Ana on the Slippery Slope

Without the slightest hint of praise for her valuable services in the past--such as the time she unselfishly let the executioners of the NKVD dispose of her husband--the Communists tried to explain last week what led to the downfall of Rumania's Ana Pauker, the beefy First Lady of Communism (TIME, June 9).

Ana was left with her title of Foreign Minister, and was even allowed to sit on the ministers' bench one day last week while the National Assembly awarded the premiership of Red Rumania to her archrival, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.* But, no doubt about it, she was in bad odor.

In official lingo, her crimes were: activities against the party and the state, support of counter-revolutionary elements, suppression of criticism, double-dealing opportunism, laziness in the development of collective farms, unprincipled relations within the party, tolerance toward the kulaks, rightist deviations and--to keep things in balance--leftist deviations. The fact was, said the Communists with horror, that Ana had taken to living on "a slope of aristocracy."

"Look, Comrades; the suspense is getting terrible," pleaded the New York Daily News. "How about coming clean . . .? Confidentially, now--you mean you caught the old battleax taking a bath?"

* He used to be simply Gheorghe Gheorghiu until he spent so much time in Rumania's Dej prison in pre-Red days that he tacked Dej on to his name, a Balkan equivalent of calling oneself Alphonse Capone-Alcatraz or Lucky Luciano-Sing Sing.

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