Isolation. Poverty. Donkeys. Pyramid schemes. That's probably all that most of us could come up with about Albania. Even experts in other parts of the Soviet bloc have found it easy to neglect Albania, considering it too small, too poor, and too idiosyncratic to matter much in the history of socialist eastern Europe. The lack of a robust scholarly literature on socialist Albania has only exacerbated this tendency. With From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World, Elidor Mëhilli has made our former happy ignorance untenable. In this excellent book, Mëhilli argues that even though Albania may have been located on the periphery of the Soviet bloc, its history is anything but peripheral.
Rather than viewing Albania through the lens of its isolation, Mëhilli has written a history of Albania's engagement with the larger socialist world, from its early ties to Yugoslavia to its alliance with the Soviet Union, culminating in its decision to split with the Soviets and deepen its relationship with Mao's China. In From Stalin to Mao, Mëhilli examines socialism as a transnational network of connections that extended well beyond the interactions of political elites. These connections encompassed both the material and the ideological, ranging from people, money, and Russian-language courses to aesthetics, expertise, and a common vocabulary of administration. By highlighting these linkages, Mëhilli pushes us to see the Soviet bloc as a vital entity, not merely a mechanism for Soviet domination.
One of the hottest topics among historians of eastern Europe in recent years has been encounters between the countries of the Soviet bloc and the so-called developing world (as one example, see the article cluster in the Fall 2018 issue of this journal to which Mëhilli also contributed). Mëhilli's work takes a similar approach, extending it to consider international socialist-led development in Europe. While the Albanians considered themselves European, the Soviets and their east European allies saw them as a benighted Muslim country that needed help on the path to socialism. Modernization in Albania had been dependent on foreign money and expertise even before the establishment of the communist regime. After the end of the war, the new government of Enver Hoxha was so desperate for trained professionals that it forced Italian specialists left in the country to stay and work, sometimes for years. After the Yugoslav-Soviet split, Albania would eagerly look to the Soviets and their east European allies for assistance.
Historians of other countries in the Soviet bloc generally treat Sovietization as a violent process; as Anne Applebaum put it, it represented the “crushing” of eastern Europe. The case of Albania, Mëhilli argues, forces us to look beyond these tropes. The Albanian communists had taken power on their own; they did not need the Soviet military. For them, Sovietization brought possibility. This was a desperately poor country; most Albanians were illiterate peasants. Soviet development aid provided tangible assets, including a textile factory, a cement factory, an oil refinery and a sugar processing plant, as well as people to assist in the construction and to instruct Albanians in their operation. Throughout the 1950s, Soviet and east European experts routinely outnumbered the Albanians in their professions. In a 1956 pact on technical and scientific exchange with Bulgaria, the Bulgarians agreed to send materials and personnel on a long list of topics, from agriculture to medicine. The Albanians promised to send olive seeds. Given the tight economic situation all over the bloc, the Albanians routinely asked for more than they received: as one example, when asked to print 10,000 copies of a two-volume set of Marx and Lenin translated into Albanian, the East Germans demanded cash for the job (the Albanians declined).
In other parts of the Soviet bloc, the adoption of Soviet methods and practices was often seen as a foreign imposition; in the wake of de-Stalinization, local leaders might even characterize unpopular policies as such. In Albania, the Hoxha regime embraced Stalinist practices more than Stalin himself desired. Stalin gave Albanian leaders Georgian corn and suggested they concentrate on growing grain, olives, and citrus. The Albanians rejected Soviet advice to concentrate on agriculture and insisted on rapid industrialization. For Mëhilli, new socialist industrial enterprises, most prominently the Stalin textile complex, became a site of transnational encounter for ordinary Albanians. Workers at these factories operated in ways that their compatriots in the Polish Nowa Huta or the Hungarian Sztálinváros would have recognized. Soviet methods of working may have been foreign, but they also provided a common experience of socialism and of being socialist that united Albanians with workers elsewhere in the region.
One motif that runs throughout the book is the problem of translation, both literal and metaphysical. The Albanians were reliant on foreign expertise, but few knew Russian in the 1940s. The first contacts between Soviet and Albanian leaders were in French. Language courses increased the number of Albanians who could speak Russian or other Soviet bloc languages. Nonetheless, foreign experts might arrive in the country to find no translators available, leaving them stranded for days or weeks before they could begin their work. In any case, neither facility in Russian nor familiarity with a common language of socialism could make for perfect understanding on either side. Experts from Soviet bloc countries who came to work in Albania clashed with their hosts over what made for “adequate” work and living conditions. Some contradicted local propaganda, claiming, for example, that people were not starving in the United States. Although they needed their skills, Albanian hosts sometimes resented the superior attitudes of these experts and their exoticization of Albanian rural poverty. On the other side, Albanian students in Moscow felt alienated from their surroundings, yet upon returning home some felt their own country had become equally remote.
Mëhilli returns to architecture and urban planning throughout the book as a vehicle for exploring the problematics of exchange. Located at the nexus between the ideological and the material, the built environment reflected the difficulty of translating socialist imperatives into a specific locality. This is reflected particularly well in the Khrushchev-era attempt to adopt standardized prefabricated construction models using reinforced concrete. With Soviet encouragement, architects and builders across the bloc experimented with prefab construction in the 1950s, looking for ways to cut costs and increase production. Albanians took part in congresses and other exchanges, but found that realizing Soviet or East German blueprints (which they had copied) in Albania was impossible. A lack of materials meant that many buildings were constructed of mud bricks or panels made of populit, an Italian-derived composite of wood shavings and cement. While managers used language like “industrial methods,” unskilled, manual labor and primitive hand tools were more often the reality. The government tried to mandate innovations, like using concrete for floors and standardized five-story apartment buildings (the use of mud bricks meant that the vast majority of Albanian buildings even at the end of the 1950s were no more than two stories), but the results were decidedly mixed. Doors and windows leaked, floors were so shoddily finished they were hard to clean, and some kitchens were so tiny they could hardly hold a sink. Of course, skirting the standards to complete the plan on time was itself a common socialist phenomenon, even if it was done here in a particularly Albanian fashion.
In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a visit to Albania. In many ways, his interactions with Albanian leaders recalled those of Stalin a decade before. The Albanians asked for more money and the Soviets laughed, joked about how little the Albanians had done with previous loans, and urged them to concentrate on agriculture. The Soviets envisioned Albania as a source of fruit and other raw materials, or maybe as a place for sea vacations. The Albanians wanted to be industrially self-sufficient, just like the Soviets were. As Mëhilli argues, the causes of the Albanian-Soviet split were complicated, encompassing both ideological and geo-political factors. But at the core was a failure, despite years of interaction and a common dedication to socialism, to fully understand each other. As Hoxha wrote after a meeting in Moscow in 1957, “We all toasted and shook hands. Truth be told, the atmosphere at dinner was warm, but we felt hurt inside” (194).
From Stalin to Mao is one of the first books on socialist Albania in any language. The extraordinary research that made this book possible reflects the text's transnational emphasis; the author delved into Albanian, Russian, German, Italian, Czech, British and American archives. One side effect of these sources is that the book provides a better sense of what foreigners thought of Albania than how Albanians experienced the onslaught of socialist modernization. But that is not meant to take away from this book's tremendous achievement. From Stalin to Mao not only educates us about Albania, it gives us a new sense of what it meant to be part of a socialist world.
