This non-fiction book covers Europe and Albania from the start of the 20th century until now. It has many layers that, while all rationally connected, uncover a hidden layer. This book review will deal with one of its constituent layers, while the hidden layer is left for the reader to discover. Albania's post-World War II communist regime has proved to be with its citizens as ruthless as Hitler's Blitzkrieg ("lightning war") campaign in Poland on September 1, 1939.

?Enver Hoxha's alliance of seven years with Yugoslavia's dictator Josip Broz Tito (1941 – 1948) reflected communist Albania's geopolitical oscillations and Tirana's reluctance to embrace the territories of ethnic Albanians encompassing Kosovo today. Tito's paternalistic role in Albania was highly successful even though Shqipëria – as the locals name it – was the only country in Europe that did not have a communist party in 1940. This observation was accurately made by Lea Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, who grew up in Albania during the last period of Tirana's communist regime.

?However, Yugoslavia's regime was training Albania's communist elite and ensuring the Sons of Eagles would not approach Western democracies as a guiding source for shaping government reforms and post-war nation-building principles that embody democratic government and freedom of expression.

?According to Raymond Zickel and Walter R. Iwaskiw of the U. S. Library of Congress: "In October 1941, the leader of Communist Party of the Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, dispatched agents to Albania to forge the country's disparate, impotent communist factions into a monolithic party organization. Within a month, they had established a Yugoslav-dominated Communist Party of Albania (CPA) with 130 members under the leadership of Enver Hoxha and an eleven-member Central Committee."

?In his acclaimed book of realpolitik, "The Nation – Free Recipe: How the Triple Entente Served Comintern," professor Saimir A. Lolja has disclosed some of the principal matters in Albanian history during the second half of the twentieth century leading up to the inception stages of Tirana's turbulent post-communist period in which a cascade of blunders caused significant destruction of national economy, defense industry and obliterated the country's national security mechanisms.

?In his book, Prof. Lolja writes: "On December 15, 1947, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of CPA received the Yugoslav Communist messenger Sava Zllatiç. In that meeting, the puppet Enver Hoxha ordered to speed up Albania's unification process with Yugoslavia in all fields. He justified (the right of self) that Albania could not be an independent state and install Slavic Communism without fusion with Yugoslavia. The justification was a plagiarism of what the British Foreign Office had designed for "Albania 1913" as part of a Balkan Communist Federation. In the prescribed letter that Enver Hoxha sent to Josip Broz Tito in March 1948, he asked him not to delay the remaining steps for the dissolution of Albania into the Slavic Communist Balkan Federation, namely into Yugoslavia (Greater Serbia) Nr. 3."

?Hoxha's strategic cooperation with Tito cemented an iron grip on his country, and he continued with eliminating possible political opposition groups in Tirana; in March of 1945, an extraordinary trial against war criminals was opened in the "Kosova" cinema hall in Tirana; 19 out of the 60 defendants were sentenced to death. The death sentences fell on 17 of them; the other 'dissidents' received heavy punishments. That unusual trial was the first in a long series of such trials. The special court's judicial panel was headed by the Minister of Interior Affairs, Koçi Xoxe, and it generally consisted of incompetent persons who visibly issued politically biased sentences. On May 20, 1947, Xoxe, leader of a pro-Yugoslav faction of the CPA, ordered the arrest of nine anti-Yugoslav members of the Constituent Assembly.

?In July 1948, the Albanian government cut off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia. Koçi Xoxe was removed from the government, and the CPA purged the pro-Yugoslav faction during a Congress of the CPA renamed Albanian Party of Labor – APL.

?With Tirana establishing close ties with Moscow, the aspirations of Tito to create a Balkan confederation with Albania and Bulgaria were abandoned, and such an economic platform would resurface again in Edi Rama's playbook on July 29, 2021, when Albania, North Macedonia, and Serbia established The Open Balkan Initiative. It was an alliance that would varnish Serbia's imperialistic pivot in the Balkans and weaken Kosova as an independent Republic. 

?The terrorist attack of over 90 Serbian well-trained military personnel inside the sovereign territory of Kosova, in the village of Banjska on September 24, 2023, openly demonstrates Belgrade's growing appetite to create a new hotbed of armed conflict in Southeast Europe and threaten regional security. According to Reuters, Kosova's police stated that one officer was killed, and "three of about 30 attackers died in shootouts around the village of Banjska. Monks and pilgrims were locked in the Serbian Orthodox monastery's temple as the siege raged for hours."

?About this terrorist attack committed by Belgrade and continuously ignored by the European Commission officials, Prime Minister Albin Kurti stated: "The attackers are professionals wearing masks and heavily armed; the shooting was a terrorist attack." he blamed neighboring Serbia for seeking to destabilize his country […] "Organized crime, which is politically, financially and logistically supported from Belgrade, is attacking our state," Prime Minister Kurti stated.  

?Although Moscow loyalists in the Illyrian Peninsula showed their true face, the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, just like Enver Hoxha immediately after World War II, has failed to grasp and draw an accurate analysis of what is Belgrade's geopolitical posture and true intentions towards its neighboring countries. The 2023-armed clashes in Banjska were too serious to ignore; the loss of police officer Afrim Bunjaku was tragic; however, his heroism marked the end of the Open Balkan Initiative, a so-called regional economic alliance that was merely Serbia's tool to expand its chauvinistic policies towards non-Serbian ethnic communities inside its territory and apply its malignant, coercive measures, secretive operations across the Balkan Peninsula. 

?In his volume, Professor Lolja writes: "…However, it lasted until the newly emerged US leadership on world affairs had other strategic plans insisted on by the USA, Yugoslavia Nr. Three separated from the USSR-led communist camp on June 28, 1948. Thus, the USA again saved Albania, that time, from its dissolution into Yugoslavia Nr. 3." 

?The deeply analytical volume of Lolja provides a breakthrough in the international relations of Albania during the last eighty years, reflected remarkably by a highly competent author who has conducted significant research on Tirana's communist dictatorship, foreign interferences, imperial verdicts, and the difficult journey of democracy.