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Ana Pauker 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. Pauker was born into a poor, religious Orthodox Jewish family in Codreşti, Vaslui county and became a teacher. While her younger brother became a Zionist and remained religious, she became a socialist joining Romania's radical social-democratic party in 1915 and then joining its pro-Bolshevik faction in 1916. In 1921, the left faction took control of the party and it joined the Communist International and renamed the party the Communist Party of Romania. She and her husband, Marcel Pauker, became leading members. She and her husband were arrested in 1922 for their political activities and then went into exile to Switzerland on their release. She 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 and put on trial with other leading Communists such as Alexandru Moghioros and Alexandru Draghici 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 Soviet Union after the occupation of Bessarabia, just in time to escape the execution of half of the country's Jews by the Nazis. 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 liberated the country. She became a member of the post-war government which came to be dominated by the Communists and was named Foreign Minister in 1947. In 1948 Time Magazine put her on its cover calling her "the most powerful woman alive". She opposed forced collectivization and supported higher prices for agricultural products resulting in her being criticised as a "peasantist". She also opposed the purging of Romanian veterans of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance, and opposed Stalin's plans to have former Communist leader Lucretiu Patrascanu criminally charged. As well she argued against Soviet-inspired currency reforms that drove down the prices of farm goods risking shortages. Pauker's "Muscovite faction" in the Communist Party (so-called because many of them, like Pauker, had spent years in exile in Moscow) was opposed by the "prison faction" (most of whom had spent the fascist period in Romanian prisons, particularly Doftana Prison) led by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej who had supported intensified agricultural collectivization and was a rigid Stalinist who later resisted Khruschevite reforms. Pauker and her supporters were purged in May 1952; she was hurt largely by anti-Semitism as Romania had a long history of anti-Jewish sentiment and Jews were generally removed from senior positions once Gheorghiu-Dej consolidated power. She was also hurt by Stalin's own anti-Semitism which intensified in the last years of his life as she was charged with "cosmopolitanism", the charge Stalin used against Jews in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. According to biographer Robert Levy in Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (ISBN 0520223950 ) 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 1952 and was subjected to prolonged interrogations in preparation to be put on trial, as had occurred to Rudolf Slnsky and others in the Prague Trials. After Stalin's death in 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 Paurker and possibly install her as Romania's leader. She was invited in 1956 to talks with Gheorghiu-Dej and his representatives, who insisted that she acknowledge her guilt. She insisted on her innocence, however, 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. During her forcible retirement, Pauker was allowed to work as a translator from French and German for the journal Editura Politica. See also External links Pauker, Ana Pauker, Ana Pauker, Ana Pauker, Ana
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