ts.
Albania immediately established close relations with Moscow, although
Stalin never signed a mutual assistance pact with Tirana, as he had done
with all the other European Communist countries. The Party leadership
was now concentrated in the hands of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu. Shehu
had been dismissed in January 1948 as Chief of Staff of the Albanian
People's Army, because he had opposed the integration of the Yugoslav
and Albanian armed forces and the stationing of two Yugoslav divisions
on Albanian soil. He was rehabilitated immediately after the break with
Yugoslavia.

The period of direct Soviet influence in Albania began in September
1948, when the first joint economic agreement was signed. After the
establishment of the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) in
February 1949, of which Albania became a member, the other Soviet bloc
countries began to extend economic aid. As a result, an intensified
program of economic development began. From 1951 to 1955 industrial and
agricultural production increased rapidly, and the basis was laid for
transforming Albania from a backward agricultural economy to a more
balanced agricultural-industrial one.

The de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union had serious
repercussions in the internal situation in Albania. Although Hoxha
vetoed any relaxation of police controls and stamped out any dissenting
voice within the Party after Stalin's death, by 1956 there was a
significant minority in the Party elite that hoped to profit by
de-Stalinization. The opposition reached its peak at a Party conference
in Tirana in April 1956, held in the aftermath of the Soviet Twentieth
Party Congress. Some of the delegates, including Central Committee
members, criticized openly the conditions in the Party and requested
that the topics of discussion be concerned with such topics as the cult
of personality, the rehabilitation of Koci Xoxe and other top Party
leaders purged since 1948, Party democracy, and the people's standard of
living.

Hoxha silenced the dissident elements, however, and had most of them
expelled from the Party or arrested. Some were subsequently executed.
Among those executed were Lira Gega, formerly a member of the Politburo,
and her husband, Dalli Ndreu, a general in the Albanian People's Army.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev charged at the Soviet Twenty-second Congress
that Gega was pregnant when she was executed.

Workers' riots in Poland and full-scale revolt