Following the Communist partisan victory over occupying Axis forces and domestic rivals, the assembly declared Albania a republic and stripped exiled King Zog of any claim to the throne. Enver Hoxha's government would rule the country as one of the most isolated Stalinist states in the world for over four decades.
Albania emerged from World War II fractured and impoverished, having been occupied first by Italy and then Nazi Germany, with a resistance movement dominated by Communist partisans under Enver Hoxha. King Zog, who had fled the country in 1939, never returned, and by January 1946 his monarchy existed only on paper.
On January 11, 1946, Albania's Constituent Assembly, elected the previous month in a vote tightly controlled by the Communist-dominated Democratic Front, formally proclaimed the People's Republic of Albania. The declaration abolished the monarchy outright and set the constitutional foundation for one-party rule.
Hoxha would go on to lead Albania for the next 40 years, steering it through an extraordinarily isolated path: breaking with Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union, then even China, and littering the countryside with hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers built in anticipation of invasions that never came. Albania remained one of the most closed societies in Europe until Communism collapsed there in the early 1990s.