Eastern Bloc

The move is so controversial in Poland given that religious symbols were previously banned under the communist regime of the Polish People’s Republic

Sigurimi files in an exhibition in Tirana. Photo: LSA.

MPs from the governing Socialist Party on Monday decided to postpone approval of changes in two laws intended to ban people from running for parliament who collaborated with the Communist-era Sigurimi secret service after an intervention by the EU's ambassador to Tirana.

Albania's Authority on Access to Information of the Sigurimi Files, the Communist-era political police, on Friday said it is preparing the way for an "administrative" investigation to find out what happened to some 44 people who were executed or died while imprisoned in the infamous labour camp at Spac.

Soviet-era Mil Mi-17 helicopter. Photo: Vitaly V. Kuzmin / Wikimedia commons The tradition of the (Soviet) arms industry

Sad news was published by the Russian media.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 and was the political leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Aferdita Dalliu was a child when her grandfather, Hafiz Ibrahim Dalliu, a Muslim scholar with a strong reputation for patriotism, was imprisoned by the Communist regime that ruled Albania with iron fist for more than 45 years until 1991.

An exhibition entitled 'Tirana in the Eyes of the Sigurimi' was held at the Palace of Congresses in the capital on Thursday, illustrating how people in the Albanian capital were spied upon and persecuted under the Communist regime that ruled the country until the early 1990s.

After winning the parliamentary elections, the Action and Solidarity Party will start to fight the inherited ex-Soviet kleptocratic system.

This March marked the 30th anniversary of the first multiparty elections in Albania that followed the fall of the communist regime, which, according to Neil Kritz, researcher at the American Institute for Peace, was one of the most tightly closed regimes in the world.

Some appear to be members of the National Guard, state police and army, who by law would be prohibited from engaging in party politics.