Before the Sino-Soviet split became public, Peking used little Albania as a sort of ventriloquist's dummy. Albania's fiercely anti-Khrushchev rulers said all the nasty things about Moscow that the Chinese obviously wanted to say themselves. Since Nikita Khrushchev's ouster amid signs of a Russian-Chinese thaw, the Communist world—and its observers in the West—have wondered whether the Albanian line might soften. Last week came the answer: not a bit.
Pravda and Izvestia printed friendly articles about Albania, and the Soviet Union dispatched fraternal greetings on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the "liberation" of Albania from Axis occupation. It was wasted...
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