IN 1990, FACED WITH THE imminent fall of a five-decade reign in Albania, the Communist government needed to destroy immense amounts of paperwork. As the country held its first democratic elections in 50 years, some 29,000 files disappeared—generally assumed to detail the crimes committed by the regime and identify those who perpetrated them. But until recently, the secret recipe of how so many documents were so quickly destroyed remained a mystery.
Unlike other nations behind the Iron Curtain, Albania did not set up a system for releasing its secret police files. Only in the last decade did the Albanian government open up the remaining archives from the Communist era—thought to be only about 10 percent of what once existed. But they reveal the secret of just how so much information disappeared so quickly: It was turned into dough.
