SOCIAL STRATIFICATION UNDER COMMUNIST RULE The general class structure of the country at the advent of the Communist regime in 1944 consisted of the peasants and workers making up the lower class and a small upper class. The peasants represented over 80 percent of the total population, most of whom lived at or below subsistence level. Chiefly because of the old grievances against the landowning _beys_ and the promises made by the National Liberation Movement (which presented itself as a purely patriotic, democratic movement for agrarian reforms), a large number of peasants, especially the tenant and landless ones, sided with the movement (see ch. 1, General Character of the Society). Nonagricultural workers numbered about 30,000 persons, most of whom worked in mines and in the small handicraft industries. The movement found strong support from this group also. The upper class comprised professional people and intellectuals; medium and small merchants; moneylenders; and well-to-do artisans, whose capital was invested mostly in trade, commerce, and the Italian industrial concessions. The industrialists also belonged to this class; they owned very small industries and workshops. Both the _beys_ and the tribal chiefs of the north had been somewhat reduced in importance politically and economically during Zog's rule, but it was chiefly from these two groups that Zog created the ruling elite that helped him to control the country until the Italian invasion in 1939. The clergy of the three religious denominations did not form a distinct social group. The higher clergy was intellectual and upper class in structure; it supported the ruling elite but did not mix in politics after Bishop Fan Noli, leader of a short-lived reformist government, was driven out of the country in 1924. The income from the fairly extensive church estates and the state subsidies provided a good, but not luxurious, living for the higher clergy. The rank-and-file clergy, however, were derived from peasant origins, and most of their parishes were as impoverished as the peasant households they served. The events immediately preceding and following the Communist seizure of power forebode the doom not only of the _beys_ and tribal chiefs but also of most of the upper class and intellectuals, who had refused to collaborate with the National Liberation Movement. In the summer and fall of 1944, while civil war was raging between the Communist-controlled partisan formations and anti-Communist bands, nearly all the influential _beys_ and _bajraktars_ either fell in battle or fled the country; those who remained were quickly rounded up by the Communist security forces and subsequently tried as "enemies of the people" (see ch. 2, Historical Setting).