Kremlin, Albania Restoring Ties

The Soviet Union and Albania agreed Monday to end their nearly three-decade estrangement by restoring diplomatic relations that were severed over the Kremlin’s ideological quarrel with China.

The agreement to re-establish ties and reopen embassies was reached during talks held in Sofia, Bulgaria, on June 29-30 and in Tirana, Albania’s capital, on Monday, said the official Soviet Tass news agency and the Albanian Telegraph Agency.

The decision marked the latest step by Albania, Europe’s last stronghold of hard-line communism, to emerge from its postwar isolation.

For nearly 25 years, the Soviet Union has been making overtures to Albania to normalize relations that Albania broke off in 1961 during Moscow’s split with China, then a Tirana ally.

Kremlin leaders, however, could not overcome the deep distrust of the Soviets instilled by Communist Albania’s founding father, Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985.

The Tass dispatch, which was also was read on Soviet television and radio, said the Soviet Union and Albania were guided in their decision “by a mutual desire to develop the relations of friendship and cooperation on the basis of sovereignty, equality and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.”

Moscow and Tirana pledged to expand contacts in the political, economic, scientific, technical and cultural areas, it added.

Albania left the Warsaw Pact in 1968 after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Balkan nation broke with China in 1978 and established a course fiercely independent of both military blocs. It claimed to be the only nation practicing true communism and criticized the Soviet Union, China and other Communist countries as the “gravediggers of the revolution.”

It prided itself on being self-reliant, and its population of 3.2 million has been virtually cut off from the outside world since 1944.

In recent weeks, Albanian citizens demanding change forced their way into foreign embassies in Tirana and were allowed to leave the country.