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The �Red Matron�
Erik Schechter
Romanian Communist leader Ana Pauker wasn�t the tough Stalinist her peers made her out to be
The late Ana Pauker fell fast and hard. The Romanian foreign minister from 1947 to 1952, Pauker was the unofficial leader of that country�s Communist Party for much of that period � the first woman to reach such a pinnacle of power in the Soviet Bloc. But her purge from government in May 1952 left her a shunned publishing house editor; the official press ignored her death from cancer six years later. Today, Pauker symbolizes for her fellow Romanians the worst of the Stalinist era: a fanatic (and a Jew) who hunted down �imperialist spies� and terrorized peasants into joining state-run farms.
In his new biography, Robert Levy challenges this popular caricature. Yes, Pauker was a blinkered, Moscow-trained commissar, but he contends she was purged precisely because she resisted the excesses of her more dogmatic rivals. It was only after the rise of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the changing political winds, that Pauker, once derided by her foes as a sentimental �peasantist,� was recast as an orthodox Stalinist. This convenient lie, argues Levy, would later service the larger calumny that Jews alone were responsible for the horrors of Communism.
There�s no denying that until the mass recruitment drives of 1945 Jews were wildly overrepresented in the Romanian Communist Party (RCP). But as Levy notes, it was anti-Semitism that drove them there. Starting in the 1860s, the Romanian parliament banned Jews from most professions, plunging them into poverty and, for a minority, into Communist agitation. Ana Rabinsohn, daughter of an impoverished Orthodox family from Bucharest, was one such radical. In 1915, at age 21, she joined the social democrats, and moved on to the party�s pro-Bolshevik faction the following year.
There, she met Marcel Pauker, a charismatic Jewish revolutionary, whom she married in 1921. That same year, the Bolsheviks had taken control of the party (renamed the RCP), a move that propelled the Paukers to leadership. But sometime after 1938, Marcel fell victim to Stalin. Contrary to legend, Ana did not turn in her husband for his alleged Trotskyite heresies, but she did soldier on as a devoted Communist after his disappearance.
Her stay in Moscow in the 1920s taught her that �to express any doubt whatsoever, indeed even to listen to such doubts, automatically became grounds for being considered an enemy.� The Party was infallible. Pauker herself loudly defended Stalin�s forced collectivization of farmlands, a national project that killed 6-10 million peasants. After all, what was the alternative � Wall Street?
She was in the USSR during the war years, while 265,000 of her country�s 700,000 Jews were killed. Still, Levy argues convincingly that, back in Romania � which became a Soviet satellite in 1947 � Pauker, as the party�s agriculture secretary, held rather pro-peasant attitudes. In 1948, she opposed Soviet-backed currency reforms that forced down the prices of farm goods, a surefire recipe for food shortages and industrial unemployment. ��[Y]ou don�t get anything, worker, when you buy things from the peasant with prices that are nothing,�� Levy quotes Pauker as saying.
Opposing her softer line was party secretary general and future premier Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Dej had sought to speed up the collectivization of farmlands and to set up, by 1950, 1,000 state farms, but Pauker had resisted. A year later, when she was sidelined by breast-cancer surgery, Alexandaru Moghiorois, a Dej ally, managed to drive 30,000 peasants onto government plots. Upon her return, Pauker tried to undo the damage but �was forced to tread the path of party politics and implement the very actions she so adamantly opposed.�
Levy similarly argues that Pauker�s role in party purges was a reluctant one. In 1947, Stalin marked popular RCP leader Lucretiu Patrascanu for arrest, and the Romanian Communists dropped him from the party�s central committee. While favoring his political expulsion, Pauker �resisted any attempt to broaden the indictment to include criminal charges.� Two years after Pauker�s purge, the authorities executed Patrascanu. Pauker herself avoided execution with Stalin�s timely death in March 1953.
Busting one Pauker myth, Levy also marshals bits of biographical evidence to suggest that � contrary to what contemporaries like David Ben-Gurion thought of her � Pauker was not a self-hating Jew: Levy notes that she consented to having her jacket cut as a sign of mourning at her mother�s funeral,and she openly cried at a performance of �The Diary of Anne Frank.�
Obviously, Pauker was an anti-Zionist. But while other Communists opposed Jews immigrating to Israel, Pauker favored shipping off those recalcitrants who couldn�t be dissuaded by propaganda about �the futility of aliyah.� In addition to those Jews allowed to emigrate, Pauker organized a �Red Aliyah� of 3,600 leftists who were supposed to foment a class war there. (It was a failure, Levy writes, since �most of the new immigrants renounced Communism upon arriving in Israel.�) Finally, it was only after Pauker was purged that the persecution of Romanian Zionists began in earnest. (Ultimately, 118,000 Jews made their way to Israel between 1948 and 1951.)
In all, Levy offers a careful reexamination of the largely overlooked Ana Pauker. His use of documents and witnesses is solid, though at times laborious, and he is smart enough to paint her as an authoritarian politician torn by contradic-tions, rather than completely rehabilitating her. Still, if many of the despotic Romanian policies were enacted against her will, how much of a political powerhouse could the �Iron Lady of Romania� have been?
(December 3, 2001)
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