Raining in Moscow

One sunny day in Bucharest, as the story goes, a friend stopped Ana Pauker in the street and asked: "Ana, why are you carrying an umbrella? It's not raining." Replied Rumania's No. i Communist: "It's raining in Moscow. I heard it on the radio." Last week fat Ana Pauker had her umbrella up; it was raining horribly in Moscow.

It was not the first time. Early in 1941, while she was in a Rumanian prison, Prime Minister Antonescu had the idea of exchanging Ana for a leader of the Peasant Party, Ion Codreanu, held by the Russians. The Russians wanted a package deal: they would trade Codreanu for Ana and another Rumanian Communist named Gheorghiu-Dej. When Antonescu insisted on a one-for-one trade, the Russians were quite ready to let Ana rot in jail, and asked only for Gheorghiu-Dej. Instead wily Antonescu gave them Ana. While Gheorghiu-Dej sweated out the war in a concentration camp, Ana squeezed herself into a Red army colonel's uniform in Moscow and made hay with the Kremlin. Triumphantly back in Bucharest in 1944, she personified Soviet power, drove a bulletproof automobile, enjoyed Bucharest's best food and its fastest growing waistline. She was said to be the only Rumanian Communist who could pick up a phone and talk to Stalin.

Nonetheless, over the past five years things have gone from bad to worse in Rumania. Last January, for the second time since the Communists took over, there was devaluation of the currency. Money which could have bought a pair of shoes suddenly dropped to the value of a pack of cigarettes. The time had come to dim the spotlight on Soviet power, and to divert unrest by playing up nationalism. Last week Ana Pauker was quietly dropped from the roster of secretaries of the Rumanian Communist Party and the Politburo. Along with her went Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu, both Moscow-trained Communists. Into the amber spot at stage center the Communists pushed Gheorghiu-Dej, the man left in prison back in 1941. He became Premier.

The switch was like to that recently carried out in Czechoslovakia, where Moscow-trained Rudolf Slansky was dumped in favor of native son Clement Gottwald. But in Rumania, although arrests of minor government officers and army officers are taking place on all sides, the trouble does not yet seem serious enough to warrant a full-dress trial of the big-time scapegoats. Ana still hangs on to her job at the Org-buro, the organizational center of the Communist Party--in the shadow, but still around in case of another unpredictable change in the weather.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.