TIME – September 20, 1948 – Communist Ana Pauker

Description

This is the September 20, 1948 issue of TIME magazine. It features “Communist Ana Pauker” on the front cover. Like other issues of TIME, it is filled with other articles and features and vintage black & white and color advertisements.
The magazine contains 120 pages and measures approximately 8.25 x 11.25 inches.
This is a time capsule for those wanting to know about the late 1940s, particularly because it is written as news, and not history!
Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; February 13, 1893-June 3, 1960) was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's 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.
As a young woman, she became a teacher in a Jewish elementary school in Bucharest. She opted for socialism, joining the Social Democratic Party of Romania in 1915 and then its successor, the Socialist Party of Romania, in 1918. She was active in the pro-Bolshevik faction of the group, the one that took control after the Party's 1921 Congress 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 1923 and 1924 for their political activities and went into exile in 1926-27. In 1928, Ana Pauker moved to Moscow to enter the Comintern's International Lenin School, which trained the top functionaries of the Communist movement. There, she became closely associated with Dmitry Manuilsky, the Kremlin's foremost representative at the Comintern in the 1930s.
She then went to France, where she became an instructor for the Comintern and was also involved in the communist movement elsewhere in the Balkans. Upon returning to Romania in 1935, she was arrested and shot in both legs when she tried to flee. Ana Pauker was the chief defendant in a widely publicized trial with other leading communists and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In May 1941, the Romanian government sent her into exile to the Soviet Union. In the meantime, her husband had fallen victim to the Soviet Great Purge in 1938.
In Moscow, she became the leader of the Romanian communist exiles. 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 was ousted and replaced by Pauker, making her the first woman in the modern world to hold such a post.
But it was her position in the Communist Party leadership that was paramount. Although she declined to become the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party because she was a woman, a Jew, and an intellectual, and had proposed the Romanian worker Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej for the job instead, Pauker formally held the number-two position in the Party leadership and was a member of the four-person Secretariat of the Central Committee. "Arguably the Jewish woman who achieved the most political power in the 20th century," Pauker was widely believed to have been the actual leader of the Romanian communists in all but name during the immediate post-war period.
In 1948 Time magazine featured her portrait on the cover of this issue and described her as "the most powerful woman alive" at that time. Infamous as the "Iron Lady" of Romanian Communist politics, she was universally seen as unreservedly Stalinist and as Moscow's primary agent in Romania.
Unquestionably, 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 Antonescu regime. Yet, by August 1945 Pauker and interior minister Teohari Georgescu released all but 2,000 to 3,000 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. 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.
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. This policy would later be the subject of an attack on Pauker during her purge, 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). Although she acceded to Soviet orders to arrest the leaders of the non-communist opposition, Pauker reportedly opposed the arrests of prominent National Peasants' Party officials.
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."
These contradictions would intensify as the regime became more Stalinist under Cold War pressures from 1947 on. Pauker was a steeled and tested Stalinist who was "fanatically loyal to Stalin and the Soviet Union," who once admitted that "[i]f a Soviet official told me something, it was the gospel for me... If they had told me that the USSR needed it, I would have done it... [I]f they had told me to throw myself into the fire, I would have done it." Nevertheless, Pauker paradoxically promoted a number of policies counter to those of the Kremlin during the Cominform period of "high Stalinism," when the Soviet Union imposed a single, hegemonic line on all its satellites. In 1948 she opposed the verification and purge of the large number of members who entered the Communist Party during the mass recruitment campaign, even though the Cominform had ordered such a verification in every Bloc country. In 1949 she opposed the construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal, even though, according to her own testimony, Stalin had personally proposed the project. In 1949-52 she opposed the purging of the Romanian veterans of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance. And she was reported by colleagues and associates to have resisted Stalin's plans to have the Justice Minister put on trial, and was accused by the Securitate's chief Soviet adviser of having "sabotaged and postponed investigations" in the case.