I’m embarrassed to admit that before reading Lea Ypi‘s Free, my knowledge of Albania was basically zero. I probably couldn’t have found Albania on a map, and would have incorrectly guessed that it was part of the former USSR. I picked up the book based on a BlueSky user’s recommendation, and Jane, if you’re reading this, send more suggestions.
Free is a memoir about growing up in Albania during the fall of socialism and the Albanian civil war. It opens in 1990, when Lea Ypi is 11 years old, hugging a statue of Stalin before realizing it’s missing a head – a metaphor for everything that’s to come. Ypi writes large parts of the book with the innocence and honesty of her younger self, which was an excellent mechanism to help me (and surely countless other readers) understand the political history and events in her story.
She combines the daily life of her family post-communism: bullies at school that think that she’s related to a reviled historical figure, the quirks and complications of the centrally-planned economy, the lines for basic items, the struggle to make ends meet. There is a charming story of how an empty Coke can triggered a conflict between families, and the length to which a young Ypi goes to mend the fences. It’s all told with a child’s understanding of why things are that way. Equality is important, we have all we need. Her parents are dedicated socialists, proud of their contribution to the socialist state.
Until they aren’t.
There is a moment about 100 pages into the story where young Ypi’s eyes are opened to the world around her. The euphemisms, code words and truth about her family is revealed in one literally jaw-dropping chapter.
The second half of the book is a more clear-eyed assessment of the events following the country’s first multi-party elections, leading up to the 1997 civil war when she left the country for good. Countries in political and economic turmoil are very fragile, and Albania’s efforts to modernize are sabotaged by the World Bank, scam artists, gangsters and ghouls from the country’s past.
From the LA Review of Books:
Ypi, who is now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, left Albania after completing secondary school in 1997, the wounds of her homeland’s brief civil war still bloody. Her writing relates both the personal and the political milestones of her youth with clear-eyed hindsight, yet she never allows her younger self to take credit for feeling or realizing more than she felt or realized at the time. The result is an engrossing coming-of-age narrative with the aura of a Cold War thriller, as slowly the scales fall from Ypi’s eyes and she must find her own unique path toward freedom.
The closing chapters of Free dive into Ypi’s field of study. She has little time for modern western leftists, and despite her promise to her father to stay away from Marx in her university education, she now teaches Marx She criticises the West’s definition of freedom and equality, but resists the urge to lecture.
This profile in FT helps outline her views on economic liberalism:
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.”
Lest you think that the book will be an academic exercise: Free is a trim 260 pages and flies by. Ypi is a fantastic storyteller, and her academic asides leave lots of ideas that will linger for a long time. I not only learned a lot about Albania, I had some of my notions about capitalism and socialism challenged as well.
