After the Russian Revolution of October 1917, there were very few places in Europe where the local communist parties explicitly stated that they did not expect a socialist transformation to be possible. Albania was one of those places. Yet it ended up experiencing a socialist revolution during World War II, despite not even having a communist party of its own until 1941.

The small groups of scattered organizers in the country managed to work quickly under conditions of occupation and establish an effective resistance movement. Together with the Yugoslav partisans who served as their self-imposed tutors, they were the only two political forces in Eastern Europe to achieve liberation relatively independently of the Red Army.

This made it possible for the postwar governments in Belgrade and Tirana alike to defy the USSR in the decades that followed. Under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, Albania went on to follow a unique path during the Cold War, breaking with Moscow during the 1960s to ally with Maoist China, before striking out on its own by the end of the 1970s.