Ana Pauker
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.[1] 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
General Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej profited from the mounting anti-Semitism in Soviet policy, and persuaded Joseph Stalin to take action against the Pauker faction. Dej traveled to Moscow to seek Stalin's approval for purging the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party, accusing Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Teohari Georgescu of fomenting factional intrigue.[2] Soviet Foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov intervened on behalf of Pauker, whereas NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria defended Georgescu—their lives were spared[2] 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,[3] 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 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 infamous 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:
References
- ^ "A Girl Who Hated Cream Puffs", Time, September 20, 1948
- ^ a b George H. Hodos, Show trials: Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe, 1948-1954, Praeger, New York, 1987. p.103. ISBN 0275927830
- ^ Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001. ISBN 0-520-22395-0
- Book review of Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist
- 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 9736691756
- Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. ISBN 0-520-22395-0
External links
- Communist Romania article from the City of Braşov website on Romania's Communist period, including the conflicts between Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej.