COLUMN ONE : A Nation of Fearful Whispers : Albania is still caught in the icy grip of Stalinism. Despite a few small changes, its Communist regime has been softened hardly at all by the thaw in Eastern Europe.

It was nearly midnight, and rain fell as an Albanian stood under an umbrella and talked to a stranger, an American, about forbidden things. All at once, he stopped.

“Policia!” he whispered. Then he turned and walked off.

Two policemen strode past and caught up with him, escorting him into the shadows of an alley.

A few days later, by chance, he saw the American again. The police had held him for more than an hour, he said. But he had been lucky: They only slapped him in the face a few times before letting him go.

He was not an obvious dissident, but the dissidents who do walk Tirana’s streets at night are more careful. They avoid the two foreign tourist hotels where the police keep watch. And in their tiny apartments, when they talk about their hatred for the government, they first close their windows.

This is a nation still caught in the icy grip of Stalinism. It is a country whose Communist regime has been softened hardly at all by the thaw in repression across the rest of Eastern Europe.

There have been a few changes this year: For the first time, Albanians can telephone outside the country, and those wishing to visit other nations can do so, the government says. But it is still hard for outsiders to come here. Albania, which has 3.3 million people, allowed in only about 14,000 foreigners last year. Of that total, probably no more than 1,000 were Americans, and nearly all those had relatives to see.

The government talks about change, but there is still suspicion in the streets. The countryside remains dotted with cement bunkers shaped like mushroom caps, with moss and grass growing over them as camouflage--mementos from the 1960s, when Albania feared a Soviet invasion.

Albania wants to resume diplomatic relations with the United States and with the Soviet Union. After years of antagonism toward both, what the Tirana regime now wants is money. Soviet buyers, a Western diplomat says, might sop up some low-quality Albanian goods, and the Americans might offer economic aid.

Albania is the poorest country in Europe, with a per capita income of $930 a year, and life here is a daily battle of coping with shortages. Only a few of the shops with Mish over the door have meat for sale. The meat is delivered frozen, packed in boxes and stacked on the floor. Some stores have frozen chickens, some have nothing.

At the Fruta shops, there are vegetables, but the only fruit is inside the jars of marmalade. At kerosene shops, dozens stand in line with cans and plastic bottles to buy gas for their tiny cooking stoves.

Cut off even from its onetime close ally China, which it denounced for its rapprochement with the United States, Albania has courted West Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Austria and Scandinavia, with only some success.

For all the light that has crept into the dark corners of Europe, Albania remains a shadowy part of the world--particularly to its dissident minority, hoping for a miracle.

The dissidents worry every day about the internal security police, called the Sigurimi. One Western diplomat says there are 40,000 Sigurimi in Albania, which proportionally makes them one of Europe’s largest secret police forces. Dressed in suits, the Sigurimi guard some of the government buildings, but they also keep all of Albanian society under steely, one-party control. The man who got his face slapped was not the only wary Albanian to try to hide a conversation.

One evening a few days later, three men, all in their 30s, stepped in front of the American stranger. None knew he happened to be a reporter.

One spoke in English:

“I have an important letter about the human rights abuses in Albania. Can you mail this to a newspaper when you get back to America?”

The three were delighted to find a reporter. They walked past a statue of Stalin where the Albanians said a bomb had exploded one night a few months earlier. The statue wasn’t damaged, but the English speaker made a karate-chop motion to indicate that eventually it must go.

The speaker, an Albanian factory worker, looked over his shoulder before handing his letter to the American. He kept talking.

“In the next two years, the people will attack the government,” he said, “and (will) stand up as a solidarity, like in Romania.”

This country’s history has long been one of domination by others. For nearly 500 years the Turks ruled what is now Albania, except for a short time in the 15th Century, when an Albanian warrior named Skanderbeg pushed out the Turks by fighting from mountainside castles.

Iron-fisted control has been exercised from the inside by fellow Albanians, ever since a group of Communist rebels led by Enver Hoxha chased the Nazis out of Albania in 1944. A strict admirer of Stalin, Hoxha was Albania’s dictator until his death in 1985, when Ramiz Alia, Hoxha’s protege, took control.

“The people do not have guns, only their hands,” the secretive Albanian said. Then he zipped his fist across his mouth for silence.

The Albanian and his two friends were afraid to go near Skanderbeg Square, where Hoxha’s floodlighted statue sits, so they said goodby on a dark side street.

That night the American opened their letter. He copied all four pages in his own hand, cut the original into pieces and flushed them down a hotel toilet.

The letter began:

“It’s so difficult to tell you about the conditions of the Human Rights in Albania. . . . We have no . . . freedom of speech, . . . freedom of circulation, . . . (or) the freedom of believing in God and the freedom of gathering and organization in independent groups of different political parties. . . . I deeply believe that the greater part of Albanian people don’t believe in Communism or Stalinism.”

The letter described some anti-government demonstrations early this year in Shkodar, near the northern border with Yugoslavia, and in Kavaja, a small city south of Tirana near the Adriatic Sea. The government denies that the demonstrations happened. But the letter named five protesters still in jail, plus four others it claimed were killed by the Sigurimi.

A few nights later, the American met two university students. They agreed to be called Arben and Muhamet.

They loved the rock group Bon Jovi, but they were fonder still of Chairman Alia’s policy of issuing passports to those who have relatives or friends living abroad.

These passports, they said, would be their way out. But there was a problem. If they fled, what would the government do to their parents?

“My parents say to me, ‘Go! Don’t worry about us. We live for you,’ ” Arben said.

But not wishing to risk harm to his family, he said he would wait for the first wave of Albanians to escape. If their families are not harmed, only then will Arben take his passport and run.

Paying for their airline tickets is another problem.

Alia’s government says most air tickets must be bought with hard currency, such as dollars or pounds--not leks, the Albanian currency. The official exchange rate is 7 leks for $1, but on the black market Albanians pay as much as 40 leks to the dollar.

If Arben cannot afford to fly to France, where he has a friend, maybe he could pay for a shorter trip to Athens, where he would jump over the fence at the U.S. Embassy.

“Will they give me back?” he asked.

Those who cannot wait for passports take their chances and jump over fences at the Greek and Italian embassies here in Tirana. It can be a life-or-death leap.

The Greek Embassy is guarded by a cluster of Albanian police in blue uniforms who stand around the perimeter, while some stone-faced Sigurimi keep them company.

Inside the compound, Pantelis Carcabassis, who is the deputy ambassador, says that four Albanians have tried this year to hurtle past the police and climb over his fence.

It will take a nimble, desperate, lucky athlete to make it over the fence now. Part of it is wrought iron, with extra metal poles that make it eight to nine feet tall, and a metal panel, at roughly the same height, is placed above the main entrance door. Since the escapes began, Carcabassis said, the Albanians have extended the embassy fence upward by several feet, including broken glass laid on top of a masonry wall.

The first of the four jumpers vaulted over on a March evening, back in the days when there were only two police outside. The jumper waited until the police met for a smoke.

The Albanian government, Carcabassis said, “asked us in a polite way to hand him (back).” Instead, the Greeks negotiated, and after a couple of weeks, the Albanians issued the jumper a passport. Carcabassis escorted him on a flight to Athens.

Jumper No. 2 arrived on Easter Sunday. Carcabassis and his staff were on the embassy grounds, preparing a traditional feast of lamb, when the Albanian scrambled over.

“Three police climbed over the fence into the embassy and attempted to take him out,” Carcabassis remembered. “They violated our diplomatic space.”

The embassy staff sheltered the jumper, and Carcabassis, a hefty sort, “practically pushed the three police out myself.”

The jumper said he worked in one of the mines near Tirana. “He felt so desperate that he left behind a wife and three children,” Carcabassis said.

The man lived inside the embassy for two weeks until the Albanians issued a passport for him, too.

But not before the third jumper scaled the wall.

He landed inside at 8:15 a.m. on the last Sunday in April. To protect Jumper No. 2, who was still in residence, the embassy staff had locked the doors on the embassy’s residential building.

When the new jumper could not open any of the doors, he ran between two of the buildings.

“Three police and two Sigurimi came inside (the compound),” Carcabassis said, “and practically beat him to death. They beat him unconscious and threw him over the fence to the ground like a sack of potatoes.”

The fourth attempt came in May. Carcabassis was walking on the embassy grounds.

“I heard loud shouts. A man was running in the direction of the main gate. He was chased by police; and within five meters of the fence, he was put down by several police. They beat him brutally with clubs on the genitals (and) in the head. He was unconscious in a matter of seconds.

“They threw him in a truck and sped off.”

The Sigurimi also seem to keep track of the embassy staffs. A diplomat at another embassy in Tirana said: “We assume our telephone conversations are tapped. A member of another embassy told me she was talking with her husband. When she was about to hang up, . . . the whole conversation was (mistakenly) replayed.

“If we do not want to be listened to, we write it down on paper, or put on loud music, or we go into the street. Maybe we are followed, but the overheard conversations are not as complete.”

So the foreign diplomat took the American on a long tour of Tirana.

They walked near the state university and past what the diplomat called “the forbidden city”--the compound of villas where Alia and other government officials are believed to live. The villas were guarded by soldiers with machine guns and Sigurimi who stood under trees to avoid the heat.

“I do not think there is any organized movement against the government,” the diplomat said on his walk. “There is dissent. But the domino did not fall (here) because of a lack of communication and the suppression by the Sigurimi. Albanians lack the possibility of communication.

“As Lord Mountbatten said, the most important thing in warfare is communications. Here, telephones are very few.”

He put the odds of a revolution at one in five over the next five years--one in two during the next decade.

“If the government is toppled, there will be bloodshed,” he said. “It’ll be worse than in Romania. The Albanian army will not fire on the people, but the Sigurimi will defend themselves until the last drop of blood.”

Any possible exit from Albania is closely guarded by the police.

In the south at Saranda, a city with palm trees and a crescent-shaped harbor on the Ionian Sea, the most striking feature is the view of the Greek island of Corfu, its green, rocky shape rising up only five miles away. Occasionally an Albanian swimmer who can overpower the current and avoid the sharks and the armed government patrol boats escapes to Corfu.

A group of 20 Finnish tourists had come to Saranda, and on the hotel patio one night a guide named Suvi Kiviharju explained that for her veteran travelers, Albania was an exotic change.

Almost the only Albanians they had met were their government guides, she said, but they could sense the nation’s poverty. There were always kids outside the hotel begging for gum and pens.

As she talked, a beam of light from the Albanian navy base pierced the darkness and touched a bend in the coastline three miles away. Then it slowly crept in an arc over the black surface of the sea, obscuring the twinkling lights on Corfu.

The guide was asked if any of her tourists would make a second trip to Albania. She shook her head. “It’s not a place you want to come back to.”