundary, or whether we can still give them a while to cool down.
Estonia: Tea with the Invader
“Hi there, my friend. Maybe you could get hold of some TNT? There are plenty of mines in your city. We strike like the IRA—a station or an airport. Write to my personal address. Grigori.”
Sixteen-year-old Sasha received this message via Skype just after the riots in Tallinn. When he looked up the IRA on Wikipedia, he really liked what he read. “Yo, Grisha—I’ll try to help,” he wrote back, and ran off to see his miner pals.
The Bronze Soldier and being pro-Moscow
Toward the end of April 2007, the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a memorial that symbolizes the Red Army’s victory over fascism, was moved from the city center to the outskirts.
Estonia’s Russian citizens took this as a slap in the face. In Tallinn the situation exploded. Hundreds of windows were broken and blood was shed. A young Russian was killed, and several dozen people were wounded. Thousands of hooligans, both Russian and Estonian, wrecked and looted the stores. Photos of sixteen-year-olds pillaging a Hugo Boss store went around the world.
A few days later I met up with my friend Jaan. “Goddamned Russkies,” he fumed. He has spent half his life in Poland, but he always shows a lively concern for everything that’s going on in his native Estonia. “Freaking fifth column! Traitors! Invaders!”
“Invaders?”
“Yes! Half of them came with the Soviet army. To keep an eye on us. So Estonia wouldn’t rebel.”
“Traitors?”
“They’re all just waiting for the USSR to return.”
“Fifth column?”
“They’re plotting to join us up with Russia. Our government should send them all off to Moscow. Estonia should be Estonian.”
I looked into the facts. One in three Estonian citizens is a native speaker of Russian. One in six doesn’t even have Estonian citizenship. Nevertheless, Estonia is doing well, has joined the European Union, and is an economic tiger among the former Soviet republics.
“What sort of fifth column allows a country to develop like that?” I asked Jaan.
“Go and have a cup of tea from the samovar with them. You’ll see for yourself how much they hate us,” he replied, and broke off the conversation.
The invader and the cabbage in Kabul
While Sasha was looking for TNT, Yelena Yedomsky was given a garden plant by the Estonians she had befriended. To show their sympathy. “And we were afraid they’d stop talking to us,” she told her husband.
Yelena is a therapist. Viktor is an invader. They live in a small village outside Tartu, the cultural and intellectual capital of Estonia.
The Yedomskys’ neighbors are all Estonians. But they get on very well together. We’re having a cup of tea, and wondering whether the Bronze Soldier might change anything here.
“The Estonians are remarkable,” says Yelena with admiration. “Until 1918, they’d never had independence. They’ve been ruled by the Germans, the Russians, the Swedes, the Danes, and the Poles. Similar nations have died out unnoticed. Especially as they never particularly fought for independence. They just held Estonian song festivals. That was the extent of their fight.”
Ever since Estonia achieved independence, Yelena and Viktor have had nothing but problems. To start with, they couldn’t get citizenship. The only people with a right to an Estonian passport were citizens or the children of citizens of the First Republic, which existed from 1918 to 1940. Yelena and Viktor have lived in Estonia for almost all their lives. And yet the authorities wanted to send them off to Russia.
Says Viktor: “I might even have gone, but I have no one there. My daughters are married to Estonians. And then suddenly I find out I’m an invader.”
Why is that? Because Viktor was originally sent to Estonia by Soviet air force general staff—he was a pilot.
“I flew all over the world—to China, beyond the North Pole. I was in Afghanistan. I got a ringside view of so much horror there that straight after the Afghan war I threw away my Communist Party membership card. Apparently, they spent three hours debating whether in that case they could award me a medal for valor. They did.”
Viktor wears the medal on the right side of his navy-blue air force officer’s uniform.
“There were Estonians serving with me. We all talked in Russian—they had only a poor command of Estonian. And suddenly in 1991 it turned out they were citizens here, and I was an invader.”
“I was given an Estonian passport,” says Yelena. “I stood as a candidate in the elections for the city council. It has at least been possible to stop them from deporting people like Viktor.”
Nowadays Viktor has Russian citizenship with a three-year right to remain on Estonian territory. “We’re afraid that because of all the unrest they’ll tighten up the policy toward ‘invaders,’” says Yelena. “But no way are we the fifth column! We’re much better off here than we would be in Russia.”
“When I went to the bazaar in Kabul with my air force pals,” says Viktor, “one of the stallholders said to us in Russian, ‘Good cabbage, very shitty!’ Someone had taught him to prattle that nonsense. It’s the same thing with the Russian youth. Someone has told them they have to defend the Bronze Soldier. So that’s what they’re doing.”
The teacher and the Russian policemen
Everyone advised us against making a trip to Narva. Mafiosi, hired assassins, polluted air, and exploding cars. And crowds of Russians too—more than 60 percent of the population there are Russian. Some of them haven’t cooled down yet since the events in Tallinn.
Even Yelena and Viktor said it was better not to go.
Day in, day out, an Estonian called Aet Kiisla had heard the same thing. Nevertheless, she accepted a job as a teacher at a college in Narva, right on the Russian border.
Before the war, the city was a jewel. Beautiful baroque houses descended down to the river’s edge. The golden years were over by the end of the Second World War. Nowadays Narva is just gray high-rise blocks, with plenty of stray dogs and flocks of seagulls. In the middle of the city there’s a neglected park and a “friendship bridge” clogged by a line of container trucks and a crowd of cross-border traders (known in Polish as “ants”). On the other side of the river lies the Russian city of Ivangorod.
In Narva you hear nothing but Russian—97 percent of the people are Russian. According to research, more than 60 percent of them can’t speak a single word of Estonian.
Aet teaches at a college that trains other teachers for Russian-language schools. “We mainly teach in Russian. But we make it clear: ‘If you want to work in this country, you have to know Estonian.’ Though in a place like Narva, you can’t overdo it.”
“Meaning?”
“The state television is only in Estonian. That was meant to mobilize the Russians to learn it. But they watch nothing except the Russian channels. Moscow takes advantage of that and stirs things up. It persuades them that Estonia is treating them badly. And we can’t offer any counterbalance. The Russians were antagonized by the Bronze Soldier because there was no way to explain it to them from our perspective.”
A few years ago a langua
ge inspectorate was set up in Estonia. “About fifteen professions were selected that could only be practiced with knowledge of Estonian,” says Aet. “If you don’t know Estonian, you can’t be a doctor, a cab driver, or a salesperson—at least not in a state-owned store. You can’t work in the state administration or at a school.”
If the inspectorate catches a person who doesn’t know Estonian, it issues a fine and a warning. The second time the fine is higher. The third time the culprit loses the right to practice the profession.
According to Mikhail Bogrym from Kohtla-Järve: “My wife is a teacher. We’ve spent a fortune on Estonian courses. They’ve fired doctors, including eminent specialists, because they didn’t know Estonian well enough. But that’s discrimination!”
However, so far nobody has had the courage to inspect Narva. As Aet says: “It’s even impossible to buy milk in Estonian. Sometimes it really annoys me. Why do we fight so hard for our language? Because there are only a million of us. Though I do sometimes take advantage of the fact that I live in Narva.”
“How?”
“I tend to break the speed limit. In Estonia the speeding fines are high. But whenever a policeman catches me, I talk very fast in Estonian. In Narva nobody knows it fluently. So I put on a grand show of indignation. I’ve never yet paid a fine here.”
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