FROM STALIN TO MAO by Elidor Mëhilli

Author:Elidor Mëhilli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Tirana to Beijing to Havana

Out of this mixture of top-down planning in the absence of urban plans; desire for mass production and constant improvisation with soil, composites, and other rudimentary materials; borrowed blueprints and scarcity; calls for reducing monotoninë and also for combating teprimet (excesses) emerged the Albanian socialist city. It was the kind of landscape that confounded Salisbury in 1957: cities teeming with rural elements and expanding industrial settlements staffed with overworked peasants. One Western visitor described the country as a “dreary little island of Stalinism” in a letter to Harrison Salisbury. “Wherever I went,” he wrote, “I was vividly reminded of my years in North Africa, and astonished every time I remembered I was in Europe.”141 The country was somewhere and nowhere—suspended between Western arrogance, socialist expectations of plenty, and plain misery. The mud was predominant. The past was still alive. “We should destroy old buildings,” insisted the chief in charge of construction at a meeting of the party Secretariat. “Agreed,” Hoxha responded, “we should destroy the old buildings,” recommending not compensation to current residents but new apartments in socialist buildings.142

When Nikita Khrushchev visited the country in 1959, he witnessed local construction and found it primitive. Introducing reinforced concrete and mechanized systems, he lectured his hosts, would cut costs by half. They could build a five-story apartment building made of concrete blocks in one month. Bricks and mortar were a thing of the past; low-rise dwellings were not economical. The Albanians could look around the Eastern bloc for models. The Politburo promptly took up the issue, and within a year, there was talk of obtaining an Eastern bloc–designed prefabrication factory.143 The Berlin-based Comecon commission on construction promised technical assistance.144 Each member state would focus on specific areas within the construction industry: East Germany, for example, would renovate Albania’s brickworks and introduce industrial construction technology.145

The year 1960, however, also saw the beginning of a messy break between the Albanian and Soviet parties—the subject of the following chapter—and the effects rippled in relations with the rest of the bloc. By the following year, the Soviet advisers were gone, as were the East Germans and the Czechs, replaced with Chinese technical teams. Here too there were echoes of the disagreements with East German engineers in Kurbnesh. Albanian representatives accused their Comecon counterparts of failing to live up to their aid program, refusing to attend the commission’s meeting in November 1961.146 Just as socialist states sought more integration, Tirana cut itself off. Still, political detachment did not preclude continued material borrowings and shared planning practices. Socialist states did not need to have good political relations to execute similar planning objectives.

With the Soviets gone, the party declared that reinforced concrete and rational methods would help solve the housing crisis by 1975. In a memo on the subject, the party chief underlined the magic word: “prefabrication.”147 In the early 1950s, Soviet methods had stood for the future, building awareness of the need to catch up with the rest of the socialist world. By the

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