Description
This volume presents a collection of previously obscure primary documents relating to Kosovo question within the triangle of Soviet-Yugoslav-Albanian relations during the early years of the Cold War. Translated into English for the first time, these materials draw mainly from the Russian archival compilation Eastern Europe in the Documents of the Russian Archives, 1944–1953, alongside Ymer Minxhozi’s foreword translated from Albanian.
At the centre of the book is a hitherto little-known letter written by Enver Hoxha, General Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), dated no later than September 2, 1949. Written in the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split, the letter offers a retrospective Albanian assessment of wartime and postwar Yugoslav-Albanian relations. Hoxha, notably, advances a strategic argument – that anticipated anti-Tito uprisings in Yugoslavia should, in the specific case of Kosovo, include a demand for unification with Albania. Such a course, he contends, would mobilise the masses of Kosovar Albanians in favour of the Cominform line by stamping the struggle with a national character.
Beyond the letter itself, the collection includes a series of high-level conversations and internal documents involving Stalin, Molotov, Soviet diplomats and the Albanian leadership. Taken together, these texts provide insight into how the Albanian state leadership sought to concretise the national question in Kosovo as part of a broader struggle of the socialist camp. They also illustrate the Soviet leadership’s responses and calculations regarding Albanian proposals.
The documents in question do not impose a single interpretation. Rather, they invite readers and historians to assess the complex factors at play within this specific Cominformist struggle. While post-1990s narratives often portray Balkan nationalisms as historically predetermined, this volume underlines a critical moment when questions of territory and national status were not primarily framed in irredentist terms, but through problems of ideology, social systems and geopolitics.