Albania became a Soviet-aligned country. The ranks and structure of the Albanian Armed Forces were organised based on Soviet concepts, thus increasing the political control of the State-Party over the Armed Forces. One of the defining characteristics of civilian-military relations during this period was the effort of the civilian leadership to ensure the loyalty of the military to the communist system's values and institutions. Like all other branches of the state, the military was subjugated to Communist Party control. All high-ranking military officers and most of the lower and middle ranks were members of the Communist Party—and had loyalties to it. The system was re-enforced by the establishment of Party cells within the military and extensive communist political education alongside soldiers' military training, by the political commissars. To further increase its political control, the Albanian Communist Party enlarged the conscription system, thus enlisting in the Armed Forces personnel dedicated to the military career from the Albanian rural areas. The State and Party went even further, beginning on 1 May 1966, military ranks were abolished following the example of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, heavily influenced by Maoism during the years of the Cultural Revolution, and thus adopting strategic concepts related to forms of guerrilla war (Vietnam War doctrine). The military was still organised during this period into basic structural forms, but the role of the military commander was insignificant with respect to the commanding role of the political commissars. In 1991 the rank system was reestablished under President Ramiz Alia. During all these years, Sigurimi which was the Albanian secret service during the period and was formed upon the KGB structure, was responsible for the execution, imprisonment, and deportation of more than 600 officers from the Armed Forces, by completely neutralising the Armed Forces ability to start a coup d'état. Initially the communist purge concentrated on military personnel who had graduated from the Western Military Academies (mainly from Italy 1927–1939), and was extended later to the officers graduated from the Soviet Union (after Albania abandoned the Warsaw Pact in 1968). As the communist regime collapsed in Albania during 1990, there was a real fear that the armed forces might intervene to halt the collapse of communism by force. In the event, the armed forces stood by as the regime of which they had been a part disintegrated. During the 1980s, Albania had reduced the number of infantry brigades from eight