What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title, The Iron Fist of Albania—but our goal was different.

What’s unique about this book is that we wanted to situate it in a wider Europe, so that Albania doesn’t constantly appear as something exotic. The problem with studies of Albania, whether under Zog or under the communists, is that Albania is always treated as some kind of oddity. It’s quirky. The stories tend to lead with bunkers, isolation, and things like that. But that’s not the nuanced story.

The unique aspect of this book is that it situates dictatorship, tyranny, and totalitarianism in a broader framework so that people understand them better. The book was originally titled A Biography of a Balkan Tyrant, but in conversations with Artan Hoxha, my wonderful co-author, we changed the title. Artan asked a simple question: Why “Balkan”? It sounds simple, but it’s not. So we decided on Twentieth-Century Tyrant, because while there are differences for sure, the common features of these tyrannies are far more numerous than anything else.

That was what we wanted to do—place it within the context of modernity. We didn’t want to tell the standard story of bloodshed—then he killed him, then he killed that other person—because Blendi does a great job with that, and I’m not dismissing it. But we wanted to tell a different story, one that sheds light on some really uncovered aspects of that period and places them in a broader European perspective, so that Albania doesn’t appear as an anomaly in what was, in fact, a very similar communist world.

I’m not trying to be hard on anybody who’s written about Albania in the past—especially English-language authors, and I’m one of them—but I think we didn’t really get it. Part of that was the lack of access to archives. When I started the project, without that access, I found that I was writing the same story, just making it more accessible. That really disappointed me, and that’s where the project came into question as something I maybe shouldn’t do.

But bringing in an Albanian author—an Albanian specialist and a really top-notch Albanian historian—changed the landscape completely and made the book different. What’s unique about it is that it situates Hoxha in the wider realm of dictators. We’re also really good at telling Hoxha’s early life story and showing how much of it was a fluke—this role of contingency, where some things just happen.

Hoxha ends up first as a playboy living in France, an extremely good-looking, cosmopolitan guy who probably could have stayed there and made the rest of his life. Instead, there’s this fluke of coming back to Albania, running a tobacco shop, and then ending up as head of the Albanian Communist Party. Telling his story means also telling the story of his obsessions—particularly his obsession with modernity, which is not unique to Hoxha.

I’m constantly telling my students that the twentieth century is about these weird systems that are supposed to rush history. A colleague of mine, Marci Shore, talks to students about the Marxist  idea that history has laws and that you can force them to go faster. You can rush history. Hoxha is one of those guys. If you understand your basic Lenin, Hoxha is a real Leninist: the idea that you can take a backward, illiterate country and turn it into something else. He tried. Eventually, he didn’t succeed. And like a lot of great dictators, he didn’t blame himself—he blamed his people, who were simply not up to the job, at least to him.