Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth. Albania was Europe's last outpost of communism; nearly impossible to visit, and even more difficult to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, and of political executions and secret police. But to Lea, it was home.
Her new book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History is a memoir about growing up in the last days of the last Stalinist outpost.
Ypi is now a professor of politic theory at the London School of Economics and an adjunct associate professor in philosophy at the Australian National University
Photo: Supplied / Stuart Simpson
She tells Nine to Noon the book wasn’t the one she was intending to write.
“The book I was planning to write was going to be a philosophical book about ideas and freedom in the liberal and socialist traditions. I wanted to write about what these traditions had in common, but I also wanted to write about their flaws when they became realised and institutionalised.
“As I began to work on this project, which started as a philosophical project but then turned into more and more empirical, historically informed, politically informed book, I kept thinking about examples from my own life and my own country, Albania. It so happened that I had lived my first 18 years of life half in a communist system and half in a liberal system.
“The book then turned out to be a meditation on freedom as lived through the characters, the people, the stories that I had lived through.”
She describes communist Albania as being a very politicised society with moral education classes in schools.
“I was 10 or 11 when the regime fell but, before that, everything had seemed normal. Albania was very isolated. We had broken our alliance with Yugoslavia in the 1940s, then with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, then with China. By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, we were completely isolated.
“The state rhetoric was that this was the only country in the world that was still promoting the pure ideals of socialism and that every other socialist country in the world had problems, but Albania was still resisting and holding on to these ideals.”
The Albania slogan, she says, was that they were the lighthouse of the anti-imperialist struggles around the world.
“I grew up convinced of this.”
In reality, living in Albania meant queues, scarcity, and struggle.
“We grew up idealising lots of things that came from the west that we didn’t have access to, but it just seemed normal. This was my normal, this was my life and I didn’t think there were any problems until that point at which the system collapsed overnight.”
She says that people would find Coca Cola cans in bins from tourist areas and use them as objects to adorn homes.
“My mother and a neighbour with whom we were very close fell out at one point because of a Coca Cola can that my mother had bought from a colleague at work. It disappeared from our television and reappeared on the neighbour’s television. This caused a fight in the neighbourhood and a falling out between these neighbours whom we otherwise trusted.
“These were markers of social status in a way, people didn’t have them so, if you happened to have one, you would expose it and show it and it would somehow show your connection to the west via this object.”
Growing up, Ypi idolised Joseph Stalin as the man who’d brought communism to the world, defeated the Nazis and fought the anti-imperialist struggle. The Albanian leader Enver Hoxha refused to join Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev when he began to de-Stalinise the Soviet Union.
“Hoxha was seen to be in continuity to Stalin. That’s why these were my two favourite uncles in a way. Stalin was the one who initiated communism and Hoxha was the only one in the world that was still carrying forward the legacy of Stalin in 1990 when the Berlin Wall had already fallen, and socialism had fallen. In Albania, it happened about a year and a bit later.”
Ypi said she fully believed in the Albania state and its goals and thought her family did too, it wasn’t until later she found out the had they opposite opinion.
“I never knew this until the system collapsed, I came from a dissident family. My great grandfather had been the Prime Minister of Albania shortly before Fascists occupied the country. He had been pivotal in transferring sovereignty from Albania to Italy – he was a kind of collaborator.
“My parents, because of the weight of your background and the treatment in society, never told me about any of this. I grew up thinking there was a former prime minister who was a Fascist who I’d learned to despise from history books and school lessons.”
She was told that her father having the same name and surname as the former prime minister was just a coincidence.
“This was, for me, shocking news because I had always assumed that, like me, my parents were also completely convinced of the rightness of the system in which we lived and that this was a free society that stood for something. It turned out they didn’t believe in any of the tropes I believed in, they had just been lying to me to protect me from a truth that they knew I would eventually discover.”
In retrospect, there were some hints that things weren’t completely right in her childhood.
“For example, my grandmother spoke French to me when I was little. It was my first language and I didn’t really understand why my grandmother spoke French because we weren’t French, she’d never been to France, we didn’t have any relatives in France.
“From very early on, there was this identity marker where I was spoken French to in front of other children and I always felt a bit uncomfortable and didn’t understand why they did this.”
She later learned that French was the lingua franca of the aristocracy and her grandmother had been a wealthy and high-status woman before communism came to Albania.
There were also times when her family spoke to one another that she didn’t quite understand what they were talking about, such as family members being away to do research at different universities. She learned later that it had been a code language to talk about the fate of relatives who’d been to prison.
“When my family spoke of relatives who’d been doing research at university, what they meant was that they had served a prison sentence. My grandfather’s 15 years of research was his 15-year prison sentence of punishment in prison.”
She says it was a big shock to her to discover that her family had, in essence, been enemies of the state she had been taught to love and that they’d all been living in an open air prison.
“It was very hard to come to terms with that. Eventually I settled on my parents’ narrative because they had always protected me. I trusted them, we had a good relationship… but it was very difficult, very confusing.”
