Over the Hill
Like Dante's Inferno, Communism has its different levels of horror and misery. At the bottom of the pit, by almost any measure, lies Albania. Last week a Cabinet minister of Albania's still strongly Stalinist government, Major General Panajot Plaku, fled his rugged country, at night crept along mountain paths he had known as a partisan in World War II, and crossed into Yugoslavia. Plaku is the most important ranking Communist among the 5,000 to 6,000 Albanians who have fled his benighted country since the war.
Since Tito's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948, Albania has been Moscow's only isolated satellite. Its 1,250,000 people, largely dirt poor and illiterate, are ruled by 48,000 Communists, who in turn owe allegiance to the handsome and savagely cruel Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. Except for an occasional Soviet submarine putting in at Albania's Saseno naval base,* and risky air communications across mountainous and hostile Greece and Yugoslavia, Albania has no contact with the Soviet world. It has almost none with
Before Tito's break with Moscow, Albania's Communist Party was an appendage of Belgrade. The 1949 split led to anguished choices in Albania. Communists loyal to Moscow and those loyal to Tito engaged in bitter no-quarter warfare in which whole families were wiped out. Hoxha, who chose Stalin instead of Tito and came out on top, at one point acknowledged that 12,000 party members had been expelled or had "deserted" to Yugoslavia.
Of all the satellites, Albanians the only one where there was no easing up after Stalin's death, and when Moscow made friends with Tito two years ago, Albania conspicuously did not join the comradeship. In fact, whenever Moscow wants to show its contempt of Tito, it lets Albania's Dictator Hoxha denounce him, and then lengthily quotes Hoxha in Pravda. This is doubly humiliating because Tito detests Hoxha, and believes that if he is to be shot at, Moscow might at least use heavier artillery.
Few weeks ago, at an Albanian banquet in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev made it plain that he wants Hoxha to fire off no more blasts at Tito. This was Khrushchev's way of indicating that he was prepared to resume the friendship with Tito that was interrupted by the revolt in Hungary.
Just where escaped Major General Plaku fits in all this, the outside world could not know. But if, as is probable, he was a Titoist intriguer in Albania who fled because he feared he had been discovered, his appearance in Belgrade at this moment was a little embarrassing to his host. Tito was just getting ready to send his own Defense Minister to Russia, and hurriedly hustled Plaku out of sight.
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