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ts. Albania immediately established close relations with Moscow, although Stalin never signed a mutual assistance pact with Tirana, as he had done with all the other European Communist countries. The Party leadership was now concentrated in the hands of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu. Shehu had been dismissed in January 1948 as Chief of Staff of the Albanian People's Army, because he had opposed the integration of the Yugoslav and Albanian armed forces and the stationing of two Yugoslav divisions on Albanian soil. He was rehabilitated immediately after the break with Yugoslavia. The period of direct Soviet influence in Albania began in September 1948, when the first joint economic agreement was signed. After the establishment of the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) in February 1949, of which Albania became a member, the other Soviet bloc countries began to extend economic aid. As a result, an intensified program of economic development began. From 1951 to 1955 industrial and agricultural production increased rapidly, and the basis was laid for transforming Albania from a backward agricultural economy to a more balanced agricultural-industrial one. The de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union had serious repercussions in the internal situation in Albania. Although Hoxha vetoed any relaxation of police controls and stamped out any dissenting voice within the Party after Stalin's death, by 1956 there was a significant minority in the Party elite that hoped to profit by de-Stalinization. The opposition reached its peak at a Party conference in Tirana in April 1956, held in the aftermath of the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress. Some of the delegates, including Central Committee members, criticized openly the conditions in the Party and requested that the topics of discussion be concerned with such topics as the cult of personality, the rehabilitation of Koci Xoxe and other top Party leaders purged since 1948, Party democracy, and the people's standard of living. Hoxha silenced the dissident elements, however, and had most of them expelled from the Party or arrested. Some were subsequently executed. Among those executed were Lira Gega, formerly a member of the Politburo, and her husband, Dalli Ndreu, a general in the Albanian People's Army. Soviet Premier Khrushchev charged at the Soviet Twenty-second Congress that Gega was pregnant when she was executed. Workers' riots in Poland and full-scale revolt
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