Nonagricultural workers numbered about 30,000 persons, most of whom worked in mines and in the small handicraft industries. The movement found strong support from this group also. The upper class comprised professional people and intellectuals; medium and small merchants; moneylenders; and well-to-do artisans, whose capital was invested mostly in trade, commerce, and the Italian industrial concessions. The industrialists also belonged to this class; they owned very small industries and workshops. Both the beys and the tribal chiefs of the north had been somewhat reduced in importance politically and economically during Zog's rule, but it was chiefly from these two groups that Zog created the ruling elite that helped him to control the country until the Italian invasion in 1939.
The clergy of the three religious denominations did not form a distinct social group. The higher clergy was intellectual and upper class in structure; it supported the ruling elite but did not mix in politics after Bishop Fan Noli, leader of a short-lived reformist government, was driven out of the country in 1924. The income from the fairly extensive church estates and the state subsidies provided a good, but not luxurious, living for the higher clergy. The rank-and-file clergy, however, were derived from peasant origins, and most of their parishes were as impoverished as the peasant households they served.
The events immediately preceding and following the Communist seizure of power forebode the doom not only of the beys and tribal chiefs but also of most of the upper class and intellectuals, who had refused to collaborate with the National Liberation Movement. In the summer and fall of 1944, while civil war was raging between the Communist-controlled partisan formations and anti-Communist bands, nearly all the influential beys and bajraktars either fell in battle or fled the country; those who remained were quickly rounded up by the Communist security forces and subsequently tried as "enemies of the people" ([see ch. 2], Historical Setting).
The whole leadership of the two nationalist organizations, the Balli Kombetar and the Legality Movement, fled to Italy. Influential patriots and intellectuals who had remained neutral during the so-called War of National Liberation but who were considered potentially dangerous to the Communist regime were apprehended and tried en masse in the spring of 1945. Some were executed; others were sent to labor camps, where most of them died from malnutrition and lack of medical care.
A new Communist social order was legally instituted in the country with the adoption of the first Communist Constitution in March 1946, which created a "state of workers and laboring peasants." The various constitutional articles dealing with the new social order abolished all ranks and privileges that had derived from reasons of origin (such as the tribal chiefs and the beys), position, wealth, or cultural standing. All citizens were considered equal regardless of nationality, race, or religion.
Marriage and family were brought under the strict control of the state, which determined by law the conditions of marriage and the family. Marriages could be considered legal only when contracted before competent state organs, and only state courts had jurisdiction on all matters connected with marriage. Included in the 1946 Constitution also was the Marxist tenet "from each according to his ability and to each according to his work." Subsequent revisions to the Constitution gave legal sanction to the existing situation that the Party and its members were the leading, or vanguard, group in the country.
E Drejta Kushtetuese e Republikes Popullore te Shqiperise (The Constitutional Right in the People's Republic of Albania), published in 1963 by the Faculty of Jurisprudence of the State University of Tirana, stated that the War of National Liberation was actually class warfare, a civil war whose purpose was as much national as it was social liberation—that is, the establishment of the "people's power" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Communist spokesmen listed three principal classes prevailing in the early years of the regime: the working class, the laboring peasants, and, in their terms, the exploiting class, that is, the landowners in the agricultural economy and the bourgeoisie in trade. The exploiting class was liquidated through a rapid revolutionary process in the early stages of the regime. The middle and high bourgeoisie was destroyed as a result of the nationalization of industry, transport, mines, and banks and the establishment of a state monopoly on foreign commerce and state control over internal trade. The feudal landlords disappeared with the application of the agrarian reforms in the 1945-47 period. These steps were followed by a program of rapid industrialization, with the consequent creation of a strong working class, and the collectivization of agriculture, supposedly resulting in the formation of a homogeneous peasant class.
After the destruction of the old class structure, the Communist regime claimed that only two classes existed in the country, the workers and the working peasants. A somewhat different social composition of the population, however, has been given by the government's statistical yearbooks, based on the last official census, taken in 1960. Under the title "Social Composition of the Population," for instance, the 1965 statistical yearbook listed, in order, the following groups; workers, employees (civil servants), collective and private farmers (officially called villagers), collective and individual artisans, collective and private traders, free professions, clergymen, and unemployed and unknown (see table 4).
In the 1967-70 period several of these groups disappeared. The individual farmers were all collectivized; the artisan collectives were converted to state industrial enterprises; the private traders, except the peasant open markets, were reduced to a minimum, and members of the clergy were sent to work either in industrial plants or agricultural collectives.