Albania leaves the Warsaw Pact.
The Warsaw Pact (WP) or Treaty of Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The term "Warsaw Pact" commonly refers to both the treaty itself and its resultant defensive alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955 as per the London and Paris Conferences of 1954.Dominated by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to NATO. There was no direct military confrontation between the two organizations; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. Its largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (with the participation of all pact nations except Albania and Romania), which, in part, resulted in Albania withdrawing from the pact less than one month later. The pact began to unravel with the spread of the Revolutions of 1989 through the Eastern Bloc, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland, its electoral success in June 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989.East Germany withdrew from the pact following German reunification in 1990. On 25 February 1991, at a meeting in Hungary, the pact was declared at an end by the defense and foreign ministers of the six remaining member states. The USSR itself was dissolved in December 1991, although most of the former Soviet republics formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization shortly thereafter. In the following 20 years, the Warsaw Pact countries outside the USSR each joined NATO (East Germany through its reunification with West Germany; and the Czech Republic and Slovakia as separate countries), as did the Baltic states which had been part of the Soviet Union.
The People's Socialist Republic of Albania (Albanian: Republika Popullore Socialiste e Shqipërisë) was the Marxist-Leninist one party state that existed in Albania from 1976 to 1992. From 1944 to 1946, the state of Albania was known as the Democratic Government of Albania and from 1946 to 1976 it was known as the People's Republic of Albania.
Throughout this period, the country was ruled by Enver Hoxha and the Party of Labour of Albania. They ruled Albania by establishing a Stalinist style of state administration and adhering to policies which stressed national unity and self-reliance. Travel and visa restrictions made Albania one of the most difficult countries to visit or travel from. In 1967, it declared itself the world's first atheist state. But after the fall of communism in Albania in 1991, the practice of religion slowly increased. It was the only Warsaw Pact member to formally withdraw from the alliance before 1990, an action which was occasioned by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The government implemented reforms which were aimed at modernizing Albania and they resulted in significant gains in the areas of industry, agriculture, education, the arts, and culture, which contributed to a general increase in the Albanian population's standard of living. However, these developments coincided with political repression by the secret police, the Sigurimi, for the purposes of preventing a counter-revolution, which included dismissal from employment, imprisonment in forced labor camps and executions. The first multi-party elections in Socialist Albania took place on 31 March 1991 – the Communists gained a majority in an interim government. The Republic of Albania was proclaimed on 29 April 1991 and the country's first parliamentary elections were held on 22 March 1992. The People's Socialist Republic of Albania was officially dissolved on 28 November 1998 upon the adoption of the new Constitution of Albania.