Ana Pauker

Ana Pauker 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, and oversaw the Pitești Experiment, called by Nobel Laureate and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world". After the purging of Pauker, the experiment was halted because the Romanian communist regime was sidelining its hardline Stalinist leaders.