Ana Pauker

See also: Pauker (disambiguation) and Pauker (surname)

Ana Pauker
Pauker on the cover of Time, 1948
Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office 30 December 1947 – 9 July 1952
President	Constantin Ion Parhon Petru Groza
Prime Minister	Petru Groza Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
Preceded by	Gheorghe Tătărescu
Succeeded by	Simion Bughici
Personal details
Born	Hannah Rabinsohn (1893-02-13)February 13, 1893 Codăeşti, Vaslui County
Died	June 14, 1960(1960-06-14) (aged 67) Bucharest
Nationality	Romania
Political party	Romanian Communist Party
Other political affiliations	Romanian Social Democratic Party (defunct) Socialist Party of Romania
Spouse(s)	Marcel Pauker
Children	Tanio, Vlad, Tatiana, Masha (Marie)
Residence	Bucharest, Switzerland, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow
Occupation	Communist activist
Profession	Teacher
Religion	none
Parents	Sarah and (Tsvi-)Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn

Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; February 13, 1893 – June 14, 1960) was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party after World War II.

Biography

Early life and political career

Pauker was born into a poor, religious Orthodox Jewish family in Codăeşti, Vaslui County (the region of Moldavia). Her parents, Sarah and Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn, had 4 surviving children; an additional two died in infancy. As a young woman, she became a teacher in a Jewish elementary school in Bucharest. While her younger brother was a Zionist and remained religious, she opted for Socialism, joining the Romanian Social Democratic Party in 1915 and then its successor, the Socialist Party of Romania, in 1916. She was active in the pro-Bolshevik faction of the group, the one that took control after the Party's Congress of May 8–12, 1921 and joined the Comintern under the name of Socialist-Communist Party (future Communist Party of Romania). She and her husband, Marcel Pauker, became leading members. They were both arrested in 1923 and 1924 for their political activities and went into exile in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna in 1926 and 1927. In 1928, Ana Pauker moved to Moscow to enter the Comintern's International Lenin School, which trained the top functionaries of the Communist movement. There, she became closely associated with Dmitry Manuilsky, the Kremlin's foremost representative at the Comintern in the 1930s.

Communist leadership position

Ana Pauker went to France where she became an instructor for the Comintern and was also involved in the Communist movement elsewhere in the Balkans. She returned to Romania and was arrested in 1935, being put on trial together with other leading Communists such as Alexandru Moghioroş and Alexandru Drăghici, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In May 1941 she was sent into exile to the Soviet Union in exchange for Ion Codreanu, a former member of Sfatul Ţării (Parliament of Bessarabia that voted for Union with Romania on 27 March 1918) detained by the Soviets after the occupation of Bessarabia in 1940. Pauker left Romania just in time to escape the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews by the regime of Ion Antonescu, in alliance with Nazi Germany. In the meantime, her husband fell victim to the Soviet Great Purge, in 1938. Rumors abounded that she herself had denounced him as a Trotskyist traitor; Comintern archival documents reveal, however, that she repeatedly refused to do so.

In Moscow, she became the leader of the Romanian Communist exiles who would later become known as the Muscovite faction. She returned to Romania in 1944 when the Red Army entered the country, becoming a member of the postwar government, which came to be dominated by the Communists. In November 1947, the non-Communist Foreign Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu was ousted and replaced by Pauker, making her the first woman in the modern world to hold such a post. But it was her position in the Communist Party leadership that was paramount: As a member of the 4-person Secretariat of the Central Committee and formally Number Two in the leadership, Pauker was widely believed to have been the actual leader of the Romanian Communists in all but name during the immediate postwar period. In 1948 Time magazine featured her portrait on its cover and described her as "the most powerful woman alive". Infamous as the "Iron Lady" of Romanian Communist politics, she was universally seen as unreservedly Stalinist and as Moscow's primary agent in Romania.

Unquestionably, Ana Pauker played a pivotal role in the brutal imposition of Communism on Romania. But, at the same time, she paradoxically emerged as a force for moderation within the Romanian Communist leadership during the early postwar period. In late 1944 or early 1945, she pushed for creating a more broad-based coalition with the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, but was overruled by Joseph Stalin; hence, the Communist-led government created in March 1945 comprised a more restrictive coalition with a faction of the National Liberals led by Gheorghe Tătărescu. The government's first year in power witnessed extensive purges and arrests of tens of thousands of Romanians who were linked to the Antonescu regime. But Pauker and Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu released all but two to three thousand of those arrested by August 1945, and offered amnesty to any member of the fascist Iron Guard who had not committed serious crimes and who would turn in his/her weapons. Pauker also pursued what she later described as "a type of Social Democratic policy" of mass recruitment of as many as 500,000 new Communist Party members without verification--including former members of the Iron Guard. This policy would later be the subject of an attack on Pauker during her purge, and it was quickly overturned. Mass arrests would return with a vengeance beginning in 1947 (including the members of the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, as well as the amnestied Iron Guardists), and many of those who entered the party during Pauker's mass recruitment campaign would be purged between 1948 and 1950.

As the regime became more Stalinist under Cold War pressures from 1947 on, Pauker increasingly took positions counter to those of the Kremlin. In 1949 she did not support the construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal, even though, according to her own testimony, Stalin had personally proposed the project. She opposed the purging of the Romanian veterans of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance as part of Moscow's bloc-wide campaign against Josip Broz Tito, as well as Stalin's plans to have former Communist leader Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu put on trial. She supported (and helped facilitate) the emigration of roughly 100,000 Jews to Israel from the spring of 1950 to the spring of 1952, when all other Soviet satellites had shut their gates to Jewish emigration in line with Stalin's escalating "anti-Zionist" campaign. And she firmly opposed forced collectivization that was carried out on Moscow's orders in the summer of 1950 while she was in a Kremlin hospital undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Angrily condemning such coercion as "absolutely opposed to the line of our party and absolutely opposed to any serious Communist thought", she allowed peasants forced into collective farms to return to private farming and effectively halted additional collectivization throughout 1951. This, as well as her support in 1947 for higher prices for agricultural products in defiance of her Soviet "advisers", along with her favoring the integration of kulaks into the emerging socialist order, led to charges by Stalin that Pauker had fatefully deviated into "peasantist, non-Marxist policies".

Pauker's "Moscow faction" (so called because many of its members, like Pauker, had spent years in exile in Moscow) was opposed by the Prison faction (most of whom had spent the Fascist period, mainly under Antonescu's dictatorship, in Romanian prisons, particularly Doftana Prison). Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the de facto leader of the Prison faction, had supported intensified agricultural collectivization, pushed for Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu's trial and execution, and was a rigid Stalinist; however, he resented some strains of Soviet influence (which would become clear at the time of de-Stalinization when, as leader of Communist Romania, he was a determined opponent of Nikita Khrushchev).

Downfall

Gheorghiu-Dej profited from the mounting anti-Semitism in Soviet policy and actively lobbied Joseph Stalin to take action against the Pauker faction. Dej traveled to Moscow in August 1951 to seek Stalin's approval for purging Pauker and her allies in the Secretariat (Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu). But archival evidence has led Vladimir Tismaneanu to conclude that "Ana Pauker's downfall did not occur merely, or even primarily, because of Gheorghiu-Dej's skillful maneuvering--as some Romanian novels published in the 1980s would have us believe--but first and foremost because of Stalin's decision to initiate a major political purge in Romania." Pauker, Luca and Georgescu were purged in May 1952, consolidating Gheorghiu-Dej's own grip over country and Party.

Pauker was charged with "cosmopolitanism", the charge Stalin used against Jews in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. According to biographer Robert Levy, Pauker was purged at Stalin's urging for being too soft. According to the memoirs of Silviu Brucan, former Romanian ambassador to the United Nations, Stalin told Gheorghiu-Dej that he had chosen him to lead Romania over Pauker, saying:

"Ana is a good, reliable comrade, but you see, she is a Jewess of bourgeois origin, and the party in Romania needs a leader from the ranks of the working class, a true-born Romanian.… I have decided….to kill the jews"

Pauker was arrested in February 1953 and was subjected to prolonged interrogations in preparation to be put on trial, as had occurred with Rudolf Slánský and others in the Prague Trials. After Stalin's death in March 1953 she was freed from jail and put under house arrest instead.

Following the rise of Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, Pauker was recast by Romania's leaders as having been a staunch ultra-Orthodox Stalinist, even though she had opposed or had attempted to moderate a number of Stalinist policies while she was in a leadership position. Following the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow there were fears that Khrushchev might force the Romanian Party to rehabilitate Pauker and possibly install her as Romania's new leader.

In 1956, she was summoned for questioning by a high-level party commission, which insisted that she acknowledge her guilt. Again, she claimed she was innocent and demanded that she be reinstated as a party member, without success. Gheorghiu-Dej went on to scapegoat her, Vasile Luca, and Teohari Georgescu for their alleged Stalinist excesses in the late 1940s and early 1950s, despite the fact that they had urged moderation against Gheorghiu-Dej's insistence on dogmatism. The period when the three were in power was marked by political persecution and the murder of opponents (such as the infamous brainwashing experiments conducted at Piteşti prison in 1949-1952). Gheorghiu-Dej, who had as much to account for, used moments like these to ensure the survival of his policies in a post-Stalinist age.

During her forcible retirement, Pauker was allowed to work as a translator from French and German for the Editura Politică publishing house.

Family

Marcel and Ana Pauker had three children:

• Tanio (1921–1922);
• Vlad (born 1926);
• Tatiana (1928–2011).

Vlad and Masha (Pauker's fourth child, also known as Marie was born in 1932, fathered by the Czech-Jewish Communist Eugen Fried) currently live in France.

References

• Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, ISBN 0-520-22395-0
• Book review of Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist
• Red Star Over Romania, review by Susan Brownmiller in The Nation.
• Ana Pauker: Dilemmas of a Reluctant Stalinist Robert Levy on Ana Pauker.
• "The Doctor's Story", Time, March 25, 1957
• Adrian Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx. O introducere în istoria comunismului românesc, Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2005. ISBN 973-669-175-6
• Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. ISBN 0-520-22395-0
• Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-691-14972-1
• Un episod puţin cunoscut: Schimbarea lui Ana Pauker cu Moş Ion Codreanu, mai 1941 [A less known episode: the exchange of Ana Pauker with Ion Codreanu, May 1941], in Pontes. Review of South East European Studies (Chişinău, Moldova State University), vol. III-IV, 2009, p. 292-301.

External links

• Communist Romania article from the City of Braşov website on Romania's Communist period, including the conflicts between Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej.