Earlier this summer, an Albanian friend in Istanbul told me a story. During the Cold War, Albanians fleeing Enver Hoxha’s People’s Socialist Republic of Albania would cross Lake Shkodra in boats. If they were lucky, and they weren’t captured by government patrol, drowned, or shot by guards, they would disembark on the shores of my friend’s lakeside village in Montenegro, then part of Yugoslavia. The two countries occupied diametrically opposed poles in the communist world: Albania was the most isolated, while Yugoslavia — separate from the Eastern Bloc since Josip Broz Tito’s split with Joseph Stalin in 1948 — was the most open. (The red Yugoslav passport, the source of much boomer Yugonostalgia, allowed visa-free travel to more than a hundred countries.)

Albania’s litany of eccentricities is well known. In the words of one observer, the world’s first officially atheist state banned “bearded visitors, Americans, and God.” Fleeing the country was considered treason; those caught were lucky to get away with hard labor. As remote as it all sounds today, my friend’s story about the boats bound for Montenegro made me think of contemporary headline news: the recent wave of small-boat migration of Albanians to the United Kingdom.

In 2022 alone, 12,300 Albanians crossed the English Channel aboard rickety rubber dinghies, risking death to get to Britain’s shores. Why was it that I didn’t immediately associate that journey with a cruel ideology? Certainly global capitalism and inequality played a big part. But why don’t we blame them in the same way we do the autarkic communism of Uncle Enver’s Albania?