World: ALBANIA: STALIN'S HEIR

Charging angrily that Albania "deliberately keeps aggravating relations with the Soviet Union," Russia last week ordered its ambassador in Tirana to pack up and come home. In turn, Albania's ambassador was ordered out of Moscow, while the two countries traded accusations of having bugged each other's embassies. It was the first time that two Red nations severed diplomatic relations (not even in 1948, when Stalin had his furious break with Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, were diplomatic ties ruptured).

Ever since the 22nd Party Congress, when Khrushchev publicly denounced Albania for its defiance of his anti-Stalin line, the tiny country has been the surrogate through which Moscow and Peking have fought each other. By formally breaking with Albania, Khrushchev is now serving notice that he will not conciliate Peking, is forcing the Red Chinese either to come to heel or else publicly widen the split. Meanwhile. Albania gleefully continues to defy Moscow as Europe's last enclave of Stalin-style Communism.

Peeling Gumshoes. Elsewhere in Communist Europe, the once familiar busts and images have disappeared, but recent visitors to Albania, notably a group of German journalists, still find the old Stalin pictures—and the old Stalin touch—in a ramshackle Balkan setting. In the capital city of Tirana, wide Skanderbeg Square boasts three white-uniformed traffic cops on duty—but no traffic for them to direct. Heavily-armed police and soldiers stand guard before ministries and embassies, on street corners, in parks, in front of and behind hotels. Other guards, toting machine guns, pace before the residences of top Red officials to protect them from "overenthusiastic admirers.''

In addition to men in uniform, Tirana swarms with plainclothes Sigurimi, Albania's secret police, whose "interrogation'' methods range from the use of poisonous snakes to an ingenious electric cage that shocks the prisoner when he tries to straighten up or sit down. According to a United Nations survey, 80,000 of Albania's 1,700,000 citizens were thrown into concentration camps between 1945 and 1956, and 16,000 died there. Last spring, a dozen Albanian army and navy officers were tried, in an improvised courtroom in Tirana's Partisan Cinema, as pro-Soviet conspirators. Found guilty, they were marched right off to an adjacent vacant lot and executed by a firing squad.

To the occasional tourist, the Sigurimi appear more comic than lethal. Whole platoons of gumshoes peel off two by two to shadow individual visitors. Any attempt to talk to an Albanian results in his being shouldered out of earshot by an agent. One tourist on the beach at Durres succeeded in evading his shadow by swimming out beyond the breakers to accost an Albanian girl in a bikini. The girl, treading water, said: "I would like to have a long talk with you, but you must know that in this country it is impossible."

Visitors seldom detect any Albanian tendency to criticize the government or the country's backwardness—and the Sigurimi are not the only reason. Traditionally proud, suspicious of foreigners, filled with a clannish loyalty, Albanians reply to complaints about their country with fierce anger. "That's the way it is," the average Albanian will splutter. "You just have to understand us."