In his book From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World, published last November, Elidor Mëhilli gives a detailed history of soviet Albania post-World War II and its unique position in the Cold War era.
During a presentation of his book at New York University, Mëhilli described Albania as “one of the less researched and less published about” countries in the Soviet bloc. He found the lack of literature about communist-era history, and in particular about communist Albania “astonishing.”
“There was a gap,” Mëhilli said. “There was a story that needed to be told.”
Mëhilli’s book is a study on the history of socialism in Eastern Europe through the lens of Albania and its alliances during the Cold War. From the end of World War II and until 1992, Albania had a Marxist-Leninist government that intermittently relied on Soviet and Chinese support. It was the latter that made Albania’s trajectory so peculiar: it was the only country among the Soviet satellite states that supported China in the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, after which Russia and China broke relations over differences in socialist doctrinal beliefs.
Albania signed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, aligning itself with the communist Eastern Bloc, but it eventually clashed with the Soviet Union on an ideological front. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s head of state, thought the Soviets were veering away from the strict Stalinist-style socialism that he admired. Albania finally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in 1968 after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Hoxha condemned.
In spite of its physical proximity to the Soviet Union, and being surrounded by Soviet satellite states such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania, Albania was able to align itself ideologically and financially with China.
Mëhilli started his research in 2008, when he was 26 and working on his doctoral thesis. To get primary sources for his book he spent eight years sifting through thousands of documents in various historical archives in Albania, New York and Germany, among other locations. He even managed to access previously restricted communist party archives and secret police documents in Tirana and Berlin.
The first part of the book deals with Soviet influence on Albania. One of the book’s main takeaways is that the Albanians did not know how to build a socialist government and were initially dependent on Soviet officials’ direction. The second part compares different nations belonging to the communist “Eastern Bloc,” such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and how each of them conceptualized and practiced socialism.
“I wanted to capture socialism as an official and unofficial traffic of ideas, people, industrial goods, technologies — so through the lens of exchange,” Mëhilli said. “But I also wanted to capture the other Eastern Bloc nations. I wanted to see Albania as a site of contact, not just with the Soviets and the Chinese, but also with East Germans, with Poles, with Czechoslovaks.”
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