Ana Pauker

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Pauker (surname)

Ana Pauker
Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office
30 December 1947 – 9 July 1952
PresidentConstantin Ion Parhon
Petru Groza
Prime MinisterPetru Groza
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
Preceded byGheorghe Tătărescu
Succeeded bySimion Bughici
Personal details
Born
Hannah Rabinsohn

(1893-02-13)13 February 1893
Social Democratic Party of Romania
Socialist Party of Romania
SpouseMarcel Pauker
Domestic partnerEugen Fried
ChildrenTanio, Vlad, Tatiana, Masha (Maria), Alexandru (adopted)
Residence(s)Bucharest, Switzerland, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow
OccupationCommunist activist
ProfessionTeacher
ParentsSarah and (Tsvi-)Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn
Signature

Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; 13 February 1893 – 3 June 1960) was a Romanian

foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ana Pauker became the world's first female foreign minister when entering office in December 1947. She was also the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party immediately after World War II
.

Biography

Early life and political career

Pauker was born on 13 February 1893 into a poor, religious

Comintern in the 1930s.[2]

Communist leadership position

Ana Pauker went to France, where she became an instructor for the

Comintern archival documents reveal, however, that she repeatedly refused to do so.[3]

Vasile Luca, Constantin Pîrvulescu, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Pauker, Teohari Georgescu, Florica Bagdasar, and Gheorghe Vasilichi at a Romanian Communist Party meeting in October 1945

In Moscow, she became the leader of the Romanian communist exiles who later on became 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. 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.[4]

But it was her position in the Communist Party leadership that was paramount. Although she declined to become the General Secretary of the

Stalinist and as Moscow's primary agent in Romania.[contradictory
]

Unquestionably, Ana Pauker played a pivotal role in the imposition of communism on Romania. At the same time, however, she emerged as a force for moderation within the Romanian communist leadership during the early postwar period. Pauker was certainly complicit in the extensive purges and arrests in 1945 of tens of thousands of Romanians who were linked to the fascist Ion Antonescu regime. Yet, by August 1945 Pauker and interior minister Teohari Georgescu released all but two to three thousand of those arrested, offering amnesty to any member of the fascist Iron Guard who had not committed serious crimes and who would turn in his weapons.[9] 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.[10]

During this same period, 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 strict verification, including many former members of the Iron Guard.[11] This policy would later be the subject of an attack on Pauker during her purge,[12] and it was quickly overturned. Many of those who entered the party during Pauker's mass recruitment campaign would be purged between 1948 and 1950, and mass arrests would return with a vengeance in 1947 (including members of the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, as well as the amnestied members of the Iron Guard).[13] Although she acceded to Soviet orders to arrest the leaders of the non-communist opposition,[14] Pauker reportedly opposed the arrests of prominent National Peasants' Party officials Corneliu Coposu and Ghiță Pop[15] and appealed to the presiding judge of the trial of National Peasants' Party leader Iuliu Maniu for leniency in his sentencing.[16]

Antonín Zápotocký, Petru Groza, and Pauker in 1948

Reviewing her record during the early postwar years, the historian Norman Naimark observed that Pauker's "policies in the period 1945–1948 are remarkably similar to those of the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka. She encouraged coalitions with the 'historical' parties, urged compromises with 'bourgeois' politicians, and sought to deflect the persecution of social democrats and liberals."[17]

These contradictions would intensify as the regime became more Stalinist under

Stalin had personally proposed the project.[20] In 1949–52 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 or - at the very least - took no part in their repression, as they were not purged en masse in Romania until a few months after Pauker's downfall.[21] And she was reported by colleagues and associates to have resisted Stalin's plans to have Justice Minister Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu put on trial, and was accused by the Securitate's chief Soviet adviser of having "sabotaged and postponed investigations" in the Pătrășcanu case.[22] (This remains a subject of debate among historians,[23] for there is a dearth of evidence in the Romanian archives on Pauker's position on Pătrășcanu, because all transcripts of Politburo discussions on the Pătrășcanu inquiry were summarily destroyed on the orders of General Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.[24]
)

Pauker c. after 1945

In addition, Pauker 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

kulaks into the emerging socialist order,[29] led Stalin to charge that Pauker had fatefully deviated into "peasantist, non-Marxist policies".[30]

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 in Romanian prisons, particularly in the

Communist Romania, he was a determined opponent of Nikita Khrushchev).[33]

Downfall and scapegoating

Great National Assembly
in April 1951

Gheorghiu-Dej profited from the

anti-Semitism in Stalinist policy closely linked to Joseph Stalin's increasing paranoia, actively lobbying Stalin to take action against the Pauker faction. Gheorghiu-Dej travelled to Moscow in August 1951 to seek Stalin's approval for purging Pauker and her allies in the Secretariat (Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu).[34] But archival evidence has led Vladimir Tismăneanu 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 foremost because of Stalin's decision to initiate a major political purge in Romania."[35]
Pauker, Luca, and Georgescu were purged in May 1952, consolidating Gheorghiu-Dej's own grip over country and Party.

The charges against Ana Pauker increasingly focused on her positions on Zionism and Israel. She was accused of supporting "the subversive and espionage activities of the Israeli Legation and of the Zionists in the country", of making secret commitments to Israeli diplomats, of displaying a "nationalist attitude on the emigration of Jews to Israel", and of divulging secrets to "the enemy" (the United States) through its principal agent, "international Zionism."[36]

Pauker was arrested on 18 February 1953 and subjected to tightened interrogations and a soft form of torture in preparation for a show trial, as had occurred with Rudolf Slánský and others in the Prague Trials.[37] After Stalin's death in March 1953 she was freed from jail and put under house arrest instead—the result of the direct intervention of Vyacheslav Molotov, who reportedly acted on the insistence of his wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, a friend of Pauker's and herself freed from prison soon after Stalin's death.[38] When another Party leader informed Pauker of Stalin's death, she burst into tears—prompting her colleague to quip: "Don't cry. If Stalin were still alive, you'd be dead."[38]

Following the

Pitești 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.

Later life

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.

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

Death

In the spring of 1959, Pauker was diagnosed with a terminal recurrence of cancer. She died on 3 June 1960 of cardiac arrest, after the cancer had spread to her heart and lungs.[39]

Analysis

Ana Pauker was recast by Romania's leaders in the official party history 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. As the historian Robert Levy concluded: "No other communist leader save Tito has been shown to have resisted the Soviet-imposed line [during the Cominform period of "high Stalinism"] as she did—whether on

kulaks and the urban bourgeoise, the prosecution of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, the purge of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance veterans, the dimensions of the Five-Year Plan, the staging of a show trial of Romanian Zionists, or the facilitation of mass Jewish emigration".[40]

Legacy

Ana Pauker's legacy in Romania today is still tainted by the attempt of ruling party propagandists in the 1950s and 1960s to scapegoat her as the leader responsible for the crimes of the early Communist period. For instance, she is often referred to in Romania as "Stalin with a skirt" (Stalin cu fustă).[41] Film director Radu Gabrea, who completed a feature-length documentary on Pauker in 2016,[42] suggests that this demonising of Pauker is only possible because Pauker was a woman and of Jewish origin, and that it reflects the widespread antisemitism in Romania.[43]

As historian Robert Levy put it: "Long the party's propagandists' scapegoat as the source of all the horrors of the Stalinist period, Ana Pauker continues to be vilified in post-communist Romania as the party leader most culpable for the post-war years' repression. But the truth is that this perpetually contradictory figure, though a Stalinist herself, and one who played a key role in imposing Communism on Romania, paradoxically presented an alternative to the rigid, harsh Stalinism that soon emblemised Romanian party life and left a hidden legacy as a persistent patron of Romania's peasantry within the communist hierarchy. The fall of Ana Pauker was a significant step in a process that precluded any reformist leadership from prevailing in Romania and fated its citizens to endure the extreme hardship that would culminate in the Ceaușescu regime."[44]

Family

Marcel and Ana Pauker had three children:

  • Tanio (1921–1922);
  • Vlad (1926–2016);
  • Tatiana (1928–2011).

Though it was long alleged that she denounced the father of her three children as a

Comintern archival documents reveal, however, that she repeatedly refused to do so.[3]

Ana Pauker had a fourth child, Masha (1932–2020), fathered by the Czech-Jewish Communist Eugen Fried; Masha (Maria), who was born in Moscow, was raised in France by her father.[46] Pauker adopted a fifth child, Alexandru, in the late 1940s.

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-3-031-13127-1
    .
  2. ISBN 0-520-22395-0
    , pp. 15–16, 39, 45–47.
  3. ^ a b Levy, pp. 64–66. Levy's findings are based on documents in the Comintern and the Romanian Communist Party archives.
  4. ^ "Female Foreign Ministers". www.guide2womenleaders.com. Retrieved 24 December 2018.
  5. ^ Levy, pp. 71-72.
  6. ^ Paula E. Hyman, "Romanian Leader's Political Biography Explores the Costs of Party Loyalty," The Forward, October 5, 2001, pp. 13-14; reprinted in Haaretz, October 12, 2001.
  7. ^ Levy, p. 2.
  8. ^ "A Girl Who Hated Cream Puffs", Time, 20 September 1948
  9. ^ Levy, p. 75.
  10. ^ Levy, p. 74.
  11. ^ Levy, pp. 74–75.
  12. ^ The final report of the Party Commission investigating Pauker (issued in 1954) concluded that Pauker's opening of the Party's gates to Iron Guard members and "other groups" in 1945 was one of the two primary components of Pauker's "counterrevolutionary line." The second was her promotion of mass Jewish emigration to the newborn State of Israel.--Levy, pp. 177, 339, note 112.
  13. ^ Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 92–93, 127.
  14. ^ Levy, pp. 86.
  15. ^ Corneliu Coposu, Dialoguri, with Vartan Arachelian (Bucharest, 1993), pp. 66–67.
  16. ^ This was revealed by Ion Cârja, the secretary general of the Association of Writers in Transylvania, who was himself arrested in 1949. --Ion Cârja, Canalul Morții, (Bucharest, 1993), p. 173. The judge was Colonel Alexandru Petrescu.
  17. ^ Norman Naimark, Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer 2002), p. 389.
  18. ^ Levy, pp. 3, 157.
  19. ^ Levy, pp. 87, 285, note 147 and 148.
  20. ^ Levy, pp. 88, 286, note 158.
  21. ^ Levy, pp. 153–162.
  22. ^ Levy, pp. 134–152.
  23. ^ Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, p. 116.
  24. ^ "Report on the Party Commission Established to Clarify the Situation of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, submitted to the Party Leadership on June 29, 1968," Executive Archive of the Central Committee of the R.C.P., pp. 43–44; cited in Levy, p. 149, 321, note 137.
  25. ^ Levy, pp. 166–180
  26. ^ Levy, pp. 108–109
  27. ^ Levy, 109–111. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery concur on this point: Ana Pauker, they write, "consistently fought for a gradualist strategy once the Soviets insisted that Romania collectivize [in 1948]."--Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 105.
  28. ^ Levy, pp. 91–93
  29. ^ Levy, pp. 118–119
  30. ^ Levy, pp. 199–200.
  31. ^ Kligman and Verdery, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, pp. 105, 201–202.
  32. ^ Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, pp. 118–119.
  33. ^ Vladimir Tismăneanu, Gheorghiu-Dej and the Romanian Workers' Party: From De-Sovietization to the Emergence of National Communism, (Working Paper No. 37) Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., 2002.
  34. ISBN 0-275-92783-0
    ; Levy, p. 199.
  35. ^ Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, p. 133.
  36. ^ Levy, pp. 214, 217.
  37. ^ Levy, pp. 214, 218, 358, note 198.
  38. ^ a b Levy, p. 219.
  39. ^ Levy, pp. 224–225.
  40. ^ Levy, pp. 233–234.
  41. ^ "Ana Pauker – "Stalin cu fustă"". www.historia.ro. Retrieved 24 December 2018.
  42. ^ "Aarc.ro - Totul despre filmul românesc". aarc.ro. Retrieved 24 December 2018.
  43. Romanian Television. Archived from the original
    on 11 September 2019. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
  44. ^ Levy, p. 238.
  45. OCLC 870339535
    .
  46. ^ Amalric, Jaques (10 February 1997). "Livre. La biographie d'Eugen Fried". Libération (in French). Retrieved 5 February 2021.

References

External links

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