Communists: Independent Dummy

Before the Sino-Soviet split became public, Peking used little Albania as a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Albania’s fiercely anti-Khrushchev rulers said all the nasty things about Moscow that the Chinese obviously wanted to say themselves. Since Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster amid signs of a Russian-Chinese thaw, the Communist world—and its observers in the West—have wondered whether the Albanian line might soften. Last week came the answer: not a bit.

Pravda and Izvestia printed friendly articles about Albania, and the Soviet Union dispatched fraternal greetings on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the “liberation” of Albania from Axis occupation. It was wasted effort. Albania flexed its puny muscles with an 85-minute parade through Tirana’s normally trafficless streets, and the military display included a few rockets, probably donated by Red China. Albanian Party Boss Enver Hoxha ranted his way through a three-hour speech hailing the removal of Khrushchev but blasting the new Soviet leadership for its failure to rehabilitate Stalin, who, said Hoxha, was a great Marxist-Leninist even though “he may have committed some small errors.” Hoxha sneered that the new Soviet leaders “would like to have us Albanians go to Moscow and bow before them because we are a small country while they represent a big country. They are much mistaken.”

On hand were delegates from pro-Chinese splinter parties in Western Europe and Peking-controlled Communist parties in North Viet Nam, North Korea, Indonesia, Japan and, of all places, New Zealand. Rumania and Cuba also sent delegates, indicating an interesting degree of independence from Moscow. None of the other, normally pro-Moscow parties attended. Peking meanwhile rejected another Moscow invitation for a meeting of the worldwide Communist movement.

But even the somber Chinese seemed to be displaying a sense of humor in the matter of Albania. Peking’s People’s Daily declared that the “comradeship in arms” between China and Albania “is as deep as the Adriatic and as sublime as the Himalayas.” The Himalayas are sublime, all right, but the Adriatic Sea, which washes the shores of Albania, is notorious for its shallowness.