Originally Posted by Balkan Insight.
Today's youth could learn from the student uprising that challenged the communist regime 20 years ago.
The collapse of communism in Albania was by no means a revolution. But some revolutionary moments took place, and this week marks the 20th anniversary of one such dramatic event.
On December 8, 1990, a group of students at Enver Hoxha University in Tirana - named after the communist dictator - decided they had endured enough. More than one year had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall but Albania's communist party still ruled supreme. Hoxha's successor had craftily avoided real reform, aided by Albania's extreme isolation and the long arm of fear. After decades of prisons, forced labor camps and executions for mild criticism, few Albanians stood ready to confront the regime. Unlike Poland, Czechoslovakia and even Russia, of dissidents there were none.
So, the students decided to act. A few had developed vague political ideas with young professors, whispering about democracy, but many dreamed of materialistic gains long forbidden by Eastern Europe's most rigid and Stalinist state: Beatles music, blue jeans and the joys of life as seen on Italian TV.
On December 8, the lights on the university campus went out, as they did many nights, and a small group gathered to protest. The students worried the regime. Unlike the intellectuals and professional class with ties to the party, the younger generation could be less controlled. The protest spread, culminating on December 11 in the legalization of political pluralism. The first opposition party was created the next day, controlled by Tirana elites, and it assumed power through democratic elections 14 months after that. A key figure in the communist leadership at the time called the process a "transfer of influence."
Twenty years later, the students' brief revolt seems a distant memory. None of the key figures from that time plays a role in Albania's public life: most are abroad or in business; one served time in prison and another was murdered. The campus of the renamed Tirana University has no spirit of dissent today. Students pay for good grades.
Albania has a plethora of private academic institutions today, such as universities named "Epoka", "Kristal" and the "University of New York Tirana". Students are no longer taught what the ruling party wants them to think and say. But like so much in Albania, these universities are about business, pumping out degrees in architecture, engineering and law. Their uncritical orientation is towards the country's current patron, the United States, just as Albanians during communism looked to the Soviet Union and then China.
Maybe it is a healthy sign that people are making decisions based on their perceived self-interest; a revolutionary spirit can be a sign of deep-seated ills. Indeed, Albania has opened radically over the last 20 years. It is no longer a land with sealed borders where prison terms face those who paint unacceptable art, practice religion or question the idea of a Socialist paradise.
But a middle ground surely exists, where young people also ponder how to make their country a better place: how to protect the environment, how to fight corruption, how to build a system where independent institutions replace the monolithic column that for decades dominated national life.
Instead, the defeat of hard-line communism has led to an allergic rejection of all things communal; democracy means the right to do as one wants. The students do not need to confront the police or stage another hunger strike. But a waft of revolutionary spirit would invigorate and improve the frantically pluralistic and wildly individualistic scene that the students helped create two decades ago.
Fred Abrahams' book on the fall of communism in Albania will be published next year by New York University Press.