ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Francesco Zavatti analyses the tourism activities of the Swedish-Albanian Association, established in Stockholm in 1970 by a pro-Chinese faction of the Swedish left. From its foundation and until the late 1980s, the Association organised travels for Swedish tourists in Albania, in cooperation with the Albanian tourism agency Albturist. The travels, it was promised, would provide the opportunity to meet the local population and to experience the achievements of communism in the Adriatic. Yet the Swedish travellers’ unpublished travel accounts show how the guided tours and organised activities frustrated the visitors by creating a gulf between them and ‘the people’. The Swedish fellow travellers observed how Albania failed to meet the image of a fair and just society propagandised by the Association. Their travel writing recounts a poor, authoritarian country with a backward patriarchal culture. Struggling to face the realities of the Stalinist utopia, the Swedish travel accounts employed various double-think strategies to soften their critique and justify the shortcomings.
