Excerpts :
Princess Marthe Bibesco
Ana Blandiana
Smaranda Braescu
Madelene “Madi” Cancicov
Nina Cassian
Elena Ceausescu
Ioana Celibidache
Queen Elisabeth of Romania
Princess Gregoire Ghica
Princess Ileana of Romania
Dora D’Istria
Monica Lovinescu
Ileana Malancioiu
Queen Marie of Romania
Dr. Agnes Kelly Murgoci
Mabel Nandris
Countess Anna de Noailles
Ana Novac
Oana Orlea
Ana Pauker
Marta Petreu
Elisabeta Rizea of Nucsoara
Sanda Stolojan
Leontina Vaduva
Anca Visdei
Sabina Wurmbrand
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Ana Pauker (Hannah Robinsohn)
Exile in the Soviet Union, Returnee,
Communist Party Polit Bureau Member, Foreign Minister, (b. 1893,
Codaesti, Co. Vaslui – d. Bucharest, 1960)
Pauker, Ana:
Last, but certainly not least was Ana Pauker. A big, stout
woman, with short, untidy grey hair, fierce blue eyes, under
lowering eyebrows, and a fascinating smile which was not spoiled
by the fact that her upper lip hung over her lower one, she
made one know that here was a real personality. I have always
felt when I was with her that she was like a boa constrictor
which has just been fed, and therefor is not going to eat you
– at the moment! Heavy and sluggish as she seemed, she
had all that is repellent and yet horridly fascinating in a
snake. I could well imagine, simply for watching her, that she
had denounced her own husband, who in consequence was shot;
and my further acquiantance with her showed me the cold and
dehumanized brilliance by which she had reached the powerful
position she occupied.” (Princess Ileana of Romania
(1909-1991) “I live Again”, Golancz, London 1952)
Interrogators:
"You take a person, you arrest him, you call him an
agent, you [subject him to] methods that, in all my life, with
all the prisons and [interwar Romanian secret service] Siguranta
stations, I'd never encountered...you throw mud at him, you
jeer him, you throw his kids out of their houses, you take his
books, and you don't even say 'I'm sorry,' as any person would
if he stepped on someone's foot." (quoted to have told
her investigators, in : Levi’s Biography of Ana Pauker)
Biography:
Born in a small Moldavian village, the grand daughter of a Jewish
orthodox rabbi, Hannah Robinson (Ana Pauker by her married name)
joined the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party before WWII,
then fled across the border to the Soviet Union, where Stalin
was nurturing all the foreign Communist hopefuls in readiness
for exporting his Revolution to Europe and the rest of the world.
Her husband Marcel Pauker, also a Communist exile was going
to die in Stalin’s goulags and Ana Pauker’s involvement
in his denunciation is a matter of controversy amongst her hagiographers.
Returning to Romania in 1944, on the back of the Soviet tanks,
together with other exile Communists (like Vasile Luca, Teohari
Georgescu, Walter Roman, etc) Ana Pauker becomes the member
of the Soviet-imposed Romanian Government and a Foreign Minister
in 1947. In 1948 she is in charge of Agriculture during a period
of forced collectivisation and victimization of the peasantry,
forced to give up its land to the Soviet-style co-operatives.
Again, Ana Pauker biographers (q.v. Levi) disagree about her
role in this abject period of enforced Stalinism in Romania.
What cannot be denied is that Ana Pauker will be for ever associated
with the darkest times of Romanian Stalinist excesses. She will
carry on being perceived as an instrument of Soviet imperialism
in a democratic Monarchy and a top official of the Party ready
to put the doctrinal interests of Communism above the interests
of the people. Indeed, in Romania, she is perceived half a century
after her demise, as a perpetrator of evil, regardless of the
finer points which academics will raise in their scholarly disquisitions,
whilst they remain completely removed from any personal experience
in the Stalinist purges.
Looking in retrospect at Ana Pauker’s life on the political
board of snakes and ladders one can discern how the tool of
evil becomes herself the object of the purge of 1952, just before
Stalin’s death. For the internecine battles of the Communist
party required political scape goats to make room for the new
coming home-bred Communist Gheorghiu-Dej: Ana Pauker becomes
good material for a Slansky-type trial in Romania, accused of
“Deviationism and Cosmopolitanism” . All in all a
masquerade of a family-affair, but not as acerbate as those
political trials instigated by Pauker and her fellow-travellers
against the Romanian peasantry, intellectuals and politicians
who perished in the Communist jails. For Ana Pauker was lucky
– she was demoted, but not emprisoned or shot – she
was retired on a pension and died in her own bed in Bucharest.
During her political retirement from 1953 to 1960, Pauker was
allowed to work as a translator from French and German, for
the Editura Politica, under the supervison of two former Spanish
Civil War veterans Walter Roman (father of the PM Petre Roman)
and that of Leonte Tismaneanu, then a director of the Romanian
Communist Party Publishing House and father of Vladimir Tismaneanu,
the distinguished American-Romanian academic (q.v.),
The quotation chose in the text (q.v. Interogators) does not
lack a certain piquantery thinking of the comparison which Pauker
makes, during her trial of her own party’s tactics compared
to those of Romania’s Secret Police before WWII. Sadly
Pauker’s conversion about the true colours of communist
practice surfaced too late in her life, and only after being
treated harshly herself, otherwise Romania might have become
a better country to live in.
Bibliography:
Levy, “Ana Pauker – a Biography”,
2001
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