Albania Introduction

LBANIA, PROCLAIMED A "PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC" in 1946, was for more than forty years one of the most obscure and reclusive countries in the world. A totalitarian communist regime, led by party founder and first secretary Enver Hoxha from 1944 until his death in 1985, maintained strict control over every facet of the country's internal affairs, while implementing a staunchly idiosyncratic foreign policy. After World War II, Hoxha and his proteges imposed a Stalinist economic system, and turned alternately to Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China for assistance, before denouncing each of these communist countries as "bourgeois" or "revisionist" and embarking on a course of economic self-reliance