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?

These are the kinds of disorientating questions that Lea Ypi’s work provokes in its readers. Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, is a transgressive “Kantian Marxist” (her own descriptor) in a world in which the Right claims a monopoly on transgression. Although she made her career as a serious interpreter of nineteenth-century German philosophy, she has also published widely on Marxism and political parties. Ypi’s last book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, released in 2021, held up Hoxha’s Albania as a funhouse mirror, bringing liberalism’s ideological delusions into relief in the process. The book was an international hit: it received near-universal acclaim and was translated into thirty-five languages.

In Albania, however, Free caused an uproar. Some objected to what they viewed as the book’s insufficiently grim portrait of communism. Others were put off by Prime Minister Edi Rama’s presence at its launch. The latter critique led to a heated dust-up in the letters pages of the London Review of Books between Ypi and her reviewer, Granta editor Thomas Meaney. It felt like a throwback to a time when literary culture had higher stakes.

I first encountered Free two summers ago, after spending three weeks in Albania. When I got back to Serbia, a professor friend at the University of Belgrade was waving a paperback copy of it in her hand. “You have to read this,” she told me. She loved the descriptions of the Western consultants who came to administer democracy and “shock therapy,” including one pitiful character dubbed “the Crocodile” owing to the Lacoste logo on his shirts.

The Albanian experience of “transition” to a market economy recounted in Free reminded her of the Serbian one. We became vociferous Ypi defenders, diagnosing her critics in the Balkans with provincial envy. In capitals like Tirana and Belgrade, denigrating the achievements of those who become successful abroad is a way of protecting the local market, where one’s relative social position is always artificially inflated. Little wonder then that Ypi says that Free was met with “torrents of abuse” online.

Ypi’s new book, Indignity, is an answer to her trolls. A few years ago, she was informed that a hitherto unseen photo of her grandparents had surfaced online. By the time she found the photo, the trolls had already assembled. They denigrated Ypi’s grandmother Leman as a spy, a collaborator, and Ypi herself as a communist b*tch. In the black-and-white photo, Ypi’s grandmother and grandfather are seen honeymooning at a chalet in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1941.

Indignity opens with the photo that Ypi finds unsettling. Looking at it she wonders why her grandmother had described this moment, at the height of World War II, as one in which she had been “the happiest person alive.” Had she been indifferent to events as they unfolded around Europe, or did she sense that for the young newlyweds, the worst was yet to come? Her grandfather Asllan looks worried. What did he already know? Ypi also wonders if there is anything to the trolls’ vitriol: Had her grandmother really been a spy? Was there something about her grandmother that she did not know? Had she been a collaborator? Or had she endured the repressions and horrors yet to come with dignity?

To answer these questions, Ypi turns to the archives of the Albanian communist secret police. En route to the Authority for Information Concerning Documentation of the Former State Security Service, the fantastically bureaucratic name given the archives of Albania’s Sigurimi, Ypi talks with her taxi driver, who in typical Balkan fashion is equal parts oracle and crackpot. When she explains that she’s going to view the files of the former secret police, he tells her that there is no such thing as “former” secret police — they are still there, and indeed, never went away. This sentiment can’t be dismissed as mere paranoia. In Albania and Serbia, there was no lustration process after the fall of the Hoxha and Slobodan Milošević regimes.

The bulk of the book is a reimagining of the life of Ypi’s grandmother Leman. A reconstruction of her youth begins during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire and continues through the first decade of Albanian communism. Leman was born in 1918 in Salonica, what is now Thessaloniki. Her grandfather, Ibrahim Pasha, was described as “one of the Sultan’s most trusted dignitaries.”

At the age of eighteen, Leman moves to Tirana; her young adulthood thus coincides with Europe’s descent into darkness. Ypi is skilled at building a sense of dread through the introduction of small signs announcing what is to come, while her characters remain in the dark — the way history is experienced rather than retrospectively understood. The unthinkable remains unthinkable up until the moment it happens. Once the unthinkable happens, everyone believes that it will all be over soon.

In the archives, Ypi asks herself how one ought to compare the surveillance system that followed her grandmother around with today’s vast digital regime, which is arguably more ubiquitous and effective: in addition to tracking our every movement, it incentivizes us to share our location, social contacts, activities, and even our secrets, with the public. What need is there to spy when most people give up personal information so willingly? As Ypi notes, it also exploits our personal data to sell us things, reducing us to mere consumers. And perhaps that’s worse. One might find efforts to draw any comparison between these systems too flippant, but in the age of Palantir, it feels appropriate. This is how Ypi measures both regimes against one another:

Perhaps Leman’s humanity mattered more to the system tracking her preferences than I do to the one tracking mine. She’s surveilled by her peers. They observe her, they make a note of her movements, they meticulously record her location. They must care about what she thinks, specifically, in the way no company will ever care about me, specifically. I am a generic consumer, a cog in a data-gathering machine, a means to profit. She’s still recognized as human by another human. For all the asymmetry in their power, for all the manipulation and control, she remains an end in herself, a subject whose dignity can never be fully destroyed.

Ypi’s family are elites, aristocrats even, and her questions about class and her own privilege are never far from view. Her grandmother grew up speaking French, had nannies, and met her husband Asllan at the wedding of Albania’s King Zog I. Ypi’s grandfather Xhafer was prime minister of the country in the early 1920s and briefly a minister in government during the fascist Italian protectorate.

Accordingly, Indignity’s cast of characters represent a narrow social democratic nobility, and while they profess some radical views, their outlook is limited by their status. They want a system that is more humane but also probably want to retain their privileged position within it. They want factory workers to live lives of greater dignity but to stop short of overthrowing the existing order.

Nowhere is class tension thicker than in the moment Ypi’s grandparents run into a young Enver Hoxha at a café. He is the same age as they are but from a lower class. (Stalin reportedly dismissed him as “petit bourgeois” in conversations with a visiting delegation from Belgrade.) Ypi depicts him as someone whose politics are informed by ressentiment of his betters. During their meeting, Hoxha recalls that Asllan once offered to pay the young Hoxha’s rent in Paris where they were both students. Hoxha, it turned out, had lost his scholarship. Of course, Asllan didn’t have to worry about such things. Naturally, Hoxha became resentful; he refused the offer and jumped out of a window without paying his landlord, injuring himself in the process.

The political disagreements between the two men are, Ypi implies, downstream from these class differences. Hoxha laments that all Ypi’s grandfather cares about are “reforms”; he doesn’t want to tear down the existing system but rather make it a little bit nicer. Meanwhile, Hoxha wants to destroy it. But there is of course a bias in this recounting: Ypi is writing with the horrors of Hoxha’s Albania in mind. It’s hard not to read in her arguments a defense, however reluctant, of preserving the reactionary status quo rather than risking revolutionary change. To my own dismay, I found myself sympathizing with the young Hoxha somewhat — he had to resort to crime and scheming in order to secure what Ypi’s family was born with by virtue of their class.

But just as I found myself growing skeptical of the Ypis, the later chapters chastened me against this harsh judgement. There she describes the fate of her grandparents several years later. With Hoxha in charge, Ypi’s grandparents become class enemies. Asllan draws immediate suspicion for his wartime ties to British officers in Tirana, referred to as “Anglo-Americans” in Hoxhaist jargon. (“We actively encourage the formation of a social democratic party, with people of integrity, individuals who can oppose the communists from a position of moral strength — people like yourself,” one British officer told Asllan in the last weeks of the war.)

According to the files, the secret police also suspect Leman of spying for Greece because she was born and raised in Salonica. Asllan is sent to prison and Hoxha begins executing other members of the intellectual elite, including some of his old classmates. Among the purged is Sabiha Kasimati, a biology professor and one of the first female scientists in Albania, who was executed in 1951, along with twenty-one other intellectuals:

When Enver Hoxha came to power, [Kasimati] had visited her old classmate in his office and confronted him: “If you kill all the intellectuals, who are you going to build your state with — tinsmiths and shoemakers?” “I advise you to read less of the Enlightenment, and more of Marx and Lenin,” Enver had replied.

Meanwhile, Leman and her young son, Zafo, are deported from Tirana and settle in Kavajë, a city in Albania’s lowlands. Here, Leman hits rock bottom. She becomes an “assistant worker in the maintenance of irrigation canals” in a nearby village, shoveling dirt under the supervision of a woman ten years her junior. Once again, Ypi prompts us to ask some discomfiting questions about class. Ypi’s intellectuals may espouse egalitarian or even socialist views, but also clearly reject Vladimir Lenin’s notion that “every cook must learn to govern” — they believe that their rightful place in society is in the elite. Watching Ypi’s family tumble from the top of the social hierarchy forces a reckoning with our own assumptions about who ought to comprise the elite and who ought to run the state.

In Eastern Europe, the archives of the communist secret police have been a goldmine for writers of all kinds. Antonio Gramsci, who was of Albanian descent, described what archives can help do in the Prison Notebooks a century ago. “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

The original Italian contained an additional line, mysteriously shorn from the English translation: “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” For Gramsci, an inventory of the past is a prerequisite for constructing a future. No wonder the Balkans suffer from mass emigration and a chronic sense of stagnation: the lack of agreed-upon history makes building anything new impossible. Ypi’s book is an intervention against this oblivion.

But Indignity does more than just itemize the past or put it in its proper order. Ypi’s disorienting questions force us to reevaluate our own assumptions about the present. As she takes us on a tour of her family’s twentieth-century history, it becomes clear that the clean break we like to think we’ve made with the past is illusory. History is still unfolding, revealed to us slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, through the introduction of small signs.