In the two-year period 1955-56, the rapprochement between the USSR and Yugoslavia had re-proposed to the Albania the problems that had led to the break with the neighboring republic in 1948 and, therefore, the search for new international support. The Sino-Soviet controversy in the 1960s provided the way for Albanian leaders to change their country’s international position. During the IV congress of the Party of Labor of Albania (PLA), in February 1961, Enver Hoxha condemned the Yugoslav attitude that endangered Albanian security. The concrete element of the Sino-Albanian rapprochement occurred in April 1961 with the conclusion of the economic-commercial negotiations by which the Albania obtained Chinese technical assistance in the chemical, metallurgical, electrical, construction and light industry sectors. As a result of the new course, there were internal radiations from the party and shifts of offices, while, again in 1961, a trial against pro-Yugoslav leaders accused of having tried to overthrow the regime ended with four death sentences and five prison sentences. Communist. At the same time, the XXII Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (October 1961), accusing Stalin and the Stalinists, condemned the Albanian attitude with terms that were unprecedented in the international communist movement. To react to the progressive disengagement from the USSR (on which the Albanian economy had depended up to that moment) and from the other communist countries, the Albania it was oriented towards a coexistentialist openness towards Western countries, overcoming the obstacles posed by the diversity of political systems. On the basis of this line, a commercial agreement was concluded with Italy (1961, then renewed in 1971) and with Greece (1970), regular diplomatic relations were established with Switzerland (1970), with Belgium (1970) and with Tunisia (1973).
Even after the fall of Khrushchev and the temporary easing of the Sino-Soviet tension, the political action of Tirana in the international field has maintained its autonomy, thanks also to the compactness and internal unity in the Stalinist and pro-Chinese orientation, obtained by leveraging on national sentiment and on the atavistic fear of absorption by neighboring Yugoslavia. A particularly incisive moment of the Albanian action to break the alignment of the Communist countries and parties linked to the USSR came in 1965 when Hoxha, in front of the delegations of the states linked to China, of the “neutral” Romania, of the “heretical” factions of various Western Communist parties, accused Khrushchev and the Soviet leaders of persecuting the PLA: only a recognition of the errors by the Soviets would have made it possible to return to normal diplomatic and political relations. Since this recognition was objectively impossible, Tirana accentuated its dissent, refusing the invitation to the Warsaw Pact conference for a policy of common aid to Vietnam.
According to topschoolsintheusa, the 5th Congress of the PLA (1966) attacked, following the Chinese example, the remnants of the “exploiting” classes and bourgeois ideology, decisively condemning revisionism and denouncing attempts at capitalist restoration. The congress, always following the Chinese example, decreed the beginning, albeit in a nuanced way, of a cultural revolution whose immediate consequences were the reduction in the number of ministers (from 19 to 13), the suppression of numerous administrative bodies (from 400 to 290), the curtailment of the salaries of senior state and party officials; some officials and intellectuals were assigned to agricultural work. All this also responded to objective economic needs due to that isolation from the Balkan context and the world socialist system, determined by reasons of insecurity, which had found ideological cover in the polemic against revisionism. The VI congress of the PLA (1-7 November 1971) consecrated the continuity and stability within, reaffirmed the ideological and political solidarity with People’s China alongside which the Albania, in 1968, had condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia while the National Assembly had voted to withdraw the country from the Warsaw Pact, at whose meetings the Albanian leaders had not attended since 1962. The entry of China itself to the UN was highlighted as a success of Albanian political action in the international field. The congress did not, however, deviate from the proverbial tones of the controversy that for years has divided the communist world: condemnation of American imperialism and Soviet “social-imperialism”;
Unchanged the lines of foreign policy (refusal to participate in the pre-conference in Helsinki in 1972), in domestic politics, after the 1974 elections, a new government was formed from which the Minister of Defense Bekir Balluku, one of the men, was excluded. more in sight of the regime since its formation. That of Balluku can be considered the third purge in the history of the Albania Communist after the liquidation of the Titoites (Koci Xoxe in 1948) and of the pro-Soviet (L. Belisova and others in 1961). The Defense Minister was eliminated as a staunch supporter of close ties with Beijing after the cooling of Sino-Albanian relations following the semi-reconciliation between People’s China and the United States of America. The unknowns weighing on the Balkan region and the eastern Mediterranean have suggested, on the one hand, a rapprochement with Yugoslavia and Greece and on the other the dismissal, in 1975, of some ministers (A. Kellezi, Minister of Planning and President of the Association for Sino-Albanian Friendship; K. Theodosi, Minister dell’Industria and K. Ngjele, Minister of Foreign Trade) in favor of ties with China and the expansion of trade relations with Western Europe. In January 1976 the text of the new Constitution was published in Tirana, which must replace the one launched in 1946. For the new Constitution, the to. it is a “socialist” People’s Republic where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” continues to be exercised and where the PLA also formally assumes the task of directing the state and society; the Constitution provides for the fight against bureaucratization.
