On November 17, 1944, the day that official Albanian history recognizes as the liberation of Tirana, a completely different reality was being written behind the scenes of the new government. While the city was filled with flags and celebrations, Enver Hoxha sent Dali Ndreu, one of his most trusted commanders, two letters that today read as the founding acts of the communist regime.
In the first letter, Hoxha ordered that cities prepare for the celebrations of November 28: to clean the streets, to erase the traces of bombings, to create the impression of a new and peaceful normality. But immediately after the demands for decoration, he added that society also had to be “purged” of dangerous elements, traitors and opponents.
For Enver, the beautification of the city and the filtering of the population were part of the same political picture. In the second letter, sent on the same day and also to Dali Ndreu, the tone becomes more severe. It orders the organization of prisons and concentration camps, where the Ballists, Zogists, political opponents, and basically anyone the new regime considered undesirable were to be placed.
Ndreu was not simply the recipient of these orders; he was the direct implementer, the man who was to turn the first structures of punishment and control into reality. The most cynical detail of these documents is Hoxha's instruction that violence be used "in moderation," not for moral reasons, but so as not to create unrest among the population.
It had to be struck, but without spoiling the festive image of the first days of power. Thus, on the same day that Tirana celebrated its liberation, the first lists of internments were drawn up in the offices of the partisan command, while the city was asked to dress in the colors of the holiday.
The documents of November 17 show that communist power did not come as a celebration after the war, but as an organized control structure that began that very day, where celebration and fear were written in the same hand and within the same order.
