In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  The recent nature of Albania’s Cold War period permits the use of first- and second-hand memories, which may provide hitherto undocumented aspects of daily life under communism. One of the strengths of an archaeological approach towards memory in the field of modern conflict lies within its ability to renegotiate the status of sites and objects of memory (Moshenska 2010, 36). Albania’s MSBs are currently at the juncture of having existed within post-communist Albania for as long as they were endured under a communist leadership. Almost 50 years have passed since their conception as a means of defence, and it has been 25 years since the fall of the communist leadership. This chapter is therefore positioned at a balanced temporal stage of their life histories, and these will be demonstrated through object materialities and narratives found in and around Ksamil.

  A DEFENCE DICTATED

  Ksamil is located on a linear hilly peninsular in the Sarandë District, roughly 10 km from the land border with mainland Greece further to the south. It is bounded internally by Lake Butrint on the east and on the external west by the Ionian Sea, in very close proximity to the Greek Island of Corfu. Prior to communism, the area was sparsely populated with occasional farmsteads and 1930s Italianate villas constructed during Albania’s close relationship with Italy. Once the communist leadership was established, the Ksamil peninsular became a strictly controlled militarized border zone with a hilltop army base used to monitor shipping traffic passing through the Straits of Corfu. From 1966 the township of Ksamil was established to house workers for the new Sarandë State Fruit Farm, which specialized in cultivating citrus fruits and olives (Bland 1981, 50). The peninsular hillsides were terraced for production by volunteer workers, and a new irrigation system was installed to channel fresh water from Lake Butrint. The early settlement of Ksamil comprised a few low-rise housing blocks, a school and state shops adjacent to a coastal bay containing four small islands.

  Mushroom-shaped bunkers were installed in the Ksamil region from 1968 when Hoxha launched his vision of numerous small personnel bunkers as a means of national defence. Early forms were built in the hills surrounding the Ksamil army base and along the coastline, connected by deep stone-revetted trenches with additional semi-circular forward-firing positions. These initial, almost bespoke-style, bunkers were assembled in situ using prefabricated steel and small concrete elements, patched with stone and capped off with a liberal dose of poured concrete (see Figure 9.1). This defensive concept was initiated partly as a response to the 1968 Soviet-instigated invasion of Czechoslovakia by a number of Warsaw Pact countries. Despite Albania’s status as a communist country, it did not function under the exclusive rule of the Soviet Bloc. Hoxha preferred more flexible, ideologically tied relations with larger protectorate partners, rather than being subject to the hegemony of another, and would shift alliance whenever Albania’s position was threatened. Consequently, it was for reasons of paranoia that relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia were severed in 1948, and the subsequent partnership with Stalin’s USSR deteriorated after the Soviet leader died. Following the 1960 Sino-Soviet split, Hoxha denounced the Moscow Khrushchevites as revisionists and formed a new association with Mao Zedong’s China.

  Figure 9.1. Early Mushroom-Shaped Bunker Positioned Overlooking the Sea Border with Corfu (2010, Emily Glass).

  Partnerships were crucial for Albania as they provided much-needed financial and material aid for socio-economic and military development. They also facilitated the goals of Hoxha and the leadership to retain power, attain economic self-sufficiency and create a new Marxist-Leninist value system. However, each alliance was consecutively less attuned to the economic needs of Albania, while enabling Hoxha’s Stalinist ideological credentials to become more extreme (Glenny 2000, 569). In 1967, Hoxha embraced the Chinese Cultural Revolution and eliminated all military ranks as ‘important revolutionary measures, designed to place proletarian politics above all other things’ (Prifti 1978, 207). The Chinese school of military thought was adopted, and provision was made for the development of an armed civilian population to defend the homeland. This became a vital part of Albanian identity under communism with educational initiatives promoted to forge links between the population and the armed forces. This was a necessary direction as the financial, technological and ideological backing of China could not extend to military support in the event of any invasion. Following the offensive on Czechoslovakia, Hoxha believed Albania would be the next target for conflict and formally withdrew Albania from the Warsaw Pact.

  Provisions were made to prepare Albania for attack by improving internal security and strengthening ties with China. Hoxha now perceived that the Cold War threat towards Albania would come from both the ‘imperialist’ West and ‘revisionist’ countries within the Communist Bloc.

  Relations with China inevitably shifted into decline, until Hoxha’s 1978 announcement that Albania’s future would be forged through a self-reliant path that necessitated ever more vigilance. Specifically, this meant an increase in MSBs which were catered for by a factory design change that manufactured larger, but fewer, prefabricated concrete elements that would fit together when the bunker was set in position. The new production technique’s strict technical specifications mixed a very fine grade concrete with a high quantity of steel reinforcements to produce a very robust object (Glass 2015, 147–148). For Ksamil, this national bunker-building drive meant a significant increase in new model MSBs, which were installed along the town’s coastline in units of three, joined by a short concrete tunnel at the rear that linked into a trench that ran between bunker sets (Glass 2008, 35). My field investigations inside some of Ksamil’s coastal bunker sets revealed installation dates scored into the render of the rear tunnel which date between September 1977 and February 1978, the very period during which Albania was moving towards isolation. Ksamil’s coastal front-line MSBs were installed very close to the tide-line, meaning their windows looked straight out across the water but had been sited so as to cover the widest viewshed possible. Communication trenches fed away from these coastal bunkers towards second and third rows of retreating bunkers, serving both as an outward appearance of military competence and an internal reminder of the threat from abroad.

  Nationally, all aspects of MSB production and installation were strictly controlled with ever-increasing manufacturing quotas set by the regime. Prefabricated elements for Ksamil’s defensive architecture were produced at regional factories in the districts of Sarandë and Gjirokastra. Interviews undertaken with former workers at the Gjirokastra concrete construction enterprise revealed that they were not allowed to discuss any aspect of bunker production and did not mix with the soldiers who collected and distributed the bunker parts (Glass 2015, 148). This divide-and-conquer attitude to the MSB programme was also in evidence at the Sarandë factory, where different elements were produced by separate work shifts so that the exact constructional requirements would remain a mystery to workers (Robert Hackman pers. comm.). Bunker transportation, construction and installation was undertaken by army and national service conscripts. Landi Haxhi was 18 when he was assigned the role of bunker installer in the areas of Gjirokastra and Sarandë and described it as the hardest work to undertake during military service. From 1981 he worked continuously for two years doing 12-hour shifts and recalled it as so tiring that he could barely eat. During this time, Hoxha intensified the unremitting bunker programme while continuing to stoke fear of foreign armies plotting against Albania’s Workers Paradise. After a pressurized directive from Hoxha that they needed to work faster, Landi and his fellow soldiers slept in the bunkers they had just installed rather than go back down to base. The awkward and difficult nature of this job meant that it was a dangerous undertaking where people would get hurt, break bones and occasionally die. Indeed, Landi remembered one occasion when the truck crane was not strong enough to hold the weight of the bunker parts and three men were crushed when a cap fell on them. When asked if during his time installing the bunkers he had thought that an invasion threat
from abroad was real, he replied:

  We didn’t know really what was going on outside, as soldiers we used to sing this song, that ‘we dance in front of the mouth of the wolf, that we are so brave in front of the danger’, but we didn’t know whether there was a wolf there and whether she was really hungry and wanted to eat us. We just did what we were told to do. (Glass 2008, 32–33)

  My fieldwork inside some of Ksamil’s MSBs revealed explicit evidence of soldier use in the form of graffiti daubed or scratched onto internal walls. In 1985, soldier G. Myrataj from Fier wrote, ‘This will be unforgettable in my life’ (translated from Albanian), soldier L. Agolli from Qyteti Stalin (Stalin City, restored to its original name of Kuçovë in 1991) documented his dates of service as between 1986 and 1988, and at least two of the Ksamil bunkers were graffitied by the same soldier, Luan Domi from Tirana. Although personalizing the bunker in this way was common, it was also most likely forbidden under the Hoxha regime. However, the ability to express oneself and document a level of individuality within a collective communist society verifies the presence of the person. This graffiti has enabled the soldier-object relationship to be temporally sustained beyond the conventional military use of the bunkers and into the present. All bunkers were a taboo subject for Albanians to talk about as such defences were supposed to be a secret, particularly in terms of numbers. Anyone caught discussing bunkers would be in trouble with the government as they would be suspicious of the need to know such figures, and it would have been assumed that this information was to be passed onto foreign agencies (Ksamil bar owner, pers. comm.). This embargo on bunker-related information was reflected by the near-total absence of MSBs in Albanian communist propaganda, literature or industrial statistics. Bearing in mind the substantial level of national effort that was required, the very idea that the bunkerization of a whole country was a secret operation that could be kept under wraps during the Cold War is verging on the preposterous.

  The proliferation of bunkers across Albania served only to keep the population busy and distract people from their living conditions and lack of political pluralism. Ultimately Albania’s bunker strategy was based on paranoia and devoid of any military logic (Pandolfi 2002, 205). They were the Albanian equivalent of the Maginot Line, the name of which has become symbolic with a passive and inadequate defence policy, a construction likened to a giant ‘White Elephant’ (Kaufmann 1988). The military consumed enormous economic resources, and in 1975 Albania used a defence budget nearly twice that of Yugoslavia, more than double that of Greece and over four times that of Italy (Prifti 1978, 221). Johnson states: ‘Fear was probably the single most important characteristic of the Cold War’ (Johnson 2002, 227), which would partly account for Albania’s abnormally high expenditure on defence. The enormity of this financial commitment made it necessary for the state to offset costs by using free or cheap labour wherever possible for the bunker programme. To work for the party as an unpaid volunteer was classed as education and for a while was a compulsory element of schooling over the whole country under the ideological conviction that everybody and everything needed to be ready if Albania was to be protected. Joint works such as these linked schooling and the army at an early age to serve and perpetuate Albania’s nationalist agenda.

  The Albanian landscape was constructed, perceived, experienced and contextualized by a despot who used it as a material tool for party domination (Galaty et al. 1999, 198–199). The built environment in particular was created to suffocate the masses under a dictatorship set by Hoxha towards social engineering and his agenda of sustaining Albania’s illusory magnificence (Pojani 2015, 75). On a national level, the population involvement in the MSB programme enabled this jurisdiction to operate far beyond the realm of an exclusively military operation. As the army was unable to administer all bunkers, various duties were undertaken by villagers in any locale. Regular bunker maintenance was organized on a family-by-family basis by the local party secretary or ‘brigadier’ (De Lionis 1995, as quoted in Galaty et al. 1999, 203), which also obliged the state by directing extra eyes towards Albania’s borderlands. Thus communities all over the country were duty-bound to a hierarchal defence infrastructure which stemmed from regional to central government through the agency of MSBS (Galaty et al. 1999, 203). The extent to which the population was involved in defending Albania meant that Hoxha would remain unchallenged through national obligation and fear of invasion.

  In practice, MSBs were only ever used in training as the threatened imminent invasion never materialized. Galaty et al. (2009, 172) have suggested that the ‘rather peculiar’ behaviour exhibited by Albania during the Cold War is rooted in experiences of collective trauma stemming from millennia of repeated invasions, cultural and political domination and suffering. These layers of subjugation trauma were initiated by the sixth-century BC Greek colonization, followed by invasions and conquests by the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and continued with, among others, the Visigoths, Bulgarians, Normans, Angevins and the Venetians until the Ottomans expanded into Albania and settled until the early 20th century. The conflict and turmoil experienced within the first half of 20th-century Albania was traumatic enough for fears to have resided within living memory for many of the country’s Cold War inhabitants. In his study of Albania as China’s beachhead in Europe, Hamm stated that ‘nothing is more certain to arouse the emotions of the Albanian people than the suggestion that the country’s national existence is in danger’ (Hamm 1962, 154). Hoxha utilized the strength of this anxiety to direct the collective force of an entire population afraid of ‘history repeating itself’ towards ensuring the survival of Albanianism.

  COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

  For Albania, settling accounts with the past plays a large part in the reality of the present causing the country to remain entrenched in the politics of conflict. The scars of the Hoxha years and subsequent post-communist upheavals will take decades to heal.

  (Vickers 1999, 255)

  The 1991 dissolution of the Albanian Communist Party and of Enver Hoxha’s legacy shattered the self-image of many Albanians and left a vacuum with no unifying vision of the country or what it meant to be Albanian (Standish 2002, 123). Hoxha had persuaded Albanians that their country had the highest standard of living in Europe (Hamilton 1992, 11) and the realization of this falsehood led to the destruction of state property in a violent reaction to half a century of repression in a manic attempt to completely erase the past (Hall 1994, 168). Despite the reputation of MSBs for encapsulating the power and control of the regime they were too robust for this violent episode to have had any substantial impact. Instead, these material manifestations of communism were ignored and unofficially declassified by abandonment until 2011 when the Ministry of Defence officially removed them from their property inventory. After this, MSBs physically existed, but were not seen anymore in the landscape; they had become the landscape (Galaty et al. 2009, 204) and disappeared from perception. Despite this disregarding of the bunkers, they were still an active part of the landscape as a graphic object, comprehended to a degree as a natural environmental phenomenon particularly to those Albanians who grew up after the collapse.

  As a matter of convenience, Ksamil’s MSBs were eventually re-engaged as useful places to conduct aspects of daily life. Individual and triple bunker sets were appropriated, on what was once state land, for use as storage sheds, for pigs and chickens, to upend and paint boats on, for dumping and burning rubbish and to cook meat. These engagements were passive acts of practical reuse rather than through any determined attempt to connect in an affective manner with relics of the fallen regime. The fear, dominance and terror once associated with these structures gradually waned as time moved on, and it is likely that this reuse contributed towards a reduction in the psychological power of the bunker. All space is endowed with atmosphere according to activities and memories of what has occurred there, but as time separates us from past events our emotional engagement is reduced (Uzzell & Ballantyne 1998, 158). In the wake of c
ommunism, these opportune quotidian MSB reuses formed some of the first narratives of individuality within the cultural biographies of these omnipotent objects.

  The younger generation of Ksamil has been unconstrained by any direct involvement in Albania’s dictatorial past, although many would have experienced the upheaval of anarchy and near–civil war during the 1990s transition. Often, children’s experiences of conflict and trauma can paradoxically comprise a heightened sense of powerlessness fused with a measure of freedom that operates among the surrounding social and material chaos (Moshenska 2008, 113). With only the stories of parents and grandparents as their personalized link to communist life, Ksamil’s children have been at liberty to explore and engage with MSBs as liminal obsolescent remnants of a not-quite lost world. Games of hide and seek were common in Ksamil as such subterranean structures provided a perfect sanctuary from which to look out for the seeker. An obvious hiding-place perhaps, but which bunker did the hiders go into? The closely designed nature of communal living meant that bunkers became an ideal getaway space for groups looking to hang out away from prying eyes. The interior of many of Ksamil’s MSBs contained evidence of den-making with rough seats, empty drink and snack containers with names or slogans scratched on internal walls. This testifies to the clandestine nature of the object as an underground space, the very reason why MSBs have commonly been the scene of assignations between lovers with the occasional case of rape or murder. However, their most frequent employment is as a convenient location for toilet use.