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The Women Who Hate & Follow. She did not attain her power as Lupescu did, nor in the way the suffragettes dreamed of in Ana's youth. She came up through 30 fighting years in the Communist Party, to which she contributed great courage and a good, if not brilliant mind. Her chief offering, however, was a blind loyalty which stood every test, including the party's purge of her husband.
She belongs to that extraordinary band of Red Amazons who serve the top Red bosses. They are great followers, great haters, qualities the party prizes more & more. Some of Ana's fellow Amazons:
¶ Spain's Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria (now living in France), a miner's daughter and a miner's wife, whose Communism rose from the pits. She grew up amid strikes, riots, unemployment, sudden death. She has two children whom she mentioned in her fiery Civil War speeches urging Spain's women to put the cause above husbands and children ("it is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a miserable coward").
¶ France's Jeannette Vermeersch, who started as a mill hand in Lille, lived for years with Maurice Thorez, eventually married him. She has the reputation of being a hard, intelligent party worker. Rank & filers like her for being a roughhewn, no-nonsense kind of a wife to Thorez (and to Communism), who can talk about the price of butter.
¶ Finland's Hertta Kuusinen, a smooth intellectual, now Minister Without Portfolio, and wife of Communist Yrjo Leino, whom she dominates. Hertta got her Communism from her father Otto Kuusinen, a party veteran.
¶ China's Ting Ling, a romantic neurotic. Her grandfather was a high official under the Manchus, her father a playboy who spent most of his money before he died. Her widowed mother taught school and, embittered, drifted into the Party. Giving her own reasons for following her mother, Ting said: "I was afraid of party discipline. My main motive was to be a heroine and famous all over the world."
¶ The U.S.'s. Ella Reeve ("Mother") Bloor, an idealist rebel. She came from a fine old colonial family. When she was 14, she demanded that her name be taken off the rolls of the Presbyterian Church in Bridgeton, N.J., because she did not think it fair for some people to be destined for hell and others for heaven. She was, successively, a suffragette, Prohibitionist, Ethical Culturist, Single Taxer, a partisan of William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair. When the Russian Revolution came along, she found the spiritual home for which she had searched so long.
The Embattled Bulwarks. Far more powerful than any of these is Ana. Her sway extends beyond Rumania's 92,000 square miles and its 16.5 million people. She is the leading Communist in the band of states running from the Baltic to the Adriatic, where over 100 million people serve as Russia's shield against attack and Russia's springboard for aggression. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania are the satellites of a power which intends to make the world its satellite.