Ana Pauker

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ana Pauker

Ana Pauker (born December 13, 1893 in Codăeşti , Vaslui County , as Hannah Rabinsohn ; † June 3, 1960 in Bucharest ) was a communist politician in Romania , from 1947 to 1952 the first woman in the world to become foreign minister .

Life

Beginnings

She came from a destitute family with many children. Her parents were Orthodox Jews , her father Schochet , her mother a simple saleswoman. The couple had six children, four of whom reached adulthood. The Hebrew language learned Ana in cheder . While her younger brother Zalman devoted himself to Zionism , she took the path of socialism after 1915 under the influence of a childhood friend . From 1915 to 1917 she was a Hebrew teacher at the school in Bucharest, where she had learned the language herself, and earned an extra bread with sewing work. From 1919 she studied medicine in Geneva for a year . During a stay in Paris, she met the communist Marcel Pauker (1896-1938) and married him on July 1, 1921. Under his influence, she turned to communism , both of which became founding members of the Romanian Communist Party (RKP). In 1921 their daughter Tanja was born, who died of dysentery after seven months . Marcel Pauker was executed in Moscow in 1938 as part of the Stalin Purge .

Career as a communist

In 1922 Ana Pauker and her husband were arrested for the first time for illegal political activity, which was to be repeated several times in the following years. After their release, they toured Switzerland and France. In 1925 she was sentenced to ten years in prison, but escaped to the Soviet Union in 1926. In the same year their son Vlad was born, in 1928 their daughter Tatanya. In 1928 she and her husband moved to Moscow and took courses at the International Lenin School . In the same year the couple separated and the two children were sent to an MOPR children's home . In 1930 Ana Pauker was appointed head of the Comintern and moved to Paris under the code name Maria . In 1932 she had a daughter Maria, the father was the Slovak communist Eugen Fried . The daughter grew up in France, mainly with the first wife of the communist Maurice Thorez .

In 1934 Pauker was sent to Romania to work as general secretary to promote the establishment of the Communist Party. On July 12, 1935, she was arrested by the Romanian government along with Dimitar Ganew and Șmil Marcovici on the basis of information from the then Siguranța secret police . In the so-called Craiova trial from June to July 1936, she was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in the prison in Râmnicu Sărat , 10 more years of being banned from political activity and a fine of 100,000 lei. After the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940 and a. had arrested the nationalist politician Ion Codreanu, Pauker was released in July 1941 as part of a prisoner exchange and moved to Moscow. During the Second World War she headed the “Group Moscow”, an association of Romanian communists in the Soviet Union. She also produced Romanian radio programs for Radio Moscow in collaboration with Vasile Luca . From October 1943 to June 1944 she helped as a political instructor in the establishment of the 1st Romanian Volunteer Infantry Division "Tudor Vladimirescu" , formed from Romanian emigrants and prisoners of war , which had already fought on the Soviet side before the coup on August 23, 1944 also the royal Romanian army swept their weapons against Nazi Germany.

In the summer of 1944 she returned to Romania with the Red Army and participated in the formation of a communist-dominated coalition government headed by Petru Groza . After the fall of the liberal foreign minister and deputy prime minister Gheorghe Tătărescu in November 1947, Pauker took over his post and was thus the first female foreign minister in Romania under communist rule. Together with Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu, she led the so-called “Moscow Group” within the RKP, whose ideology was personally supported by Stalin . A power struggle for years broke out between this group and the so-called prison group, with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej , Iosif Chișinevschi and Nicolae Ceaușescu as leading members, with the prison group finally proving victorious and taking power in the 1950s. Much of its members had been incarcerated mainly in Doftana Prison during World War II . In a secret protocol of May 23, 1948, the existence of which remained unknown for decades, Pauker signed Romania's renunciation of Snake Island in favor of the Soviet Union . On June 11, 1948, she sent a telegram to the Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharet, with official recognition of the State of Israel . On April 15, 1949, she took over the post of Deputy Prime Minister in addition to heading the Foreign Ministry.

Ana Pauker participated to a large extent in the transformation of Romania into a Soviet vassal state with a distant relationship to the West, whereby violent means and terror were used at various levels. She is also responsible for the deportation to the Bărăgan steppe , the murder of opponents of the communist regime and the re-education measures of the Piteşti experiment . In addition, a concordat with the Holy See from 1927, which guaranteed the Catholics in Romania freedom of worship , was unilaterally canceled by the Romanian side. According to the dissident William Totok , Pauker is said to have asked the Securitate in 1949 to construct sham reasons to publicly expose clergy who refused to collaborate with the communist authorities. Their compromise plan was to convict priests of criminal acts and set them sexual traps. The political show trials against the "Vatican spies" in September 1951 were intended to intimidate the lower clergy and the faithful. Molotov was one of Pauker's supporters in the Soviet Union . Despite this, she opposed the collectivization of agriculture in Romania and was against the introduction of the Soviet system of collective farms , possibly preventing the execution of Chiaburi , the Romanian equivalent for kulaks , Tito supporters and various opponents of the regime.

At the end of 1945, Ana Pauker and Teohari Georgescu had initiated contacts with Horia Sima's faction of the Iron Guard legionnaires' movement, negotiating the release of legionnaires from concentration camps and the persecution of legionnaires who had gone underground, voluntarily and surrendered their weapons should be discontinued. As a result of this agreement, Pauker and Georgescu were later tried as deviants and removed from their functions.

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej ( far left), next to him Ana Pauker at a government meeting in 1951

Disempowerment

Ana Pauker developed breast cancer , which was treated for the first time in 1950. During this time she fell out of favor and, probably with Stalin's consent, was ousted by Gheorghiu-Dej at the plenum of the Central Committee of the PMR on May 27, 1952 . As a high-ranking party official and foreign minister, she was expelled from the Romanian Workers' Party (PMR) along with the other heads of the “Moscow Group” . Simion Bughici took over the management of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs . She was arrested on February 19, 1953; after Stalin's death, she was released from custody on April 20, 1953 and placed under house arrest. A trial planned against them for “deviating from the law” and “Zionist connections” was suspended after Molotov intervened. Her brother Solomon Rabinsohn was imprisoned for "Zionist activities" at the time. In the years when she headed the government, she participated in the process that enabled over 100,000 Romanian Jews to emigrate to Israel, very likely with the approval of the Soviet Union. After the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia and the Stalinist disinformation campaign on the “ doctors' conspiracy ”, her arrest was accompanied by a campaign and new trials against Zionist activities in Romania.

Pauker lived under constant surveillance after her release. After she refused to recognize the allegations of cosmopolitanism and anti- party activities brought against her , she was expelled from the party in 1954. In the last years of her life she translated books from German and French into Romanian without her name being published. She died of breast cancer in Bucharest in 1960. Leading Romanian communists were present at her burial in the crematorium. After Ceaușescu's rise to power , she was politically rehabilitated, and in 1968 her ashes were transferred to the mausoleum in Carol Park . After the mausoleum was demolished in 1991, her family brought her ashes to Israel. Pauker played an important role in the upbringing of the young Ion Iliescu , who would later become President of Romania.

According to some publicists and historians (including Robert Conquest , Victor Frunza , Jaques de Launay and Arkadi Waksberg ), she is said to have betrayed her husband to the NKVD . This was also suggested by Princess Ileana . According to other sources, she did not find out about the 1938 execution of Marcel Pauker as a "Western agent" until 1959. According to most information, she was in Romanian custody at the time of her husband's arrest and execution and only emigrated to the USSR after her release in 1941 .

Awards

reception

Pauker received various names: "Stalin with skirt", "Ruler of Romania" or "Pasionaria Balcanilor", d. H. “ La Pasionaria of the Balkans”. The Time Magazine described it in 1948 as "the most powerful woman alive."

In both Romanian and Western historiography, Ana Pauker was portrayed as a power-hungry Stalinist (“red tsarina”) for decades after her death, although anti-Semitic undertones (“rabbi's daughter”) were not missing. As early as 1949, a press release marked by anti-Jewish clichés reported how Pauker's father Zwi Rabinsohn was “caught by a photo reporter for the first time in his 85-year life”. For over 40 years, Ana Pauker was portrayed by communist propaganda in Romania as an extreme Stalinist dogmatist who played a major role in the implementation of Soviet guidelines at the beginning of the communist regime in Romania. This view has been essentially adopted by Western historians who for a long time had no access to the archives of the Communist Party.

Their role in the collectivization of Romanian agriculture, for example, was also distorted. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who had initiated Pauker's disempowerment on the occasion of a visit to Stalin, then accused her of “instigating provocative measures” during the collectivization and “trampling on the free will of the peasants”, even though Pauker was at her time as Foreign Minister had opposed the collectivization measures.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ana Pauker  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Florica Dobre: Membrii CC al PCR 1945-1989 , page 453ff. Editura Enciclopedică, Bucharest 2004 ( PDF )
  2. ↑ William Totok : “Comrade Stalin, as we believed you, we didn't even believe ourselves.” Marcel Pauker (1896–1938) - an ostracized . Half-yearly publication for Southeast European History, Literature and Politics 1996/2, pp. 35–38, accessed on February 1, 2018.
  3. ↑ România - Viața politică în documente - 1950 Bucureşti 2002
  4. ^ William Totok : Securitate and Vatican . Horch and Guck , Issue 76, 02/2012, pp. 52–56, accessed on April 21, 2013.
  5. ^ Georgeta Daniela Oancea: Myths and the past: Romania after the turn . Dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, 2005, p. 37 (pdf; 1.8 MB).
  6. ↑ a b Andreea Tuzu: Ana Pauker, "Stalin cu fustă"
  7. ^ Robert Levy: Ana Pauker . Preface.
  8. ↑ William Totok : Comrade Stalin, as we believed you, we did not even believe ourselves. Marcel Pauker (1896-1938) - an ostracist. In: Half-yearly publication for Southeast European history, literature and politics . December 17, 2004, accessed April 25, 2019 .
  9. ^ Robert Levy: Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist. syndetics.com, archived from the original on July 14, 2012 ; accessed on February 1, 2018 (English, short review).
  10. ^ Viorel S. Roman, Hannes Hofbauer : Transilvania: românii la încrucișarea intereselor imperiale. Focus on Eastern Europe.
  11. ^ From the ZBW press kit, No. 00015
  12. ^ Robert Levy: Ana Pauker , p. 3
  13. ↑ Kenneth Jowitt: Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: the Case of Romania, 1944-1965. University of California Press, 1971, ISBN 0-520-01762-5 , p. 99.
personal data
SURNAME Pauker, Ana
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rabinsohn, Hannah; Pauker, Anna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian politician
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Codăeşti , Vaslui County
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1960
Place of death Bucharest