Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; 13 February 1893 – 3 June 1960) was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Pauker was born on 13 February 1893 into a poor, religious Orthodox Jewish family in Codăești, Vaslui County (in central Moldavia), the daughter of Sarah and (Tsvi-)Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn.

Ana Pauker was the chief defendant in a widely publicized trial with other leading communists and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

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.

"Arguably the Jewish woman who achieved the most political power in the 20th century,"[6] Ana Pauker was widely believed to have been the actual leader of the Romanian communists in all but name during the immediate post-war period.

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.

[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] 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.

[18] 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.

[25] Moreover, she firmly opposed forced collectivization that was carried out on Moscow's orders in the summer of 1950, while she was in a Kremlin hospital undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

[27] This, as well as her support beginning in 1947 for higher prices for agricultural products in defiance of her Soviet "advisers",[28] along with her favoring the integration of kulaks into the emerging socialist order,[29] led Stalin to charge that Pauker had fatefully deviated into "peasantist, non-Marxist policies".

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.

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 collectivisation, the fight against the 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] 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.

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.