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. While considered extremely faithful to Stalin and Moscow, she paradoxically deviated from Stalin's line in many respects, in particular by opposing forced collectivization, not implementing the requested purges of communists, practicing a more moderate approach towards non-communists, and assisting the emigration of Jews to Israel. Nonetheless, the Pitești Experiment, called by Nobel Laureate and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world", took place under her watch. After the purging of Pauker, the experiment was halted because the Romanian communist regime was sidelining its hardline Stalinist leaders. She also as Minister orchestrated the Bărăgan deportations, which resulted in the mass expulsion of political opponents and ethnic minorities to the arid Bărăgan Steppe.