Kerenji, Nesti

Born in the family of an activist of the national movement. He studied at the French Lyceum Korchi , was expelled for indiscipline. Since 1939 he was a member of the youth communist organization ^[1] .

In 1941 he joined the Communist Party of Albania (CPA; since 1948 - the Albanian Party of Labor, APT) . The next year, Nesti Kerendji led an underground Albanian Komsomol. He was the political commissar of one of the partisan brigades. He directed the party school in Korce, which was supervised by the Yugoslav communist Dusan Mugosha . He represented the command of the National Liberation Army of Albania at the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army Josip Broz Tito .

After the CPA came to power, Nesti Kerendji entered the punitive apparatus of the new regime. In 1946 - 1948 he was deputy Kochi Dzodze in the leadership of Sigurimi . In 1946, when Kochi Dzodze took the post of Minister of the Interior of the NRA , Nesti Kerendji was appointed Director of Sigurimi. In the hierarchy of repressive organs of that time, Nesti Kerendji was considered the second person after Kochi Dzodze (the third was Vaska Koletsi ) ^[2] . This period saw numerous political executions and judicial killings of opponents of the Enver Hoxha regime.

In 1947, Colonel Kerenji represented Albania in the UN Security Council during the analysis of the Albanian- Greek border conflict ^[3] . At the same time, he spoke not so much from international legal as from ideological positions, denouncing the "monarcho-fascist" regime of Greece and its "imperialistic ambitions" ^[4] .

In the fall of 1948, Kochi Dzodze was removed from all posts, arrested and put on trial. Nesti Kerenji was brought as a witness for the prosecution and testified (they mainly concerned the surveillance of party leaders organized by the Zodze) ^[5] . In 1949, Kochi Dzodze was executed as a "Yugoslav agent."

For several weeks in October 1948, Nesti Kerendji was at the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Then he was replaced by Mehmet Sheha . Despite the apparent connection with Zodze, Kerenji was not repressed. For a short time, he was even a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the APT, but already at the beginning of 1949 he was removed from his posts at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and removed from the Central Committee. Periodically, the question arose of his arrest, but did not reach a decision ^[6] .

Since 1949, Nesti Kerendji has held various leadership positions in the Department of Road Construction, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the Ministry of Construction. In the early 1960s, he led the price committee under the NRA Council of Ministers, then headed the consumer cooperation system. Finally, since 1961, Nesti Kerendji became the director of a coal mining enterprise in Vlore . In 1982 he retired.

The period 1981 - 1983 was marked by a new outbreak of the struggle for power in the party-state leadership. The death of Mehmet Shehu and the action of the Mustafa Group gave rise to the next cycle of political repression. The long-standing leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Sigurimi Kadri Hazbiu and Fechor Shehu were arrested. The functionaries ever associated with them were also persecuted - in this way Nesti Kerengi ended up in jail.

Kerengi was brought in as a witness at the Hazbiu trial ^[7] . He gave the requested indictment, which mainly related to the events of the late 1940s, the time of the struggle between Kochi Dzodze and Mehmet Shehu ^[8] . On September 10, 1983, Hazbiu was executed. A few days after this execution, Kerendzhi was released from prison and sent to live in one of the villages of Vlora. Until 1988, it was in the status of supervised.

In 1990 - 1991, the communist regime in Albania fell under the pressure of mass protests . Nesti Kerenji did not participate in politics and refrained from publicity. Only once in 1991 agreed to give an interview. In 1996 , he moved with his family to Tirana .

Subsequently, it turned out that Nesti Kerendji kept personal records with detailed exposition and detailed assessments of political events. He very negatively characterized Enver Hoxha, his dictatorial system and the dogmatic ideology of the APT, and condemned the repression, especially the Kochi Dzodze process. Among other things, Kerenji criticized Hodge for his indecision on the issue of Kosovo’s ownership, for his concessions to Tito ^[1] .

Nesti Kerendzhi died at the age of 80.

Nesti Kerendji was married to the communist activist Nadzhiye Duma , the Minister of Education of the NRA in 1948 (the first woman in the history of Albania to be a member of the government). Since the mid-1950s, Nadzhiye Duma was persecuted for “opportunism”, spent many years in exile and internment ^[9] .