ALBANIA: STALIN'S HEIR

Charging angrily that Albania "deliberately keeps aggravating relations with the Soviet Union," Russia last week ordered its ambassador in Tirana to pack up and come home. In turn, Albania's ambassador was ordered out of Moscow, while the two countries traded accusations of having bugged each other's embassies. It was the first time that two Red nations severed diplomatic relations (not even in 1948, when Stalin had his furious break with Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, were diplomatic ties ruptured).

Ever since the 22nd Party Congress, when Khrushchev publicly denounced Albania for its defiance of his anti-Stalin line, the tiny country has been the surrogate through which Moscow and Peking have fought each other. By formally breaking with Albania, Khrushchev is now serving notice that he will not conciliate Peking, is forcing the Red Chinese either to come to heel or else publicly widen the split. Meanwhile. Albania gleefully continues to defy Moscow as Europe's last enclave of Stalin-style Communism.

Peeling Gumshoes. Elsewhere in Communist Europe, the once familiar busts and images have disappeared, but recent visitors to Albania, notably a group of German journalists, still find the old Stalin pictures--and the old Stalin touch--in a ramshackle Balkan setting. In the capital city of Tirana, wide Skanderbeg Square boasts three white-uniformed traffic cops on duty--but no traffic for them to direct. Heavily-armed police and soldiers stand guard before ministries and embassies, on street corners, in parks, in front of and behind hotels. Other guards, toting machine guns, pace before the residences of top Red officials to protect them from "overenthusiastic admirers.''

In addition to men in uniform, Tirana swarms with plainclothes Sigurimi, Albania's secret police, whose "interrogation'' methods range from the use of poisonous snakes to an ingenious electric cage that shocks the prisoner when he tries to straighten up or sit down. According to a United Nations survey, 80,000 of Albania's 1,700,000 citizens were thrown into concentration camps between 1945 and 1956, and 16,000 died there. Last spring, a dozen Albanian army and navy officers were tried, in an improvised courtroom in Tirana's Partisan Cinema, as pro-Soviet conspirators. Found guilty, they were marched right off to an adjacent vacant lot and executed by a firing squad.

To the occasional tourist, the Sigurimi appear more comic than lethal. Whole platoons of gumshoes peel off two by two to shadow individual visitors. Any attempt to talk to an Albanian results in his being shouldered out of earshot by an agent. One tourist on the beach at Durres succeeded in evading his shadow by swimming out beyond the breakers to accost an Albanian girl in a bikini. The girl, treading water, said: "I would like to have a long talk with you, but you must know that in this country it is impossible."

Visitors seldom detect any Albanian tendency to criticize the government or the country's backwardness--and the Sigurimi are not the only reason. Traditionally proud, suspicious of foreigners, filled with a clannish loyalty, Albanians reply to complaints about their country with fierce anger. "That's the way it is," the average Albanian will splutter. "You just have to understand us."

This same national touchiness is continually displayed by Red Boss Enver Hoxha, and represents much of his strength. Albanians have a Mediterranean fondness for florid and denunciatory speeches, and Hoxha is recognized even by his enemies as a master of this sort of oratory. Tall and handsome, with thick, pomaded hair now greying at the temples, Hoxha draws stormy applause for his insults to Khrushchev.

Hoxha's picture is plastered on just about every wall in the land. His profile adorns Albania's monetary unit, the lek, and at meetings of the Communist Central Committee (most of whom are related to each other and to the boss by blood or marriage) Hoxha speaks from a podium decorated with a plaster bust of himself. Like his country, Hoxha is full of surprises. Instead of being a rough, tough mountain chieftain, he is a former schoolteacher and was the pampered son of a well-to-do Moslem merchant. Though he has the mentality of a brigand, his manners are those of a cultivated bourgeois and reflect his education at universities in France and Belgium.

The Jet Class. During World War II, Hoxha seized the leadership of a Communist guerrilla band and not only cleared Albania of Italian invaders but also eliminated rival guerrillas. He literally slit throats among his own followers--of the 14 members of the first Central Committee, Hoxha is the only survivor.

His pocket-Stalinist regime has done little for Albania's limp economy. The few paved roads and sizable buildings are relics of the Italian occupation. There are no private cars or buses; Albanians travel from village to village by donkey or in open trucks. The only railroad is scarcely 70 miles long, and the main seaport at Durres can unload only one ship at a time. -

The most striking contrast is between the poverty of the masses and the grotesque luxury of the Communist elite. There is no middle ground between the peasant donkey cart and the chauffeur-driven Mercedes from the state motor pool. Farm land is almost totally collectivized, and most peasants are virtually paid off with a lek and a promise. Tirana has a TV transmitter that broadcasts to a total of 200 TV sets owned by party officials. Albanian workers patch holes in their trousers with bits of vulcanized rubber, but in the new "jet class" "the men wear Italian-cut suits, and the girls have flaring cocktail dresses.

Chip on Shoulder. Soviet and satellite technicians have been replaced by Red Chinese experts since the break with Moscow. The Chinese draw the same low wages as their Albanian counterparts and earnestly spend their free time studying the difficult native language, but most of the xenophobic Albanians regard them as something straight out of a zoo. Chinese films are being shown at the numerous open-air cinemas (one visitor commented that Albania has "drive-in movies for pedestrians"), and in the darkness students frequently boo and whistle at the heavy propaganda.

Albania has repeatedly defied giant neighbors from Rome to the Byzantine Empire to the all-conquering Turks. Even under Communism it seems to have lost none of its old talent for chip-on-the-shoulder recklessness. But whether or not Enver Hoxha will get away with it depends not on him but upon decisions being made in faraway Red China. For what is at issue is not the submission of Albania to Khrushchev but that of Peking. For the time being, Hoxha continued to denounce Khrushchev as a traitor to Marxism, while Red China's Peking Review proclaimed: "Albania will always stand like a giant holding the southwestern outpost of the Socialist camp."

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