The Constituent Assembly, elected on December 2, 1945, proclaimed on January 11, 1946, the People's Republic of Albania; and on March 14 it approved the first Albanian Constitution, based largely on the Yugoslav Communist Constitution. In this first Constitution no mention of any kind was made of the role played by the Party or any other political organizations. The Constitution was, however, amended after the break with Yugoslavia in 1948, and revisions of the Constitution published since 1951 have cited in Article 12 the Albanian Workers' Party as the "vanguard organization of the working class." The Communist regime quickly consolidated its power through a ruthless application of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The first measures were both political and economic. In the political field a large number of nationalist leaders who had chosen to remain in the country when the Communists seized power rather than flee to the West, as many of them did, were arrested, tried as "war criminals" or "enemies of the people," and were either executed or given long-term sentences at hard labor. All families considered potentially dangerous to the new regime, especially families of the landed aristocracy and the tribal chieftains, were herded into concentration or labor camps, in which most of them perished from exposure, malnutrition, and lack of health facilities. Some of these camps were still in existence in 1970. In the economic field a special war-profits tax was levied, which amounted to a confiscation of the wealth and private property of the well-to-do classes. A large number of those who could not pay the tax, because it was higher than their cash and property assets, were sent to labor camps. All industrial plants and mines were nationalized without compensation, and a radical agrarian reform law was passed providing for the seizure of land belonging to the _beys_ and other large landowners and its distribution to the landless peasants. The 1944-48 period was characterized by an increase of power and influence of the Yugoslavs over the Party and the government. This in turn engendered resentment even among some top Party Leaders, who were kept in check or purged by Koci Xoxe, minister of interior and head of the secret police. Backed by the Yugoslavs, he had become the most powerful man in the Party and government but was tried in the spring of 1949 as a Titoist and executed. By the beginning of 1948 preparations had been completed to merge Albania with Yugoslavia, but the plan was not consummated because of the Stalin-Tito conflict, which resulted in Tito's expulsion from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform--see Glossary) on June 28. 1948.