From Stalin to Mao ; Contents ; List of Illustrations ; Acknowledgments ; Introduction: A New World ; Breaks ; Contacts ; To Be Modern ; Mussolini to Mao ; 1. Ten Years of War ; Socialism with a Fascist Facade ; Old Plans, New Rules ; Italy's Miserable Souls ; Trial and Error ; Conspiracy All Around ; What Does a Communist Party Do? ; 2. The Discovery of a World ; Mental Map ; Moscow Days ; Forging a Friendship ; Mechanisms of Discovery ; Months, Weeks, Days, Hours ; The Language of Lenin ; The Price of Discovery.
Gorky's Shadow 3. The Methods of Socialism ; Soviet Labor, Albanian Lives ; Kombinat ; Stakhanov Travels to the Balkans ; Exemplary Bodies ; Staging ; 4. Socialism as Exchange ; Commonwealth of Plans ; Making Up Socialist Experience ; The Problem of Comparison ; Encounters ; 5. Mud and Concrete ; The Invention of Urban Planning ; Borrowing from the Bloc ; Going to Berlin ; Albanian Soil, Italian Traces, Socialist Slabs ; Tirana to Beijing to Havana ; 6. The Great Leap ; A Garden of Rocks ; The Ruins of Friendship.
Saving the Revolution Geopolitics Is Personal ; 701 Million ; Broken World, New World ; Destruction: A Crossroads with China ; Afterword: 1991 ; Note on Sources ; Notes ; Bibliography.
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Elidor Mëhilli has produced a groundbreaking history of communist Albania that illuminates one of Europe's longest but least understood dictatorships. From Stalin to Mao, which is informed throughout by Mëhilli's unprecedented access to previously restricted archives, captures the powerful globalism of post-1945 socialism, as well as the unintended consequences of cross-border exchanges from the Mediterranean to East Asia. After a decade of vigorous borrowing from the Soviet Union--advisers, factories, school textbooks, urban plans--Albania's party clique switched allegiance to China during the 1960s Sino-Soviet conflict, seeing in Mao's patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Mëhilli shows how socialism created a shared transnational material and mental culture--still evident today around Eurasia--but it failed to generate political unity. Combining an analysis of ideology with a sharp sense of geopolitics, he brings into view Fascist Italy's involvement in Albania, then explores the country's Eastern bloc entanglements, the profound fascination with the Soviets, and the contradictions of the dramatic anti-Soviet turn. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs, From Stalin to Mao draws on a wealth of Albanian, Russian, German, British, Italian, Czech, and American archival sources, in addition to fiction, interviews, and memoirs. Mëhilli's fresh perspective on the Soviet-Chinese battle for the soul of revolution in the global Cold War also illuminates the paradoxes of state planning in the twentieth century.