Professor Sergey Khrushchev was waiting for me in front of the entrance to the University of Rhode Island. I had made a long journey to meet him. I was driven by an old curiosity, to hear not only his memories of his father, Nikita Khrushchev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, but also what he might know about Albania, that small country that, according to our early custom, we have always imagined as the axis around which the history of the world revolves. After we greeted each other, he showed me the way. I followed him. The professor's steps were slow, but his mind was clear. As soon as we sat down, I asked him about the visit his father had made to Albania. I remember it, he said. "I was a boy, but I remember it well. My father stayed for about three weeks." Three weeks! It seemed an unusual time to me. What could the leader of a superpower do in Albania for three weeks? - I asked him.

The professor smiled.

"He was simply curious. He wanted to know the country. Moreover, they welcomed him with great honors"

I did not escape the temptation. However, later Enver Hoxha accused him of wanting to destroy Albania. He said that Khrushchev wanted to leave the Albanians without bread, advising them to plant oranges instead of wheat.

The professor laughed lightly, with that laugh of people who have heard political nonsense many times. "When I was helping my father prepare his memoirs, he mentioned Albania to me. He did not appreciate Hoxha. He called him ungrateful and attached to his own greatness. But tell me, for what reason would the Soviet Union want to harm Albania? What interest did it have? Albania was a small country, about which Moscow knew very little" - he paused for a moment and after drinking a cup of coffee continued - "Father thought that your climate was suitable for citrus fruits. Oranges and tangerines had a secure market. You could get wheat in exchange. For the Soviet Union, supplying Albania with wheat did not constitute any burden. Therefore, the accusation that he wanted to let Albania starve to death was, at best, a political fantasy"

Time, as it often does, has taken its toll. Today, southern Albania is not known for its wheat fields, but for the citrus plantations that cover the hills and fields.

Then I asked him: Why didn't the Soviets overthrow Hoxha?

The professor looked at me with his blue eyes. "My son, the Soviet Union had much bigger problems than dealing with Albania. Do you think it couldn't overthrow a provincial dictator, if it really had that intention?"

This conversation has reminded me of these days, when in Tirana we hear that behind the protests, the hand of the Russians is hidden. It seems that history has only one habit, it changes the scenery, but leaves the same actors. Once it was said that the Russians wanted to destroy us with oranges, today it is said that they want to destroy our tourism.

And yet the professor's question remains as simple as it is unpleasant: Why would Russia have such a great interest in Albania? Is it possible that the Kremlin doesn't sleep at night from the Albanian prime minister's visits to Ukraine? Or from the promises of the Tirana Municipality to build a couple of schools there?

Is it possible that Putin is not asleep that Zelensky (the corrupt leader according to American intelligence agencies) honored our Mother with the Princess Olga Medal?

I am not an expert on geopolitics and I do not undertake to give lessons on the great affairs of the world. But one thing seems clear to me: great powers do not waste their energies on provincial myths.

When they have great interests, they act, when they don't, they leave us to deal with the shadows that our own imagination creates. Albania has long suffered from an old disease, the belief that the world wakes up every morning thinking about us. It is an arrogance that we have inherited from propaganda, not from history. Cuna, Maybe it is not the Russian bear that is disturbing our forest. Maybe our forest is disturbed more by our Cakenjte who, whenever they lack an answer to the country's troubles, rush to invent a distant enemy. And when the forest is emptied, when citizens become impoverished and trust fades, they always look for the blame somewhere far away in the Bear!