Europe’s Last Stalinists

The more things change, as the French say, the more they stay the same. In Eastern Europe tyrants fall, the governing doctrines of decades are abandoned in the wink of an eye, dissidents who were in jail one day become national leaders the next.

Ah, but in the mountainous little Adriatic state of Albania, life, such as it is, goes on as pretty much as it has since the Communists seized power in 1944. Like Brigadoon, only a mean and brutal Brigadoon, Albania stays frozen in time.

Ramiz Alia, who became the country’s boss in 1985, has vowed in a New Year’s statement that Albania won’t be affected by the upheavals in other Communist states. Lest that dire promise plunge 3 million Albanians into utter despondency, Alia hastened to add that 1990 should see improvements in supplies of food and consumer goods.

Of course, anyone who expects to enjoy material improvements had better be prepeared to work even harder and put up with “economic austerity measures” everywhere. In Albania, the system remains defiantly Stalinist and so does the rhetoric. Albanians can take some comfort in recalling that things were just the same in Romania, right up to the moment when an explosion of popular wrath made a liar out of another dictator who had sworn that nothing would change.