The Stalin-Tito rupture offered Enver Hoxha and his closest colleagues in the Albanian Party Political Bureau (Politburo) the opportunity to rid themselves of both their internal enemies, such as Koci Xoxe, and of Yugoslav domination. A few days after the Cominform resolution against Tito, the Albanian rulers expelled all Yugoslav experts and advisers and denounced most of the political, military, and economic agreements. Albania immediately established close relations with Moscow, although Stalin never signed a mutual assistance pact with Tirana, as he had done with all the other European Communist countries. The Party leadership was now concentrated in the hands of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu. Shehu had been dismissed in January 1948 as Chief of Staff of the Albanian People's Army, because he had opposed the integration of the Yugoslav and Albanian armed forces and the stationing of two Yugoslav divisions on Albanian soil. He was rehabilitated immediately after the break with Yugoslavia.
The period of direct Soviet influence in Albania began in September 1948, when the first joint economic agreement was signed. After the establishment of the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) in February 1949, of which Albania became a member, the other Soviet bloc countries began to extend economic aid. As a result, an intensified program of economic development began. From 1951 to 1955 industrial and agricultural production increased rapidly, and the basis was laid for transforming Albania from a backward agricultural economy to a more balanced agricultural-industrial one.
The de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union had serious repercussions in the internal situation in Albania. Although Hoxha vetoed any relaxation of police controls and stamped out any dissenting voice within the Party after Stalin's death, by 1956 there was a significant minority in the Party elite that hoped to profit by de-Stalinization. The opposition reached its peak at a Party conference in Tirana in April 1956, held in the aftermath of the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress. Some of the delegates, including Central Committee members, criticized openly the conditions in the Party and requested that the topics of discussion be concerned with such topics as the cult of personality, the rehabilitation of Koci Xoxe and other top Party leaders purged since 1948, Party democracy, and the people's standard of living.
Hoxha silenced the dissident elements, however, and had most of them expelled from the Party or arrested. Some were subsequently executed. Among those executed were Lira Gega, formerly a member of the Politburo, and her husband, Dalli Ndreu, a general in the Albanian People's Army. Soviet Premier Khrushchev charged at the Soviet Twenty-second Congress that Gega was pregnant when she was executed.
Workers' riots in Poland and full-scale revolt in Hungary in late 1956, followed by general uneasiness throughout Communist East Europe, gave Hoxha additional reasons to increase his control over the Party apparatus and to sidestep all pressures from Khrushchev for reconciliation with Tito. Indeed, in an article published in the November 8, 1956, issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth), Hoxha accused Yugoslavia of being at the root of the Hungarian Revolution and implied that the relaxation of internal tensions in some of the Soviet-bloc countries had endangered the existing regimes. In a speech to the Party's Central Committee in February 1957 he came openly to the defense of Stalin and lashed out against "those who attempt to discount the entire positive revolutionary side of Stalin."
Hoxha did, however, pay lip service to the collective leadership principle enunciated in Moscow after Stalin's death. In July 1954 he relinquished the premiership to Mehmet Shehu, keeping for himself the more important post of first secretary of the Party. But aside from this he made no changes in his Stalinist method of rule. He demonstrated this after the Party conference in Tirana in April 1956, when he suppressed ruthlessly all those demanding the elimination of personal rule.
Hoxha showed the same determination in the summer of 1961, when Khrushchev apparently enlisted a number of Albanian leaders, including Teme Sejko, a rear admiral and commander of the navy who had been trained in the Soviet Union to overthrow the Hoxha-Shehu duumvirate and replace it with a pro-Moscow group. Sejko and his colleagues were arrested, and he and two others were later executed.
In September of the same year Hoxha arrested a number of other top Party leaders who were suspected of pro-Moscow sympathies. Among these were Liri Belishova, a member of the Politburo, and Koco Tashko, head of the Party's Auditing Commission; these two were also cited by Khrushchev as examples of the alleged reign of terror that prevailed in Albania.
After the break with Moscow, Albania remained nominally a member of both the CEMA and the Warsaw Pact. It did not, however, attend any meetings, and it withdrew officially from the Warsaw Pact after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Unlike Albania's relations with the Communist world, which have been varied and fluctuating, those with the Western countries have been, with minor exceptions, static and rigid, particularly toward the United States. Only two major Western powers, France and Italy, initially recognized the Communist regime and established diplomatic relations with it. Proposals made in November 1945 by the American and British governments to normalize relations with the Tirana regime were never consummated, chiefly because of the regime's consistent inimical attitude toward them.
There have been three distinct periods in the history of the country under Communist rule. The first, from 1944 to 1948, was characterized by Yugoslav domination. The country's rulers, however, had no difficulty extricating themselves from this domination once Stalin broke with Tito.
In the second period, 1948 to 1961, Soviet predominance was evident everywhere in the country. All the armed and security forces wore Soviet-type uniforms. The regime copied much of the Soviet governmental system. The same kind of bureaucracy and the same secret police, functioning with the same supervision as in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, prevailed. In major branches of the government, the military, and the security forces, there were Soviet advisers and experts. The economic and cultural fields were also patterned after those of the Soviet Union. But despite this widespread penetration, the Soviets were in the last analysis unable to impose their will on the Albanian rulers, and in 1961 they withdrew completely from that country.
The third period, begun in 1961, saw the penetration of Communist Chinese influence in many aspects of political, military, and economic life. Like the Yugoslavs and Soviets before them, the Chinese introduced their advisers and experts in various governmental organs and economic enterprises, and probably in the military and security forces as well, but they were there at the invitation of the Albanian regime (see ch. 6, Government Structure and Political System).
CHAPTER 3
PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
Albania has land borders on the north and east with Yugoslavia and on the south and southeast with Greece. Tirana, the capital, is less than an hour by aircraft from eight other European capitals and barely more than two hours from the most distant of them. The coastline is adjacent to shipping lanes that have been important since early Greek and Roman times. Nevertheless, partly because of its rugged terrain and partly because of its political orientation, the country remains remote and isolated from its European neighbors (see ch. 6, Government Structure and Political System).
The large expanses of rugged and generally inaccessible terrain provided refuge for the Albanian ethnic group and permitted its distinctive identity to survive throughout the centuries. Although the country was almost always under foreign domination, it was never extensively colonized because of the lack of arable land, easily