Liberal Party, but was overruled by Joseph Stalin; hence, the Communist-led government created in March 1945 comprised a more restrictive coalition with a faction of the National Liberals led by Gheorghe Tătărescu. During this same period, Pauker also pursued what she later described as "a type of Social Democratic policy" of mass recruitment of as many as 500,000 new Communist Party members without strict verification, including many former members of the Iron Guard. This policy would later be the subject of an attack on Pauker during her purge, and it was quickly overturned. Many of those who entered the party during Pauker's mass recruitment campaign would be purged between 1948 and 1950, and mass arrests would return with a vengeance in 1947 (including members of the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, as well as the amnestied members of the Iron Guard). Although she acceded to Soviet orders to arrest the leaders of the non-communist opposition, Pauker reportedly opposed the arrests of prominent National Peasants' Party officials Corneliu Coposu and Ghiță Pop and appealed to the presiding judge of the trial of National Peasants' Party leader Iuliu Maniu for leniency in his sentencing. Reviewing her record during the early postwar years, the historian Norman Naimark observed that Pauker's "policies in the period 1945–1948 are remarkably similar to those of the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka. She encouraged coalitions with the 'historical' parties, urged compromises with 'bourgeois' politicians, and sought to deflect the persecution of social democrats and liberals." These contradictions would intensify as the regime became more Stalinist under Cold War pressures from 1947 on. Ana Pauker was a steeled and tested Stalinist who was "fanatically loyal to Stalin and the Soviet Union", who once admitted that "[i]f a Soviet official told me something, it was the gospel for me... If they had told me that the USSR needed it, I would have done it... [I]f they had told me to throw myself into the fire, I would have done it". Nevertheless, Pauker paradoxically promoted a number of policies counter to those of the Kremlin during the Cominform period of "high Stalinism", when the Soviet Union imposed a single, hegemonic line on all its satellites. In 1948 she opposed the verification and purge of the large number of members who entered the Communist Party during the mass recruitment campaign, even though the Cominform had ordered such a verification in