{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021174205967276226, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0038498556304138597, 'mean_word_length': 4.974137931034483, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Documents as Weapons: The Uses of a Dictatorship’s Archives

Close to thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Albania remains a blind spot in the literature on twentieth-century socialism. International histories of the Cold War continue to ‘de-centre’ Europe, and the focus increasingly shifts to relations between big powers and the so-called Third World. But this recent euphoria of ‘the global’ has also tended to obscure how a small European country can remain terra incognita for so long. In much of the former communist world, the socalled ‘archival revolution’ of the 1990s has helped produce a now large body of literature. Such a process has been slow and complicated in Albania. This essay begins by asking why. It first offers an overview of Albanian-language historical work from roughly the last two decades, placing it alongside other relevant contributions in English, German, Italian and French, to highlight trends and suggest possible analytical paths. My thoughts are organised around the problem of the country’s archives, which took many years to become available to historians. Shrouded in mystery, communist era archives have often become places of political controversy over major themes like the Second World War and the origins of communist power. This essay argues for making archives objects of analysis, too. After surveying how authors have and have not approached the party-state’s sources, it offers a history of archiving as an example of state led centralisation. The push to centralise archives coincided with a period in which Albania’s regime sought to make sense of shifting foreign alliances: from a dedicated ally of the Soviet Union to an anti-Soviet voice during the revolutionary 1960s. Rather than as depositories of hidden truths, archives emerge as part of a larger project to define the state and discipline its past. They can shed much light on the domestic landscape of this period, but they can also offer new insights into how processes of nationalisation have been deeply intertwined with internationalist imperatives.