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  • Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Elidor Mëhilli analyzing the changes Albania experienced in 1956 amid the upheavals generated by Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in February 1956 denouncing some of the crimes of his predecessor, Iosif Stalin, ushered in a prolonged period of ferment and instability in the Soviet bloc. The events of that year in Poland and Hungary have been investigated in great depth, and the repercussions in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and East Germany have also been explored in some detail. But until recently very little was known in the West about the degree of popular ferment and elite infighting in Albania during that fateful year. Mëhilli’s article is a path-breaking discussion of the impact on Albania of the USSR’s de-Stalinization drive. Drawing on Albanian, Soviet, East German, and Western archival sources, Mëhilli shows that the Albanian Communist leader, Enver Hoxha, tried to preserve ideological orthodoxy and a Stalinist polity, shielding Albania against the turmoil elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. The Albanian Communist authorities did not want to risk an overt break with the Soviet Union (something that did not happen until the early 1960s in connection with the emerging Sino-Soviet split), but they did try to eschew the liberalizing measures that were being adopted in the USSR. The Albanian case highlights some of the tensions and contradictions sown by de-Stalinization not only in Albania but in the whole Soviet bloc and the USSR itself.

The next article, by Andrea Benvenuti and David Martin Jones, disputes the prevailing academic view of Australian foreign policy under Prime Minister Robert Menzies during the first two decades of the Cold War. Heading right-of-center governments for some seventeen years, Menzies later came under criticism from historians affiliated with the left-of-center Australian Labor Party, who wrote textbooks portraying Menzies as an ideologue oblivious to postwar realities in the Asia-Pacific region. The Menzies government’s foreign policy, according to this portrayal, damaged Australia’s reputation in Asia and more generally. This left-Labor portrayal of Menzies has been widely accepted among Australian academics and politicians, but Benvenuti and Jones show that it is flawed and tendentious. Far from being naïve and aloof, Menzies displayed a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics and established solid relations with key countries in the region. Benvenuti and Jones go systematically through the critiques of Menzies’s foreign policy and demonstrate that the critics, rather than Menzies, were the ones who often had simplistic, outdated conceptions of the political and economic contours of the Asia-Pacific region.

The third article, by Wolfgang Mueller, explains why the Soviet Union seemed on two occasions in 1972 to hold out the prospect of officially recognizing the European [End Page 1] Economic Community (EEC). The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev gave two speeches in 1972—one in March and the other in December—that appeared to mark an abrupt departure from the long-standing Soviet policy of suspicion and hostility toward the EEC. Mueller argues that the overtures were only tactical maneuvers rather than sincere offers of recognition. Several factors—the progress in West European integration, the advent of East-West détente (U.S.-Soviet détente and intra-European détente), and the changing orientation of Soviet policy toward Western Europe—came together to produce Brezhnev’s statements. The Soviet leader’s announcement in March was designed mainly to facilitate the West German Bundestag’s approval of the landmark Treaty of Moscow, signed by the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in August 1970. Brezhnev’s speech in December was more substantive, signifying a new Soviet strategy toward the EEC, including the prospect of talks between the Community and the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). The Soviet Union continued to oppose West European integration and promoted talks between the EEC and CMEA in order to achieve its goal of “eliminating discrimination” against third countries and establishing “businesslike economic relations” between East and West on a bilateral basis. The EEC countries were unwilling to accept the price Brezhnev demanded for recognition of the Community, and...

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