Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; Yiddish: חנה רבינסון;
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. Her parents, Sarah and Hersh Kaufman
Rabinsohn, had four surviving children; an additional two died in infancy. As a young woman, she became a teacher. 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 1922 for their political activities and went into exile to Switzerland on their release.
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 a Romanian being detained by the Soviets after the occupation of Bessarabia in 1940, 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.
In Moscow, she became 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 post-war government which came to be dominated by the
Communists. She was named Foreign Minister in 1947, after Gheorghe Tătărescu had been marginalized.
In 1948 Time magazine featured Ana Pauker's
portrait on its cover, with the caption The most powerful woman alive. She promoted forced collectivization, but also supported higher prices for agricultural products - which resulted in the
allegation that she was moving away from Marxism, as a "peasantist". She also opposed the
purging of Romanian veterans of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance, as well as Joseph Stalin's plans to have
former Communist leader Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu put on trial. Just as forcefully, she
argued against the Soviet-inspired monetary reform that drove down prices of farm goods
and risked provoking drastic shortages.
Pauker's initially unreserved Stalinist Muscovite faction within the Communist Party
(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 and was a rigid Stalinist: however, he resented 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 on the mounting anti-Semitism in Soviet policy, and persuaded
Stalin to take action against the Pauker faction. Pauker and her supporters 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 in Ana
Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (ISBN 0-520-22395-0 ) 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…
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, despite the fact that 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.
She was invited in 1956 to talks with Gheorghiu-Dej and his representatives, who insisted that
she acknowledge her guilt. Again, she claimed she was innocent and demanded that she be reinstated as a party member, without
meeting success. Gheorghiu-Dej went on to scapegoat her, together with 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. This is not to say that the period when the three were
in power was not marked by political persecution and the murder of opponents (such as the notorious works on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, begun in 1949 and ceased in 1953);
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 (b. 1926)
- Tatiana (b. 1928)
See also
External links
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