The Political Abuse of Military History in Albania During Communism

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is to analyse the abuse of military history for political purposes during the communist era in Albania. As a sub-discipline of general history, military history has always been one of the most essential subjects in military education. To support this hypothesis, there were used documents from the Central Archive of the Armed Forces ** of Albania and Military History Department which testify to the most important developements regarding the national and international military history. The method applied in this paper is the comparative approach highlighting the ideological context. Deliberate distortion was an effective strategy to indoctrinate young officers with Marxist ideology and national communism. In addition, by analysing some of the military art texts used in the Military Academy of Albania before the 90s, it turns out that a large number of them were presented in a one-sided manner. The phenomenon was common to the military events that took place in Albania, especially during the Second World War, including the occurrences in the Western camp. Hence, the analysis focuses on facts that enable any military historian to comprehend this delicate subject matter, concerning its impact on the army and society, as a whole. To summarize, a partial military history can serve an authoritarian regime to propagate their version of history rather than the truth. One such example is the military history written in Albania during the communist period, which is the case study of this paper.