Whatever else Albania's Red Boss Enver Hoxha might be, he has proved himself a spunky fellow. Who else would dare walk into the big international Communist powwow in Moscow last November and call Nikita Khrushchev a "revisionist" to his face? Indeed, Hoxha's blasphemy went even farther, according to a partial transcript of his speech that reached the outside world last week.
"The cult of personality does not apply only to Stalin," sneered 52-year-old Hoxha (pronounced Ho-ja), as the delegates from 81 worldwide Communist parties sat gaping. "Khrushchev has distorted the theses of Leninism to suit his own purposes!" Hoxha sided flatly with Red China in the ideological battle to keep Stalinism alive, lashed out at Moscow for organizing the vendetta against Peking at last summer's Bucharest conference.
Hoxha revealed that Moscow had sent a letter to the Albanians asking support for the anti-China campaign. "But even the parties who were asked to condemn the Chinese had no knowledge of the Soviet allegations until a few hours before the debate . . . Did Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders lack confidence in their own cause when they had recourse to such procedure?"
The Well-Fed Rats. Hoxha revealed that Moscow had tried brutal tactics to force Albania back into line. Last year Albania suffered a near famine. "We had only 15 days' supply of wheat. After a delay of 45 days, the Soviet Union promised us 10,000 tons instead of 50,000 tons—15 days' supply of wheat to be delivered in September and October!" This, declared Hoxha bitterly, was "unbearable pressure. The Soviet rats were able to eat while the Albanian people were dying of hunger!"
More recently, said Hoxha, "Malinovsky [Soviet Defense Minister] attacked the government and the party during the meeting of the chiefs of staff of the Warsaw Pact, and Grechko [Moscow's commander in chief of Warsaw Pact armies] brought pressure to bear on us by threatening to exclude us from the Warsaw Pact." The Russians also tried to sub- vert Albania's party officials. Specifically Mrs. Liri Belishova, a member of the Politburo, who "capitulated to the dishonest threats of the Soviet Union."
"Pressure from Moscow continues," raged Hoxha, hinting that Khrushchev had even threatened to throw Albania out of the Communist bloc. "But Albania's adherence to or exclusion from the socialist camp does not depend on you [meaning Khrushchev]—but on the peoples of the U.S.S.R. and Albania."
The New Pals. Hoxha's performance was a devastating revelation of the strains within the Communist bloc, leading some Western experts to suspect that little Albania may by now have been tossed out of the Warsaw Pact and isolated from the rest of Moscow's family. Recently, five Soviet submarines moved out of the Adriatic and were sighted moving through the English Channel en route to Russia. Western intelligence experts are not yet sure of the significance of the move, but they consider it conceivable that the Russians may have decided to shut down their big sub base and shelters built into the rocky cliffs of Albania's coast.