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Nostalgic for dictatorship or...?

2026-09-19 21:33:13Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ÇAPAJEV GJOKUTAJ
Nostalgic for dictatorship or...?
Chapaev Gjokutaj

It's impressive when, in everyday conversations, but also on social networks, you often come across nostalgic assessments for the period 1944-1990, such as: "Maybe we were poorer, but security was security, we slept with the door open", "when you finished school, you had to wait for a job, today with a diploma you can work as a cafe waitress", "the hospitals may not have had today's equipment, but the doctor would visit you without looking out of pocket", etc., etc.

Such statements often contain elements of truth, but they are problematic and lead one to wonder: Are we really so nostalgic for the dictatorship?

1.

Perhaps the problem begins precisely with the word "nostalgic". With it we denote very different attitudes. Saying that "there was more security back then", that "work was guaranteed" or that "school was better" does not necessarily mean saying: "I want the dictatorship to return".

An OSCE survey, conducted years ago, painted a much more complex picture than isolated statements or figures might suggest. Respondents thought that some aspects of life, such as security, access to health and education, employment, etc. had been better during the regime; but they rated economic development, lack of freedom, state repression, human rights violations, etc. poorly. The perception of the dictatorship, the report concluded, was diverse and far from uniform.

In such conditions, we have reason to wonder whether part of what we call nostalgia for dictatorship is something more complicated: individual nostalgia intertwined with selective memory.

Human memory is not an archive where the past is deposited and remains unchanged. As a rule, people reconstruct it. Over the years, the emotional charge of negative experiences can usually fade, some episodes lose their importance, others gain it, while memories are gradually organized into a story of our lives that seems coherent to us.

Therefore, when a seventy-year-old says today that “life was better in the 70s”, he may be comparing, without realizing it, two very different things. On the one hand, there is his real present: old age, retirement, insecurity, children who may be living abroad, friends who have left or are no longer living, weakening social ties, etc. On the other hand, his memories do not necessarily reflect the real Albania of the 70s. They are his memories of the time when he was twenty or thirty years old, had his parents alive, friends close by, a job, a stable social circle and most of his life ahead of him.

Here the question changes: does he miss the dictatorship or does he miss his youth?

2.

The psychology of memory helps us in another way. Negative experiences do not necessarily disappear from memory, but their emotional weight usually tends to fade. Apparently, a psychological self-defense mechanism pushes the individual to discharge some of the unpleasant burdens, otherwise life would become difficult for him.

The milk queue may be remembered, but not the daily irritation it caused. The political form may be remembered, but not necessarily with the intensity of the annoyance or fear it caused. Meanwhile, weddings, socializing, working with colleagues, vacations, youthful loves may retain a much warmer emotional charge.

In addition to the natural human tendency to diminish negative memories and strengthen positive ones, another mechanism is added: selective comparison. One takes the most obvious concerns of the present, such as inequality, corruption, economic insecurity, emigration, and the weakening of community, and compares them not with the entirety of life under dictatorship, but with some favorable aspects that one remembers from it: employment, order, security, community life, etc.

So, without realizing it, it can contrast the most problematic part of the present with the best part of the past. Such a comparison can give rise to nostalgia without necessarily being accompanied by a desire for the return of the political system.

There is another problem: there is no single memory of the dictatorship. A former political prisoner and a former functionary did not live the same dictatorship. But neither did a factory worker, a cooperator, a teacher, a family with a “good biography” and, opposite them, an interned family have the same experiences. Two people who lived in the same place and at the same time can remember two Albanias that are almost incompatible with each other.

This does not mean that personal experience is false. A person who says “I had a secure job back then” may be telling the complete truth about his or her life. The problem begins when we move from “I had a secure job” to “life was better back then,” and from there to a judgment about an entire political system and the experience of an entire society.

So perhaps we are asking the wrong question from the start: “Why are there so many Albanians nostalgic for the dictatorship?” A more useful question would be: what do Albanians remember with nostalgia when they speak positively about life during the dictatorship?

The answer may contain many things at once: security, work, community, social status, some public services, but also youth, the family that is no more, disappointment with the transition and the problems of today's Albania. And, along with them, the silent work that memory does by selecting, fading and reconstructing the past.

3.

This does not relativize dictatorship. Political persecution, imprisonment, exile, lack of pluralism, restriction of freedom, isolation and state violence do not depend on how one or a few detached individuals remember them today. The history of a system and the subjective memory of life within it are not the same thing.

Milan Kundera beautifully captured this distinction in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” with the episode of a famous photograph from 1948. The Czech communist leader, Klement Gottwald, steps out onto a balcony to greet the crowd. It is cold and the leader is not wearing a hat. The foreign minister, Vladimír Clementis, takes off his hat and puts it on Gottwald. The photograph of this gesture is multiplied and becomes part of the iconography of the regime. Four years later, Clementis is convicted and executed in the Stalinist purges. Propaganda retouches him and removes him from the photograph. Where the foreign minister stood, the blank wall remains. But not everything could be hidden. Even in the censored version, Clementis' hat was still on Gottwald's head.

Perhaps this is how we should think about the memory of dictatorship. Each of us can remember the past in our own way. We can soften it, romanticize it, darken it, or reconstruct it. Individual memory has this freedom and this vulnerability.

But the past does not exist only in our memory. It remains in archives, in documents, in statistics, in files, in photographs, in court decisions, in cross-examinations, but also in historical studies, in publications, television shows, etc. etc. So sooner or later, from the subjective version that detached individuals can build, a hat like Clementis's always emerges somewhere, accompanied by Kundera's famous statement in comment on that retouching: the struggle of man against power is, in a sense, the struggle of memory against oblivion.


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