Death to the Muscovites

For nearly everyone but Red Boss Enver Hoxha, who has desperately clung to power for 20 years, life in tiny Albania can be brutish, nasty and short. Fourteen concentration camps and a dozen jails are jammed with an estimated 30,000 prisoners--nearly 2% of the total population. The secret police favor such refinements as thumbscrews and electric cages, in which the current is gradually built up in walls and floor while the victim dances in agony.

Enver Hoxha (pronounced Ho-jah) sees enemies everywhere. He accuses neighboring Yugoslavia and Greece of planning to partition Albania between them, and he jailed an admiral of the Albanian navy (four subchasers, six minesweepers) as a collaborator in the farfetched plot. More recently he has developed a paranoid fear of Nikita Khrushchev. He apparently suspects that Khrushchev might try to bring Yugoslavia back into the Moscow fold by offering Tito a free hand to take over Albania. Hoxha has found one dependable ally, who is a safe 3,000 miles away--Red China. Alone among the European satellites, Albania openly sides with Peking in the ideological struggle between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung. Chinese military and technical missions are now installed in Albania; Chinese loans and economic aid help keep the tiny country going.

Things came to a head at a meeting of satellite leaders in Moscow last winter. Hoxha called Khrushchev a "revisionist," one of the worst epithets in the Communist lexicon, since it means not going by the book. An enraged Khrushchev shouted back: "Comrade Hoxha, you have poured a bucket of dung on me, and you will have to wash it off."

Instead, Hoxha went home to start his own kind of cleanup. He ordered Nikita Khrushchev's picture removed from all public buildings in Albania and replaced with pictures of Stalin. Russian personnel at the Soviet submarine base at Saseno on the Adriatic are constantly spied upon; Soviet pilots at the Albanian airfields under their control cannot get transport off the base. A month ago, two government officials were arrested and charged with having passed Albanian state secrets to the Russians--the first civil servants in any Communist country known to have been persecuted for collaboration with the "Socialist motherland." Yugoslav diplomats, hounded by the police and sometimes beaten and cursed, decided last month to clear out. Departing for home, one Yugoslav said that the best thing about leaving Albania was that he would "no longer see armed soldiers carting away hundreds of prisoners in the mornings, and no longer hear the screams of Albanians being shot at night." Inside the party hierarchy, Hoxha launched a thoroughgoing purge of pro-Khrushchev men. Last week the word came that Enver Hoxha had finished up his purge with a flourish by summarily executing 60 of the most prominent of his political prisoners.

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