Enver Hoxha on the Titoite Betrayal

“Traitors to Marxism-Leninism, agents of imperialism and intriguers like Josif Broz Tito, try in a thousand ways, by hatching up diabolic schemes like the creation of a third force, to mislead these people and the newly-set up states [in Africa and Asia], to detach them from their natural allies, to hitch them up to U.S. imperialism. We should exert all our efforts to defeat the schemes of these lackeys of imperialism.

[….]

U.S. imperialism has given and is giving billions of dollars to its loyal agents, the treacherous Tito gang.

[….]

It has been said that J. V. Stalin was mistaken in assessing the Yugoslav revisionists and in sharpening his attitude towards them. Our Party has never endorsed such a view, because time and experience has proven the contrary. Stalin made a very correct assessment of the danger of the Yugoslav revisionists, he tried to settle this affair at the proper moment and in a Marxist way. The Inform Bureau, as a collective organ, was called together at that time and, after the Titoite group was exposed, a merciless battle was waged against it. Time has proven over and over again that such a thing was necessary and correct.

The Party of Labor of Albania has always held the opinion and is convinced that Tito’s group are traitors to Marxism-Leninism, agents of imperialism, dangerous enemies of the socialist camp and of the entire international communist and workers’ movement, therefore a merciless battle should be waged against them. We, on our part, have waged and continue to wage this battle as internationalist communists and also because we have felt and continue to feel on our own backs the burden of the hostile activity of Tito’s revisionist clique against our Party and our country. But this stand of our Party has not been and is not to the liking of comrade Khrushchev and certain other comrades.

The Titoite group have long been a group of Trotskyites and renegades. For the Party of Labor of Albania, at least, they have been such since 1942, that is, since 18 years ago.

As far back as 1942, when the war of the Albanian people surged forward, the Belgrade Trotskyite group disguising themselves as friends and abusing our trust in them tried their uttermost to hinder the development of our armed struggle, to hamper the creation of powerful Albanian partisan fighting detachments, and, since it was impossible to stop them, to put them under their direct political and military control. They attempted to make everything dependent on Belgrade, and our Party and our partisan army mere appendages of the Yugoslav Communist Party and the Yugoslav National-liberation Army.

Our Party, while preserving its friendship with the Yugoslav partisans, successfully resisted these diabolical intentions. It was at that time that the Titoite group tried to found the Balkan Federation under the direction of the Belgrade Titoites, to hitch the Communist Parties to the chariot of the Yugoslav Communist Party, to place the partisan armies of the Balkan peoples under the Yugoslav Titoite staff. It was to this end that, in agreement with the British, they tried to set up the Balkan Staff and to place it, that is to say, to place our armies under the direction of the Anglo-Americans. Our Party successfully resisted these diabolic schemes. And when the banner of liberation was hoisted in Tirana, the Titoite gang in Belgrade issued orders to their agents in Albania to discredit the success of the Albanian Communist Party and to organize a “putsch” to overthrow the leadership of our Party which guided the National-liberation War and led the Albanian people to victory. The first “putsch” was organized by Tito through his secret agents within our Party. But the Albanian Communist Party frustrated this plot of Tito’s.

The Belgrade plotters did not lay down their arms and, together with their agent in our Party, the traitor Koçi Xoxe, continued the re-organization of their plot against new Albania in other forms, new forms. Their intention was to turn Albania into a seventh Republic of Yugoslavia.

At a time when our country had been devastated and laid waste and needed to be completely rebuilt, when our people were without food and shelter but with high morale, when our people and army, weapons in hand, kept vigilant guard against the plots of reaction organized by the Anglo-U.S. military missions who threatened Albania with a new invasion, when a large part of the Albanian partisan army had crossed the border and had gone to the aid of the Yugoslav brothers, fighting side by side with them and together liberating Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Kosova and Metohia and Macedonia, the Belgrade plotters hatched up schemes to enslave Albania.

But our Party offered heroic resistance to these secret agents who posed as communists. When the Belgrade Trotskyites realized that they had lost their case, that our Party was smashing their plots, they played their last card, namely, to invade Albania with their army, to crush all resistance, to arrest the leaders of the Party of Labor of Albania and of the Albanian State and to proclaim Albania a seventh Republic of Yugoslavia. Our Party defeated this diabolic scheme of theirs also. Joseph Stalin’s aid and intervention at these moments was decisive for our Party and for the freedom of the Albanian people. Precisely at this time the Information Bureau exposed the Tito clique. Stalin and the Soviet Union saved the Albanian people for the second time.

The Information Bureau brought about the defeat of the conspiracies of the Tito clique, not only in Albania but also in other countries of People’s Democracy. Posing as communists, the renegade and agent of imperialism, Tito, and his gang, tried to alienate the countries of People’s Democracy in the Balkans and Central Europe from the friendship and wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, to destroy the communist and workers’ parties of our countries and to turn our States into reserves of Anglo-American imperialism.

Who was there who did not know about and see in action the hostile schemes of imperialism and its loyal servitor Tito? Everybody knew, everybody learned, and all unanimously approved the correct decisions of the Information Bureau. Everyone without exception approved the Resolutions of the Information Bureau which, in our opinion, were and still are correct.

Those who did not want to see and understand these acts of this criminal gang had a second chance to do so in the Hungarian counter-revolution and in the unceasing plots against Albania. The wolf may change his coat but he remains a wolf. Tito and his gang may resort to trickery, may try to disguise themselves, but they are traitors, criminals and agents of imperialism. They are the murderers of the heroic Yugoslav internationalist communists and thus they will remain and thus they will act until they are wiped out.

The Party of Labor of Albania considers the decisions taken against Tito’s renegade group by the Information Bureau not as decisions taken by comrade Stalin personally but as decisions taken by all the parties that made up the Information Bureau.

[….]

The Party of Labor of Albania remained unshaken in its views that the Titoite group were traitors, renegades, Trotskyites, subversionists and agents of the U.S. imperialists, that the Party of Labor of Albania had not been mistaken about them.

The Party of Labor of Albania remained unshaken in its view that comrade Stalin had not erred in this matter…

[….]

Some comrades hold the erroneous idea that we maintain this attitude towards the Titoites because, they claim, we are allegedly eager to hold the banner of the fight against revisionism or because we view this problem from a narrow angle, from a purely national angle, therefore, they claim, we have embarked, if not altogether on a “chauvinist course”, at least on that of “narrow nationalism”. The Party of Labor of Albania has viewed and views the question of Yugoslav revisionism through the prism of Marxism-Leninism, it has viewed, views, and fights it as the main danger to the international communist movement, as a danger to the unity of the socialist camp.

[….]

The Yugoslavs accuse us of allegedly being chauvinists, of interfering in their internal affairs, and of demanding a rectification of the Albanian -Yugoslav borders. A number of our friends think and imply that we Albanian communists swim in such waters. We tell our friends who think thus that they are grossly mistaken. We are not chauvinists, we have neither demanded nor demand rectification of boundaries. But what we demand and will continually demand from the Titoites, and we will expose them to the end for this, is that they give up perpetrating the crime of genocide against the Albanian minority in Kosova and Metohia, that they give up the white terror against the Albanians of Kosova, that they give up driving the Albanians from their native soil and deporting them ‘en masse’ to Turkey. We demand that the rights of the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia should be recognized according to the Constitution of the People’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Is this chauvinist or Marxist?

 – Enver Hoxha, “Reject the Revisionist Thesis of the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Anti-Marxist Stand of Khrushchev’s Group! Uphold Marxism-Leninism!”