Through a lengthy post on social media, researcher Auron Tare mocked statements by Prime Minister Edi Rama and other Socialist Party figures claiming that foreign agents are behind the protests, first Iran and most recently Russia.
While sharing an exchange from a meeting with Sergei Khrushchev, the son of former Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev, Tare drew a parallel between the period when Enver Hoxha’s communist Albania broke off relations with the Soviet Union and today’s poor relations with Russia.
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The researcher says that Albania, both during the dictatorship and now, suffers from the idea that the world revolves around our country and that everyone is thinking about how to harm it.
He also says that these are the kinds of statements made whenever there are problems they cannot solve, so they invent foreign enemies.
The full text:
“The Russians and the Bear”
Professor Sergei Khrushchev was waiting for me in front of the entrance to the University of Rhode Island. I had made a long journey to meet him. I was driven by an old curiosity, to hear not only his memories of his father, Nikita Khrushchev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, but also what he might know about Albania, that small country which, according to our old habit, we have always imagined as the axis around which world history revolves.
After we greeted each other, he showed me the way. I followed behind him. The professor’s steps were slow, but his mind was clear.
As soon as we sat down, I asked him about the visit his father had made to Albania.
“I remember it,” he said. “I was a teenager, but I remember it well. My father stayed for about three weeks.”
Three weeks! It struck me as an unusual length of time.
What could the leader of a superpower do for three weeks in Albania? I asked him.
The professor smiled.
“He was simply curious. He wanted to get to know the country. Besides, he was received with great honors.”
I could not resist the temptation.
“And yet later Enver Hoxha accused him of wanting to destroy Albania. He said Khrushchev wanted to leave Albanians without bread by advising them to plant oranges instead of wheat.”
The professor laughed softly, with the laugh of people who have heard political madness many times before.
“When I was helping my father prepare his memoirs, he mentioned Albania to me. He did not think highly of Hoxha. He called him ungrateful and obsessed with his own grandeur. But tell me, for what reason would the Soviet Union have wanted to harm Albania? What interest did it have? Albania was a small country about which very little was known in Moscow,” he paused for a moment and, after taking a sip of coffee, continued, “My father thought your climate was suitable for citrus fruits. Oranges and mandarins had a guaranteed market. Wheat you could get through exchange. For the Soviet Union, supplying Albania with wheat posed no burden at all. So the accusation that he wanted to leave Albania to die of hunger was, at best, a political fantasy.”
Time, as often happens, has delivered its own judgment. Today, southern Albania is known not for wheat fields, but for the citrus plantations covering its hills and plains.
Then I asked him:
So why didn’t the Soviets overthrow Hoxha?
The professor looked at me with his blue eyes.
“My son, the Soviet Union had far bigger troubles than dealing with Albania. Do you really think it could not have overthrown a provincial dictator, if that had truly been its aim?”
This conversation has come back to me these days, when in Tirana we hear that the hand of the Russians is behind the protests.
It seems as though history has only one habit: it changes the scenery, but leaves the same actors in place.
Once it was said that the Russians wanted to destroy us with oranges; today it is said that they want to destroy our tourism.
And yet the professor’s question remains as simple as it is uncomfortable:
Why would Russia have such a great interest in Albania?
Could it be that the Kremlin lies awake at night because of the Albanian prime minister’s visits to Ukraine?
Or because of promises by the Municipality of Tirana to build a couple of schools there?
Could it be that Putin cannot sleep because Zelensky (the corrupt leader according to American intelligence agencies) honored our mother with the Princess Olga Medal?
I am no expert in geopolitics and I will not presume to lecture on the great affairs of the world. But one thing seems clear to me: great powers do not waste their energy on provincial myths. When they have major interests, they act; when they do not, they leave us to deal with the shadows created by our own imagination.
Albania has long suffered from an old illness, the belief that the world wakes up every morning thinking about us. It is a conceit we inherited from propaganda, not from history.
Guys, perhaps it is not the Russian bear disturbing our forest.
Perhaps our forest is disturbed more by our own jackals, who, whenever they lack an answer to the country’s troubles, rush to invent a distant enemy. And when the forest empties out, when citizens grow poorer and trust fades, they always look for the blame somewhere far away, with the Bear.
