|
Albania
Albania and the Soviet Union
Albania became dependent on Soviet aid and know-how after the
break with Yugoslavia in 1948. In February 1949, Albania gained
membership in the communist bloc's organization for coordinating
economic planning, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(Comecon). Tiranë soon entered into trade agreements with Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union. Soviet
and East European technical advisers took up residence in Albania,
and the Soviet Union also sent Albania military advisers and built
a submarine installation on Sazan Island. After the Soviet-Yugoslav
split, Albania and Bulgaria were the only countries the Soviet
Union could use to funnel war matériel to the communists fighting
in Greece. What little strategic value Albania offered the Soviet
Union, however, gradually shrank as nuclear arms technology developed.
Anxious to pay homage to Stalin, Albania's rulers implemented
new elements of the Stalinist economic system. In 1949 Albania
adopted the basic elements of the Soviet fiscal system, under
which state enterprises paid direct contributions to the treasury
from their profits and kept only a share authorized for self-financed
investments and other purposes. In 1951 the Albanian government
launched its first five-year plan, which emphasized exploiting
the country's oil, chromite, copper, nickel, asphalt, and coal
resources; expanding electricity production and the power grid;
increasing agricultural output; and improving transportation.
The government began a program of rapid industrialization after
the APL's Second Party Congress and a campaign of forced collectivization
of farmland in 1955. At the time, private farms still produced
about 87 percent of Albania's agricultural output, but by 1960
the same percentage came from collective or state farms.
Soviet-Albanian relations remained warm during the last years
of Stalin's life despite the fact that Albania was an economic
liability for the Soviet Union. Albania conducted all its foreign
trade with Soviet European countries in 1949, 1950, and 1951 and
over half its trade with the Soviet Union itself. Together with
its satellites, the Soviet Union underwrote shortfalls in Albania's
balance of payments with long-term grants
Although far behind Western practice, health care and education
improved dramatically for Albania's 1.2 million people in the
early 1950s. The number of Albanian doctors increased by a third
to about 150 early in the decade (although the doctorpatient ratio
remained unacceptable by most standards), and the state opened
new medical training facilities. The number of hospital beds rose
from 1,765 in 1945 to about 5,500 in 1953. Better health care
and living conditions produced an improvement in Albania's dismal
infant mortality rate, lowering it from 112.2 deaths per 1,000
live births in 1945 to 99.5 deaths per 1,000 births in 1953 (see
Medical Care and Nutrition, ch. 2). The education system, considered
a tool for propagating communism and creating the academic and
technical cadres necessary for construction of a socialist state
and society, also improved dramatically. The number of schools,
teachers, and students doubled between 1945 and 1950. Illiteracy
declined from perhaps 85 percent in 1946 to 31 percent in 1950.
The Soviet Union provided scholarships for Albanian students and
supplied specialists and study materials to improve instruction
in Albania. The Enver Hoxha University at Tiranë was founded in
1957 and the Albanian Academy of Sciences opened fifteen years
later. Despite these advances, however, education in Albania suffered
as a result of restrictions on freedom of thought. For example,
education institutions had scant influence on their own curricula,
methods of teaching, or administration
Stalin died in March 1953, and apparently fearing that the Soviet
ruler's demise might encourage rivals within the Albanian party's
ranks, neither Hoxha nor Shehu risked traveling to Moscow to attend
his funeral. The Soviet Union's subsequent movement toward rapprochement
with the hated Yugoslavs rankled the two Albanian leaders. Tiranë
soon came under pressure from Moscow to copy, at least formally,
the new Soviet model for a collective leadership. In July 1953,
Hoxha handed over the foreign affairs and defense portfolios to
loyal followers, but he kept both the top party post and the premiership
until 1954, when Shehu became Albania's prime minister. The Soviet
Union, responding with an effort to raise the Albanian leaders'
morale, elevated diplomatic relations between the two countries
to the ambassadorial level.
Despite some initial expressions of enthusiasm, Hoxha and Shehu
mistrusted Nikita Khrushchev's programs of "peaceful coexistence"
and "different roads to socialism" because they appeared to pose
the threat that Yugoslavia might again try to take control of
Albania. Hoxha and Shehu were also alarmed at the prospect that
Moscow might prefer less dogmatic rulers in Albania. Tiranë and
Belgrade renewed diplomatic relations in December 1953, but Hoxha
refused Khrushchev's repeated appeals to rehabilitate posthumously
the pro-Yugoslav Xoxe as a gesture to Tito. The Albanian duo instead
tightened their grip on their country's domestic life and let
the propaganda war with the Yugoslavs grind on. In 1955 Albania
became a founding member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (see
Glossary), better known as the Warsaw Pact, the only military
alliance the nation ever joined. Although the pact represented
the first promise Albania had obtained from any of the communist
countries to defend its borders, the treaty did nothing to assuage
the Albanian leaders' deep mistrust of Yugoslavia.
Hoxha and Shehu tapped the Albanians' deep-seated fear of Yugoslav
domination to remain in power during the thaw following the Twentieth
Party Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union's in
1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes in his "secret
speech." Hoxha defended Stalin and blamed the Titoist heresy for
the troubles vexing world communism, including the disturbances
in Poland and the rebellion in Hungary in 1956. Hoxha mercilessly
purged party moderates with pro-Soviet and pro-Yugoslav leanings,
but he toned down his anti-Yugoslav rhetoric after an April 1957
trip to Moscow, where he won cancellation of about US$105 million
in outstanding loans and about US$7.8 million in additional food
assistance. By 1958, however, Hoxha was again complaining about
Tito's "fascism" and "genocide" against Albanians in Kosovo. He
also grumbled about a Comecon plan for integrating the East European
economies, which called for Albania to produce agricultural goods
and minerals instead of emphasizing development of heavy industry.
On a twelve-day visit to Albania in 1959, Khrushchev reportedly
tried to convince Hoxha and Shehu that their country should aspire
to become socialism's "orchard."
Data as of April 1992
|
