To reach the old villa restaurant where we are to have lunch, my guest takes me along a beach fringing her childhood hometown. It is a stunning stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast. It is also a trip down a dictatorial memory lane. Lea Ypi played here, just outside the port of Durrës, in the 1980s, in the closing years of Enver Hoxha’s hermit state. It was here, she says, that as a little girl she first observed people from the west — staying in the then state-run and foreigners-only and now super-swish Adriatik Hotel — and was struck by the unfamiliar scent of sun cream.
As we pass an Art Deco block, Ypi looks up at the second-floor flat. All those years she played outside it, her parents hid from her that it had once belonged to her mother’s family. After the war it was expropriated by the communists and became one of the many things that were too dangerous to discuss. Now the flat is her family’s again. We walk on in silence but not for long: impish memoirist of the communist era, professor at the London School of Economics and arch critic of capitalism, Ypi is a fountain of argument, laughter and ideas. She breaks off to point again, this time at an old pier.
“That’s where my mother and brother fled from . . .” The pier looks so innocent in the balmy afternoon sun. In 1997, six hectic years after the collapse of the old order, the new get-rich-quick one in turn imploded. Ypi was at home one March morning as her mother and brother joined a desperate crowd on that very pier and fled on a boat to Italy to escape the anarchy engulfing their homeland. Many who tried that route drowned.
The wheel of history has turned fast in Albania in the past three decades, faster than anywhere else in Europe. In the late stages of the cold war, only North Korea rivalled it for its ideological purity and totalitarian zeal. Its communist regime was the last in eastern Europe to unravel. Then came all but unbridled capitalism, leading to pyramid schemes, their collapse, fury and near civil war.
It is a story Ypi tells in a remarkable memoir written from the perspective first of an idealistic girl coddled from the realities of Hoxha’s paranoid rule — and then as a curious teenager observing the opportunities but also compromises and shortcuts of the long-dreamt-of capitalist way. The experience drove her to become a relentless questioner of what it means to be really free.
“I had this obsession with freedom throughout my life,” she says. We have arrived at our destination, the Vila Lule, which dates back to the 1930s, and are sitting on a veranda looking over the sea.
“I moved to the west and didn’t see this big dream realised, really. Or at least I saw it was realised for some but not for others. In Albania we had this big idea that this world was going to deliver — and then we realised that it doesn’t actually work like that.”
“It did deliver a bit though, didn’t it?” I interject. Having witnessed the cultural and economic desolation left by communism as a young reporter in eastern Europe in 1990, I am all the more interested in her reply.
“It delivered on first-generation freedoms, I suppose. There is freedom of thought and there’s freedom of expression and freedom of association and so on.”
“Which are big . . .”
“Yes, extremely . . .” She breaks off her train of thought to laugh at the “high” price she has to pay for freedom of expression today: the trolls on social media who have that very day launched a fresh attack on her, accusing her of traducing Albania. “To be clear, I’d rather have the trolls . . .”
The maître d’ has come to take our order. Ypi orders a dizzying array of fish courses and a bottle of crisp white Albanian wine. We raise a glass to freedom — and to the dreams of the early 1990s, when the future and the free market seemed full of hope.
Ypi returns enthusiastically to the fray. She is now a professor of political theory at the LSE and was teaching Marxism studies until she went on research leave two years ago. I suggest it’s a remarkable specialism for her, given her family’s ordeal under Hoxha; both her grandfathers were political prisoners, her paternal one for 15 years for “agitation and propaganda”. Ypi says her mother still makes that point. But having seen at an early age the failure of extreme versions of both systems in Albania, Ypi wanted to consider an alternative way for a society. When she left Albania in the late 1990s to study at the Sapienza University of Rome, she brushed aside her parents’ hopes that she might do a more commercially minded course and instead signed up for philosophy.
“I got to Marx from Hegel and Kant. A lot of people asked, ‘How could you be interested in Marx given your family background?’ My mother was completely obsessed with worry . . . But for me, it was hard to say ‘I’m turning back because my family wouldn’t like this.’ I wanted to explore these ideas. For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy, in a way.”
She has been talking at breakneck speed. All the while waiters have been arriving with one plate after another of carpaccio, marinated salmon, squid and more. Amid rapture over our alfresco feast and the mid-70 Fahrenheit temperature in January, we plunge back into the debates that swept eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ypi’s argument is that the disasters of the communist dictatorships led to an unquestioning lurch to capitalism and a conflation of democracy with the free market. She wanted, she says, “to try to show that capitalist institutions pay lip service to freedom but fail to realise it, because they don’t realise equal opportunities for everyone . . . The classic Hayekian standard stories are that you have spontaneous society . . . and the market will deliver somehow. That’s just a loss of control.”
Ypi, 42, has a simple answer to those who suggest she whitewashes the Hoxha years: read the book. She is right. Free brims with diamond-studded details of life under communism. It lays bare the compromises, fear and betrayals of a secret police state, but is also an uplifting and humorous reminder of how much the human spirit can endure. There is the tussle with neighbours over ownership of an empty Coke can, an object with extraordinary cachet in drab 1980s Albania. There is the etiquette over food queues. There are the word games her parents played in front of her to maintain her childhood innocence; when they referred to the university degrees relations were doing, this was code for long sentences in camps for political prisoners.
“My book is partly about the fact that no one can take away your dignity however hard they try,” she says, “and partly about how there are always ideological lenses through which we read the world and so we actually are always in some lie or other.” It’s in the second half, set in the blinking and bewildered Albania that emerged into freedom, that she underpins her narrative with an implicit question: was capitalism a false god?
So which system is better? Ypi will not be drawn. “One of the things people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But you are not comparing like for like.
“What you need to do is take a system at face value and see what kind of commitments it has and what ideals it tried to realise. Then you look at what it does for ordinary people and for everyone and then you ask yourself, is this system representing everybody or not? And then you find the flaws and criticise the system.”
The previous night, I tell her, I had reread her book and marked up two passages that suggest she thought communism and capitalism were as bad as each other. I read one: “My family equated socialism with . . . the denial of who they wanted to be . . . I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit.” I start leafing through my copy for the second extract but Ypi pre-empts me, quoting from memory.
“‘My world is as far away from freedom as the one that my parents tried to escape.’ This is very important,” she says. “It’s not about these worlds vis-à-vis each other. It’s about these worlds vis-à-vis freedom. It’s not, is one better, is one worse than the other. It’s about the common core that they start with, which is this ideal of freedom that both of them promise to realise and fail for different reasons.”
“But did one get closer to freedom?”
“I don’t think it did, no.”
“So that’s where cold war warriors would say, hang on a moment, you’re nuts!”
Ypi is unfazed. It’s a “complacent narrative”, she says, to suggest that the free market takes a society “closer” to genuine freedom. “That holds you back. You need to be really radical in your critique [of society] to be able to build better.”
When I suggest that it’s a complacent narrative many would sign up to, she counters that it depends on who is writing the story: “The people who lost haven’t told their stories yet.” After all, she adds — and I agree with her wholeheartedly here — across eastern Europe it is the old communist elites who did best out of the transition. “They were recycled in the new apparatus. They came back in a different fashion. They just changed colours. The people who won were the people who could travel and had contacts from the old days.”
I interrupt to seek her advice on Albanian protocol on eating oysters — whether to slurp from the shell. All the while the maître d’ is hovering. He has a salver with a huge red snapper covered in salt. Another waiter bears a sole in a lemon sauce. Ypi is the first to laugh at the potential for parody of her as a champagne socialist. But she has a more serious point too.
“Sometimes people say to me, ‘How can you write this stuff about capitalism? You are at the LSE, you’ve clearly made it, you’re one of the winners.’ I say this is fallacious. You can’t base an argument on one individual’s story. The other story in my book is of my friend who went to school with me and who lost her mother, and her father lost his job, and she was completely lost and ended up as a victim of sex-trafficking.”
In the early 1990s, then living in Romania, I was among many swept up in the idea that liberalism had won once and for all. Socialism seemed consigned to the past — and deservedly so. But, with hindsight, I tell Ypi, increasingly I have found myself asking if the west as a whole wasn’t too hubristic in its approach to the former communist countries.
I recall her mordant depiction in Free of a Dutch “transition expert” who arrived in Albania in the early 1990s bearing endless certainties and “a pink newspaper called The Financial Times”. He personified the structural adjustment programme proponents who were pouring into the region and who just knew best, when ideally there would have been a middle ground between the past and the shock therapy of the new. Ypi nods and bemoans the then prevailing “one size fits all” idea for running an economy. “People thought everybody’s angry with their government and they must be angry with everything. The ideas of political and economic freedom were conflated — and that needs to be disentangled.”
I turn to Vladimir Putin. Has he not capitalised on the west’s missteps and arrogance after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Ypi agrees, citing also the trajectory of Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban.
“For better or worse, what Orban offers, what Putin offers, is an alternative, and they often play the card of the contrast with the liberals and with failed globalisation and so on. And because there isn’t an alternative enlightened project on which everyone can be on board and develop as a democratic project, that leaves you in the hands of the authoritarians.”
Fortified by our main courses, I decide it’s time to mount a more robust defence of the durability of liberal capitalism. I predict that it will weather the current storm.
Ypi will have none of it. “That’s because it hasn’t conquered the whole world yet . . . It’s true that it has a capacity to adapt and survive and so on, but it’s going to hit its limit. We don’t know when and how and in what form it’s going to hit us but surely it’s going to hit us.”
The sun is starting to set. We gaze out towards Italy. A cat is meowing at my leg. It wants the fish head which has just been presented on our table. The waiter says it’s a local delicacy that I might want to eat or take home. I decline the offer but we do acquiesce to his suggestion of a plate of baklava, sorbet, semifreddo and strudel on the house. Then with coffee, after a polite dither, an amaretto for each of us it is.
We toast Ypi’s grandmother, a towering figure in Free and the subject of her next book. She was born into an elite family in the Ottoman ruling caste and her life straddled the Belle Époque and the rise of fascism and then the nightmare of Hoxha’s rule.
“She was the first Kantian I ever met. She hated dogma, but she was also not a sceptic and told me always to believe in something,” Ypi says. “She also brought me up with a complete disdain for wealth that is accumulated. She had seen it disappear.” Her husband, Ypi’s grandfather, was a socialist who was imprisoned by Hoxha. Ypi likes to cite his experience as a case study to her mother, “to try to make her understand that it’s not as though every left is the totalitarian left”.
I meet her mother briefly that evening on the outskirts of the capital Tirana. She has been looking after Ypi’s four-year-old daughter, one of her three children, and the three of them are bound for neighbouring Kosovo for a book event. As they head for the border I return to Tirana musing over what Ypi said when I asked if her mother was reconciled at all to her leftwing views.
“She thinks I am a utopian who thinks about ideals of freedom and doesn’t really think about real-world constraints,” Ypi told me. I am with her mother on this. But I also believe that Ypi has written a magical, timeless and important account of what life was really like under communism — and that her contemporary questions are well worth asking.
Alec Russell is the editor of FT Weekend
Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first