Ramiz Alia, a cult-of-personality enforcer who succeeded Albania’s Communist dictator Enver Hoxha after his death in 1985 and presided over halting and often chaotic moves toward democracy before his own downfall in 1992, died Friday. He was 85.

His death was announced by a spokeswoman for Albania’s president, Bamir Topi, in Tirana, the capital. Further details were not released. Alia’s whereabouts had remained unclear in recent years.

Alia had carried out many of the crackdowns, purges and executions ordered by Hoxha — resorting even to the Stalinist horrors of burying enemies alive — over decades of repression and Albanian isolation from the outside world.

But when he succeeded to the presidency, he responded to widespread discontent by introducing limited economic reforms, easing restrictions on religion and civil liberties, and seeking ties with Western Europe and the Balkan states.

Nevertheless, his government began to crumble in 1989 and 1990 during the wider collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Communism. Alia managed to cling to power for two more years by granting amnesty to political prisoners, allowing multiparty elections and promising other democratic reforms — a complete about-face from his years as the provost of repression, censorship and internal controls.

But it was too little, too late. Albania, then Europe’s most backward and impoverished country, continued to lurch from crisis to crisis with a dying economy, violent protests and masses of citizens fleeing abroad. Albania’s Communist government, the last in Europe, disintegrated in 1991, and Alia resigned in 1992. He was soon arrested.

Convicted of corruption in 1994, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. He served only a year but was arrested again in 1996, this time on genocide charges. Before he could be tried, however, Albania descended into anarchy in 1997.