UPHEAVAL IN ROMANIA : Albania--Stalinism’s Last Outpost : East Bloc: Experts predict reform will be difficult to achieve in the isolationist country.

The fall of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu leaves only Albania as the final remnant of Stalinism surviving in Europe, but those who know the small, isolated nation across the Adriatic Sea from the boot of Italy predict that reform there will be extremely difficult to achieve.

Indeed, for much of the period since World War II, the Maryland-sized country seemed to have reveled in an uncompromising political and physical isolation from its European neighbors.

In a major statement last month, Albania’s hard-line Communist leader Ramiz Alia blamed the collapse of Communist regimes elsewhere in the region on ill-conceived reforms which had undermined socialism.

“They are restoring the laws of the capitalist type of society with all the consequences that accompany them,” he said of the changes in the former hard-line Communist countries of East Germany, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.

The statement fit well for a party that in the 1960s found the de-Stalinization efforts of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev so repugnant that it broke with Moscow and found in Mao Tse-tung’s Communist China as an ideological soul-mate.

Alia added in another speech only last Saturday: “There are foreigners who ask: ‘Will Albania experience such processes as those occurring in Eastern Europe?’ We answer in a clear and categorical way: ‘No.’ ”

American clergyman Arthur Liolin, who returned from Albania earlier this month after a visit that included a meeting with Alia, said he detected a desire for change among many of those he met, but believed the country’s long isolation from the world around it still provided a powerful buffer.

“From what I saw, there is no mechanism or alternative for power at this time because Albania has been a very closed society,” said Liolin, a priest with an Albanian Orthodox church in Boston.

Milenko Babic, editor of the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug’s world radio service, noted reports of minor anti-government disturbances in Albania’s second largest city of Shkoder earlier this month, but he doubted this signaled the start of any wider unrest.

“We had some information that people gathered and tried to shout some anti-government slogans, but I doubt there can be an explosion,” he said in a telephone interview from Belgrade. “The party is too strong, the police is too strong. Everyone is under control.”

Commented a U.S. diplomat, “With the changes in Romania, Albania is the worst remaining human rights violator in Europe. There is very little emigration, almost no travel permitted, although some travel groups of Albanian descent are allowed to visit.”

Certainly any opponents to Alia’s regime would find it harder to generate support than those who have brought down other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Diplomats and other analysts familiar with Albania stressed several factors working in Alia’s favor.

The leadership’s historically aggressive attitudes toward its neighboring countries has enhanced an isolation imposed by the Continent’s toughest travel restrictions.

Continuously sparring with Yugoslavia to the north, a state of war technically existed with the country’s southern neighbor, Greece, for 47 years before it was finally lifted two years ago.

A 1946 incident involving British ships in the Corfu Channel off the Albanian coast still simmers as a reason for the lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

Such policies make the outside world a terrifying place to most of Albania’s 3 million citizens.

With none of the ethnic minorities to act as a bridge to neighboring countries--as they did in Romania--and foreign radio and television programming jammed until very recently, there has been little chance for an influx of new ideas. Albania is also a rare East European country where organizations such as the British Broadcasting Corp.’s World Service and Radio Free Europe transmit no local language programming.

While other Communist countries eventually altered their Stalinist systems following the Soviet dictator’s death, Albania never did. It found no reason to do so.

One Soviet editor quipped to a colleague at a recent Moscow cocktail party when asked about the fate of Albania: “We should preserve it as a museum, so people will know what communism was supposed to be.”

The country’s largely rural population of just over 3 million also makes any political mobilization difficult. Most towns in the country have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants.

Remote and underdeveloped by European standards, Albania languished for five centuries as part of the Turkish Empire until it became free briefly in 1912, only to be invaded by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1939.

An ardent Communist named Enver Hoxha established an independent government in 1944 and ruled the country with an iron hand and an independent, stubborn spirit until his death in 1985.

Hoxha survived several plots against him, including an invasion by a group of exiles in 1982, and the year before, a rumored gunfight in which his premier, Mehmet Shehu tried to assassinate him. Shehu either killed himself or was executed. Other rivals were disposed of in the same, typical Stalinist fashion.

Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Paris, Barry Stavro in Los Angeles and Michael Parks in Moscow contributed to this report.