alternatehistory.com

We've discussed several possibilities for the USSR of which I suppose Furtseva is the most plausible, though not very likely. https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ler-of-the-soviet-union.451916/#post-17597577 For Romania, Ana Pauker if Stalin had sided with her against Gheorghiu-Dej? (Unlikely, I know.) There are other long-shot possibilities, but they usually owed their influence to their husbands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Honecker or fathers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Zhivkova

But here's a possibility I hadn't been aware of--Liri Belishova of Albania if the pro-Soviet elements in the Party had prevailed over Hoxha:

"The Albanian woman, Liri Belishova, also enjoyed some of the happiest years of her life during one of the worst periods of Stalinism. Her memories of 1952-1954 Moscow, where she had been sent to study, are enchanted ones: “For a young Albanian woman from the mountains who had stopped wearing the veil, Moscow, in those years, was New York!” A Muslim, like most of the Albanian population, she had thrown off religious and family oppression at age 18, when she joined the anti-fascist resistance during the war. I interviewed her during the summer of 1993, in a modest two-room apartment in Tirana, where she lived with her husband, who, like her, had survived Albania’s political repression. We spoke Russian together, as it had become the language of the Albanian dissidence after the break with the USSR. She took obvious pleasure in speaking it, which she still did quite well, almost 40 years later...

"In several ways, Liri Belishova’s case can be seen as emblematic of women’s ambiguous status under the communist regime, and of the failure of its promises to them. A partisan from the very start, Liri Belishova explains that she was expelled from the Politburo because of her opposition to the break with the USSR and the rapprochement with China that Enver Hodja undertook over the “great winter” of 1960, which was the theme of one of Ismaïl Kadare’s first novels. According to her, without the aid sent by the USSR, socialist Albania could not have survived. But she spoke mostly about her 31 years of relegation, a series of intensifying sanctions...

"Although she could be described as the “token woman” in the Politburo, Liri Belishova was much more than that. Unlike Margot Honecker in East Germany or Elena Ceaucescu in Romania, she didn’t reach the pinnacles of power through marriage. If her husband became Minister of Agriculture, it seems more likely that it was thanks to her. He had studied in the USSR, too, and although he mostly stayed in the background during our interview, he would occasionally provide a Russian word she couldn’t remember. She was clearly the one running things in their couple. Had she tried to take the same kind of role in the Politburo and even to topple Enver Hodja? That had been my guess when I talked about her shortly after having met her..." https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CLIO1_041_0229--the-issue-of-gender-in-european.htm

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liri_Belishova

(I'm dealing with the post-World War II era--Rosa Luxemburg leading a Sparticist Germany in 1919 is of course a different story...)
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