"The iron lady." "The most powerful woman alive." "Stalin in a skirt." Obviously, that last statement is a not exactly complimentary.

All were used to describe Ana Pauker, who was Romania's foreign minister from 1947 to 1952. More importantly, she de facto ran the Communist Party — and, as it follows, Romania itself.

We will not go into the details of Pauker's reign. From one side, she helped install Stalinist communism in Romania. From another, she actually tried to combat the growing Soviet influence (obviously, to not much effect). For all the bad and the good Pauker did, one action makes her stand out from contemporaries: after Soviet-Israeli relations soured, Stalin (the one without a skirt) closed off Jewish immigration from the USSR and its satellite states. Pauker didn't follow through, and actually allowed 100,000 Romanian Jews to leave for Israel.

Here's another statement: "Arguably the Jewish woman who achieved the most political power in the 20th century."