The Soviet model for the medal
When Hoxha’s regime proposed the “Mother Heroine” medal, it had been awarded in the Soviet Union for around 10 years. There, it had been created on 8 July 1944 to give privileges to mothers with many children or women widowed by wartime deaths. The medal was awarded on the tenth child’s first birthday, and the other nine had to be alive or to have fallen in battle.
The difficult circumstances in which the Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War, with more than 20 million dead, pushed the state to find ways to increase its population. The rest of the promised privileges were simply propaganda, as in Albania.
Its creation and use in Albania
On 13 March 1954, as chairman of the People’s Presidium, Haxhi Lleshi proposed to Enver Hoxha the creation of two medals, “Hero of Socialist Labour” and “Mother Heroine”. In secret document no. 79 addressed to the Prime Minister’s Office, Lleshi explained that the medal for “mothers” was widespread in the Soviet Union. To make his proposal more persuasive, he added that this order “has also begun to be awarded in the people’s democracies”.
He specified that it should be awarded to mothers who “have given birth to, raised and educated 10 children”.
What Lleshi writes in the document is absurd: “Bearing in mind that in future it will be easier to raise 10 children, as the economic situation will continually improve, we believe that awarding the ‘Mother Heroine’ order will be appropriate.”
The order would be formally established on 2 October 1955 and, like several other medals, would be identical to its Soviet counterpart. A pentagonal bronze plate would carry a star, slightly larger than the one on the Soviet model, and the same attachment design, but with a less stylised frame around the inscription “Mother Heroine”.
But although these figures are indisputable, no fact can substantiate Lleshi’s “prediction” that by 1965 Albania’s economy would have improved enough to make “raising 10 children” easy. This was never achieved. The “Mother Heroines” always came from rural areas, not urban ones.
In rural areas, having children was also seen as a way to increase the workforce. The number of “Mother Heroines” declined, to the point that after 1980 the qualifying requirement for the medal would be reduced to a minimum of 8 children.
Published in the “Memory Observatory” on 18 June 2018.
!!!This material was prepared for the Institute for Democracy, Media and Culture (IDMC). Any republication must include attribution!!!