Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s

4. Socialist Encounters: Albania and the Transnational Eastern Bloc in the 1950s

4 SOCIALIST ENCOUNTERS Albania and the Transnational Eastern Bloc in the s Elidor Mëhilli In the summer of , a group of East Germans found themselves in something of an ordeal. They were stationed in Kurbnesh, an isolated locale in the mountainous area of Mirditë, in northern Albania. A small village situated close to copper reserves, Kurbnesh was undergoing a stormy transformation into an industrial town. When authorities decided to build a copper enrichment factory there, they brought in specialists from East Germany to supply their advanced industrial experience. In their reports to Berlin, however, the visitors voiced frustration. The Albanian hosts, they complained, seemed uninterested in the advice they had to offer. Local engineers appeared ill trained, the managers mischievous, and the intelligentsia indifferent to the factory. They detected an excessive “selfconsciousness ” and a “distinct arrogance in technical and economic issues” for which they blamed constant Party of Labor (PLA) propaganda. Decisions had often been taken counter to German suggestions; the visitors’ advice was heeded only when these decisions had led to disaster. The Albanian hosts drew an entirely different picture of the conflict. They singled out delays in machine shipments from East Germany and blamed the visitors for not working hard enough. The copper enrichment factory was originally supposed to start operating on April , , Versions of this chapter were presented at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, and at the Modern Europe Workshop at Princeton University . I gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful comments of the participants. The chapter has greatly benefited from the suggestions and criticisms of Stephen Kotkin, Marc Frey, and the editors of this volume. 108 mëhilli but construction of segments was still lagging behind. Reading the reports from both sides, it would seem that the East German transfer of technology to Albania was an utter failure. True, a factory did eventually emerge, but socialist cooperation seems to have been anything but “fraternal .” Still, the point is not whether the East German experts exaggerated local conditions, or whether the hosts blamed the visitors for their own planning failures. After all, by mid-, political relations between Tirana and Moscow had deteriorated, so these records may reflect straining relations with Berlin as well. The tensions between the East Germans and the Albanians also had a lot to do with the unintended consequences of transnational socialist exchange. The point, therefore, is to ask how such encounters came about in the first place. It was not a handful of foreigners, either. By , some  Soviet and Eastern bloc specialists were employed in design and construction projects alone (urban planning bureaus, factories, nationalized brickworks, agricultural enterprises). To contextualize that number, it should be noted that by  there were  Albanian architects, urban planners, civil engineers , geometers, and drafters in the whole country. One year later, foreigners working in mines and at geological sites alone numbered  (most of them from the Soviet Union). Similar contingents were dispatched to other industrial branches, planning agencies, and schools. In addition to Soviet officers, advisers, and engineers, a small army of men and women, including East Germans, Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians, and Bulgarians , descended on Albania to help build socialism. They were brought in to execute industrial designs, supervise assembly, and teach locals how to operate imported machines. They constituted, in short, the transnational agents of the Eastern bloc. Among the excellent accounts of the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, classics by Hugh Seton-Watson, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and François Fejtö emphasized Soviet strategy to extend Moscow ’s sphere of influence. Following the “archival revolution” of the s, important new works reassessed the postwar period by utilizing a range of declassified materials. These studies point to the Soviet Union as a total model of socioeconomic development, involving nationalized means of production, central planning, and pervasive party rule. Indeed, Soviet influence was manifested not only in postwar Eastern Europe but also in North Korea and China. This chapter, however, introduces the Eastern bloc as another important level of analysis. Official propaganda socialist encounters 109 may have exaggerated its cohesion, but the bloc was not less real than any of its constitutive parts. It was more than a geopolitical concept or military alliance; it also came about through formal and informal interactions, coercive and voluntary transfers and circulations enabled by communist parties and centralized economies. Much has been written about post–World...