Word: albania
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...climate for this week's meeting has been improved by Chinese Premier Chou En-lai's apparent decision not to visit Albania, Rumania and Yugoslavia this fall. For several months, Moscow had grumbled about the formation of a sort of pro-Peking Tirana-Bucharest-Belgrade axis. Moscow was even dropping ominous hints of military intervention against Rumania and Yugoslavia, but the Russians now seem to have cooled off. After Belgrade, Brezhnev's next whistlestop is Paris in late October...
...guess we have lost Albania," said Nikita Khrushchev to a Chinese delegation in 1961, "and you have gained an important ally." Khrushchev, of course, was being heavily sarcastic after Albania's party boss Enver Hoxha sided with the Chinese against the Soviet revisionists. But ever since Albania has been China's sole friend in Europe. And for the last decade it has been as angry and insulated as Peking itself. Now, following China's lead, Albania is gradually looking outward. It has established trade and diplomatic relations with its long-estranged neighbors, Greece and Yugoslavia...
...shops that feature more slogans than merchandise. The cafes are eternally packed with workers in shirtsleeves who sip Turkish coffee and pass the time in endless conversation in apparent defiance of the Communist Party's credo of hard work. It is a pedestrian's heaven; Albania is quite possibly the most earless country anywhere. The people are suspicious, curious, unsmiling-testimony to the effectiveness of Party Boss Hoxha's motto: "It is fear that guards the vineyard...
Western fads are not tolerated. After the surly, green-uniformed customs officials have finished their examinations, visitors arriving at Tirana's bucolic, one-strip airport are immediately advised that socialist Albania frowns on long hair, shorts or deep décolletage. "We don't need hash, long hair or jazz music," one crew-cut student told a modishly dressed but severely disillusioned Italian Maoist in our group, pointing to his body-hugging Via Veneto shirt, bell-bottom jeans and wide belt. "A socialist does not dress like an American cowboy." A Swedish girl, who ventured...
...outgrowth of that conference, Literaturnaya Gazeta, a leading Soviet weekly, last week reprinted a Polish article rebuking Rumania for taking a neutral position in the Chinese-Soviet dispute. In an even harsher tone-the official Hungarian daily Magyar Hirlap reported that Chinese Premier Chou En-lai would visit Albania, Yugoslavia and Rumania this fall. Since all three nations have asserted varying degrees of independence from Moscow, the Budapest paper warned that Chou's junket "has an anti-Soviet edge." For the first time, the paper also spoke of a "Tirana-Belgrade-Bucharest" axis...