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From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World

Online ISBN:
9781501709593
Print ISBN:
9781501714153
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World

Elidor Mëhilli
Elidor Mëhilli
Hunter College
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Published:
15 November 2017
Online ISBN:
9781501709593
Print ISBN:
9781501714153
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

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