Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

it emerged that these pyramid schemes were unable to keep up with their promised high-interest payments. They all became insolvent. More than half of the population, including my family, lost almost all their savings. People accused the government of colluding with the owners of the companies and took to the streets to demand their money back. The protests, which started in the south, with its strong traditional base of left-wing support, soon extended to the rest of the country. Looting, civilian assaults on military garrisons, and an unprecedented wave of emigration followed. More than two thousand people lost their lives. These events are recorded in the history books as the Albanian Civil War. For us, it is enough to mention the year: 1997.

All the men on our street were walking up the hill carrying weapons: some people had Kalashnikovs, some pistols, some were carrying barrel bombs. I saw our neighbour Ismail, he’s so old, he walks with a stick. He was struggling to drag a big metallic thing on a wooden wheelbarrow. He said it was a medium-range RS-82 rocket. It made a scraping sound. People complimented him: Ismail, that looks great, have you got the launch pad too. He said he didn’t have it, but maybe someone else would find it. You never know when you need a rocket, he said.

June 1997,

Soon there would be new elections. There would also be a referendum to decide whether the country should remain a republic or restore the monarchy. Descendants of the king, that same King Zog whose ruling powers were briefly transferred to my great-grandfather as the country became a Fascist protectorate, returned to try their hand at managing the country’s collapse. Having fled Albania carrying gold from the national bank in 1939, they bought an advertising slot on television to campaign in favour of voting for the monarchy. Every evening, a split screen showed images of Albania in flames alongside photos of landmarks in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Written in blue under the photos was: “Norway: Constitutional Monarchy”; “Denmark: Constitutional Monarchy”; “Sweden: Constitutional Monarchy.”

I accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the Albanian Civil War could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by the long-standing animosities between different ethnic groups, the Ghegs in the north and the Tosks in the south. I accepted it despite its absurdity, despite the fact that I didn’t know what I counted as, whether both or neither. I accepted it although my mother was a Gheg and my father a Tosk, and throughout their married life only their political and class divisions had ever mattered, never the accents with which they spoke.

It was like being back in 1990. There was the same chaos, the same sense of uncertainty, the same collapse of the state, the same economic disaster. But with one difference. In 1990, we had nothing but hope. In 1997, we lost that too. The future looked bleak.

That night, we made a pact. They promised to let me study philosophy, and I promised to stay away from Marx.

My father let me go. I left Albania and crossed the Adriatic. I waved goodbye to my father and my grandmother on the shore and travelled to Italy on a boat that sailed over thousands of drowned bodies, bodies that had once carried souls more hopeful than mine but who met fates less fortunate. I never returned.

Socialism, I tell them, is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.

my new university friends. Many of those friends were self-declared Socialists—Western Socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this respect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration were the ones that had been murdered. These icons showed up on posters, T-shirts, and coffee cups, much like how photos of Enver Hoxha would show up in people’s living rooms when I was growing up. When I pointed this out, my friends wanted to know more about my country. But they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of Socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation.

“What you had was not really socialism,” they would say, barely concealing their irritation.

The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba—there was nothing Socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends’ socialism was clear, bright, and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody, and of the past.

the future they sought, one that Socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But, to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by the failure of these ideas to be realized.

if there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, “What you had was not the real thing,” applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize, and learn.