Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; February 13, 1893 – June 14, 1960) was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party after World War II.

Pauker was born into a poor, religious Orthodox Jewish family in Codăeşti, Vaslui County (the region of Moldavia). Her parents, Sarah and Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn, had 4 surviving children; an additional two died in infancy. As a young woman, she became a teacher. While her younger brother was a Zionist and remained religious, she opted for Socialism, joining the Romanian Social Democratic Party in 1915 and then its successor, the Socialist Party of Romania, in 1916. She was active in the pro-Bolshevik faction of the group, the one that took control after the Party's Congress of May 8–12, 1921, and joined the Comintern under the name of Socialist-Communist Party (future Communist Party of Romania). She and her husband, Marcel Pauker, became leading members. They were both arrested in 1923 and 1924 for their political activities and went into exile in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna in 1926 and 1927. In 1928, Ana Pauker moved to Moscow to enter the Comintern's International Lenin School, which trained the top functionaries of the Communist movement. There, she became closely associated with Dmitry Manuilsky, the Kremlin's foremost representative at the Comintern in the 1930s.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later held the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While the office of the General Secretary was officially elective and not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to consolidate more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and gradually put down all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Whereas Trotsky was an exponent of permanent revolution, it was Stalin's concept of socialism in one country that became the primary focus of Soviet politics.

Vasile Luca (born László Luka; June 8, 1898 – July 23, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian and Soviet communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) from 1945 and until his imprisonment in the 1950s. Noted for his activities in the Ukrainian SSR in 1940-1941, he sided with Ana Pauker during World War II, and returned to Romania to serve as the Minister of Finance and one of the most recognizable leaders of the Communist regime. Luca's downfall, coming at the end of a conflict with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, signaled that of Pauker.

He was married to Elisabeta Luca (née Birman), a volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, who was also imprisoned following her husband's arrest.

A native of Szentkatolna (or Sâncatolna - present-day Catalina) in Transylvania (at the time part of Austria-Hungary), Luca was an ethnic Hungarian of the Székely community; during his later years, Luca also indicated that he was of Jewish and proletarian origin.