ANALYSIS / A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY : Albania Comes in From the Cold : Its rapprochement with the Soviet Union is proof that no country can live in total isolation.

After the upheavals in Eastern Europe over the past year and the growing reconciliation between East and West, this week’s announcement that Albania and the Soviet Union were restoring diplomatic relations after nearly three decades seemed little more than a footnote to history.

True, the agreement was part of the same flow that has brought fundamental changes throughout the socialist world, but this had an ideological significance greater than Albania’s size and obscurity would suggest.

In the same way that the Soviet-American rapprochement, the new relationship between China and the Soviet Union and the end to the division of Europe have marked the end of ideology as a basis for virtually any country’s foreign policy, the Soviet-Albanian agreement reaffirmed the primacy of pragmatism in international politics.

The Realization

Albania, the last holdout in the remarkable drawing-together of Europe now under way, finally recognized that the Cold War was over, that the ideological feuding that had divided socialism so deeply had been futile and that no country, however much it prized its independence and however fierce its nationalism, could afford such absolute isolation.

After all its denunciations of the Soviet Union over the years, Albania’s readiness to restore relations, severed in 1961, marked a fundamental shift in that country’s policies, domestic as well as foreign.

“The sides were guided by a mutual desire to develop relations of friendship and cooperation on the basis of sovereignty, equality and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,” the two countries said Monday in a joint statement. “They will work to restore and expand the legal basis of Soviet-Albanian relations.”

In that formulation, common enough when two countries establish diplomatic relations, the Tirana regime accepted the fact that the Soviet Union no longer--if it ever did--threatens Albania’s hard-won independence. And with that, the Albanian leadership eliminated a major justification for the country’s harsh political and economic system.

“It seems that the Albanian leadership simply needs a foreign enemy against whose schemes it must fight,” a Soviet political commentator had written in the weekly magazine New Times six months ago, expressing regret over Tirana’s resistance to reform and its rejection of Moscow’s overtures.

The isolation that the late Enver Hoxha had imposed on Albania in his 40 years as the country’s leader had appeared to outsiders a means of ensuring his own power and that of the Albanian Party of Labor, the ruling Communist party.

But within the country, that policy of isolation drew support from many in a nation that had dreamed of independence for four centuries, had achieved it only in 1920 and then saw it in danger again from covetous neighbors.

Hoxha had taken Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, as his model when the Communists took power in Albania in 1945, and Stalinism was the system through which he would ensure the independence of Albania and its development on the basis of self-sufficiency. He ruled as single-mindedly and as ruthlessly as Stalin, and Stalinism assured his country’s autarky, albeit at a cost that left Albania the most backward and impoverished country in Europe.

When Nikita S. Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Communist Party, denounced him as a political monster and butcher, Hoxha broke with Moscow.

For two decades, Albania found an ally in Mao Tse-tung’s China, then a rival to the Soviet Union, but broke with Beijing when the Chinese began their political and economic reforms and established relations with the United States in 1979.

The Motivation

Albania always made these moves with the fiercest of ideological declarations, always affirming its adherence to Stalinism. Its motivation, however, was largely one of nationalism--abhorrence of any relationship that would indenture it politically or economically.

Interestingly, the language of the joint Soviet-Albanian communique was so soft that it only underlined the contrast with the past statements from Tirana and thus Albania’s coming political transformation.

“Establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union must reflect real changes under way in Albanian society,” a Soviet specialist on the Balkan countries commented this week. “This is so fundamental a break with its past orientation that it could only come after a real political struggle over the future of the country.”