Word: albania
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...Needle. There were additional worries for Khrushchev in Albania, whose tough, Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, loves to needle him. Last week, after a show trial that featured abject confessions in old Stalinist tradition, Hoxha, who openly prefers Mao to Khrushchev' shot four Communist Party officials for "spying." The trial got not a word in the Russian press. Reason: though the spies were accused of working for "Greek monarchist-fascists, Yugoslav revisionists and American imperialists," they were actually Khrushchev sympathizers...
Russia also was having acute satellite trouble in Albania, the tiny backward outpost in the Adriatic that has repudiated Soviet leadership as "revisionist" and sided with the tough Red Chinese. Last week the outside world learned that Albania's Communist leaders executed two of their own Foreign Office officials as spies-for Russia...
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...
...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...