Does the ethnic designation applied by an authoritarian regime to minority populations explain variation in identity transmission over time? A common assumption about authoritarian regimes is that they are unilaterally intolerant of diversity; however, some of the world’s most brutal dictators implemented real protections for some minority groups. For instance, the Albanian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, built group rights into the Albanian constitution (1945) and then, had published at point of death a 450-page tribute to his protections for the Greek minority. The tribute is propagandistic, but also demarcates an actual difference in policy toward a specific group of people, who he deemed territorially as “the Greek minority.” Hoxha’s minority identity engineering policy was carried out between 1945-1985, and lightened in its enforcement after Hoxha’s death, but still, is in the constitution and in many ways, reproduced today. The puzzle behind my motivation for this project is: how does one forge a political identity in a post-communist setting after your family has been told their ethnopolitical identity by the state for 50+ years? With the vantage points of (1) historical information for a baseline and (2) people who survived the policy, across state-designated ethnic groups, my paper poses a natural experiment design to uncover the longer-term impacts of the identity engineering on identity transmission approaches taken by the impacted populations. I hypothesize that the Greek minority identity in Albania is predominantly an ethnic feature of communist-era Albania which continues to be transmitted politically alongside leftist ideologies in post-communist Albania.