Recent events in Romania, including the cancellation of elections, have filled social networks with comments about the country’s recent past, back to the days when the Iron Curtain fell over Eastern Europe.
During World War II, the Soviets used Pavlov’s conditioned reflex theories to train their bomb dogs. The animals were starved for several days and then fed under a tank with the engine running, so that the dog associated the noise of the engine with food. Once under the tank, where there is less armour, the explosive charge carried on the dog’s back was activated and destroyed both the animal and the enemy tank.
People are not dogs, but the possibility of creating a scientific method for their re-education was a very attractive idea for the achievement of the Communist new man: homo sovieticus. The concept of re-education was borrowed from the Soviet pedagogue Anton Semyonovich Makarenko. Makarenko died in 1939, but one of his theories, that of re-education by torturing prisoners, was taken to the letter in one of the most horrifying events in the history of communism: the “Pitesti experiment”, also known as the “Pitesti phenomenon,” which took place in the Pitesti prison in Romania between 1949 and 1951.
The Pitesti experiment
“The Pitesti experiment was one of the most terrible acts of barbarism in the modern world.”
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Romania, like the rest of the countries under Soviet control, was the scene of savage repression against all those who might pose a threat to the construction of the socialist paradise. In 1948, the new regime created the Securitate to hunt down enemies of the state and crush all opposition. The Securitate did its work with Stalinist dedication, and of Romania’s 617,000 political prisoners, 120,000 died in Romanian gulags and prisons. But if one had to give a name to Communist terror in Romania, it would be Pitesti.
In 1949, the Communists conducted a campaign in Romanian universities to recruit students into the Party. Those who refused because of their political or religious beliefs, and those who had belonged to the fascist youth movement, were taken to Pitesti prison to turn them into good Communists. The number of victims of the experiment varies between 700 and 5,000, according to historians.
To carry out the experiment, Alexandru Nikolski, head of the Securitate, relied on Eugen Turcanu, a Party member who had been denounced for his fascist militancy in the past and sentenced to seven years in prison. Turcanu gathered a group of prisoners and created the Organisation of Detainees with Communist Convictions (ODCC), who were to become the first torturers in Pitesti.
Re-education through torture
“When you said: ‘I still believe in God,’ within five minutes you were covered in blood.”
-Roman Braga
The method of destroying the inmates’ personalities and turning them into true Communists was called “unmasking.” Prisoners were subjected to daily electric shocks and brutal beatings, and were also starved and given hallucinogenic drugs. But torture was not only carried out by the guards but also by the prisoners themselves. Cases of burning with cigarettes, strangulation, breaking of teeth and pulling out of fingernails are recorded. Torture also included the utter hatred of the inmates’ religious beliefs; prisoners were forced to substitute blasphemies for sacred words in reciting the liturgy and to use human faeces as hosts for Holy Communion.
In addition to the continuous torture, the prisoners had to attend political indoctrination lectures. Torture and indoctrination were to turn the prisoners into obedient Communists, in a process of “unmasking” comprising the following stages:
The first was “external unmasking,” in which prisoners were to reveal everything they were believed to have concealed in previous interrogations. Unsurprisingly, many prisoners invented crimes in order to end the torture and prove their absolute loyalty to the ODCC and the Communist Party.
Then came “internal unmasking”, in which the tortured had to betray other prisoners, revealing the names of those who had behaved well towards them or even those who had helped them in any way.
The third stage consisted of public humiliation, a “public moral unmasking” in which prisoners were forced to renounce all their personal beliefs. The guards “baptised” the prisoners by dipping their heads in buckets of urine and excrement and forced them to blaspheme by beating them mercilessly.
Finally, the tortured had to become torturers and torture their fellow prisoners. If the prisoners fulfilled this mission satisfactorily, the re-education was considered successful; otherwise, if the prisoners refused or did not fulfil their role as executioners with sufficient enthusiasm, it had to start all over again.
The end of the experiment
“They tried to destroy our souls.”
-George Calciu
The exact number of prisoners who died as a result of the experiment’s tortures is unknown, although most historians speak of between 100 and 200 deaths.
A year after it began, the Communist authorities were satisfied with the results of the experiment, and it was decided to implement it in other prisons. On 12 July 1951, 67-year-old doctor Ion Simionescu, who was undergoing the re-education process, threw himself against the barbed wire to be killed by the guards. His death was made public and the authorities launched an “investigation”.
Someone had to pay, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the Communist rulers who had allowed the experiment. Turcanu and 21 other ODCC members were tried in secret and sentenced to death on 10 November 1954. Moreover, following the usual guidelines of Communist justice, the court found irrefutable evidence that the experiment had been the result of a successful infiltration of American agents and Iron Guard fascists into the Securitate, with the sole aim of discrediting the Romanian police and the Communist Party.
The memory of Pitesti
“Many of our people died, many of our people went mad, but in some of us good triumphed.”
-George Calciu
It was not until 2014 that a museum dedicated to the horror of the Pitesti experiment was opened in a quarter of the former prison and later, in 2023, declared a memorial. In remembrance of the victims, a religious service is held every week in the largest room of the former prison and the site of the worst tortures.
There are also several documentaries about what happened in Pitesti, including Alan Hartwick’s Beyond Torture: The Gulag of Pitesti (2007).
Finally, Pitești: The Experiment, released in 2022, is the first film to date to tell the story of what happened in Pitesti. Directed by Victoria Baltag, the film is completely independent because no Romanian state entity wanted to subsidise the project. For this reason, it took 12 years of documentation, shooting and post-production before the film was released. In an interview about her film, Baltag said:
What do we know about communism? Very little. […] Communism caused the greatest number of victims in the history of mankind, but who talks about it? And how many memorials to the crimes of communism do we know about?
My film is a contribution to the memory of the horrors and abominable moments of Romanian communism. […] It is very important to know our recent history – as was the Pitesti Experiment – in order to learn from it and ensure that it does not happen again. These atrocities must not be forgotten so that the suffering of these people will not be in vain.
Pitesti: Romania’s Communist Nightmare of Re-Education and Torture
The plaque commemorating the brutal experiment on the entrance building of the Piteşti prison in Romania
Photo by Biruitorul, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (image cropped)
Recent events in Romania, including the cancellation of elections, have filled social networks with comments about the country’s recent past, back to the days when the Iron Curtain fell over Eastern Europe.
During World War II, the Soviets used Pavlov’s conditioned reflex theories to train their bomb dogs. The animals were starved for several days and then fed under a tank with the engine running, so that the dog associated the noise of the engine with food. Once under the tank, where there is less armour, the explosive charge carried on the dog’s back was activated and destroyed both the animal and the enemy tank.
People are not dogs, but the possibility of creating a scientific method for their re-education was a very attractive idea for the achievement of the Communist new man: homo sovieticus. The concept of re-education was borrowed from the Soviet pedagogue Anton Semyonovich Makarenko. Makarenko died in 1939, but one of his theories, that of re-education by torturing prisoners, was taken to the letter in one of the most horrifying events in the history of communism: the “Pitesti experiment”, also known as the “Pitesti phenomenon,” which took place in the Pitesti prison in Romania between 1949 and 1951.
The Pitesti experiment
“The Pitesti experiment was one of the most terrible acts of barbarism in the modern world.”
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Romania, like the rest of the countries under Soviet control, was the scene of savage repression against all those who might pose a threat to the construction of the socialist paradise. In 1948, the new regime created the Securitate to hunt down enemies of the state and crush all opposition. The Securitate did its work with Stalinist dedication, and of Romania’s 617,000 political prisoners, 120,000 died in Romanian gulags and prisons. But if one had to give a name to Communist terror in Romania, it would be Pitesti.
In 1949, the Communists conducted a campaign in Romanian universities to recruit students into the Party. Those who refused because of their political or religious beliefs, and those who had belonged to the fascist youth movement, were taken to Pitesti prison to turn them into good Communists. The number of victims of the experiment varies between 700 and 5,000, according to historians.
To carry out the experiment, Alexandru Nikolski, head of the Securitate, relied on Eugen Turcanu, a Party member who had been denounced for his fascist militancy in the past and sentenced to seven years in prison. Turcanu gathered a group of prisoners and created the Organisation of Detainees with Communist Convictions (ODCC), who were to become the first torturers in Pitesti.
Re-education through torture
“When you said: ‘I still believe in God,’ within five minutes you were covered in blood.”
-Roman Braga
The method of destroying the inmates’ personalities and turning them into true Communists was called “unmasking.” Prisoners were subjected to daily electric shocks and brutal beatings, and were also starved and given hallucinogenic drugs. But torture was not only carried out by the guards but also by the prisoners themselves. Cases of burning with cigarettes, strangulation, breaking of teeth and pulling out of fingernails are recorded. Torture also included the utter hatred of the inmates’ religious beliefs; prisoners were forced to substitute blasphemies for sacred words in reciting the liturgy and to use human faeces as hosts for Holy Communion.
In addition to the continuous torture, the prisoners had to attend political indoctrination lectures. Torture and indoctrination were to turn the prisoners into obedient Communists, in a process of “unmasking” comprising the following stages:
The first was “external unmasking,” in which prisoners were to reveal everything they were believed to have concealed in previous interrogations. Unsurprisingly, many prisoners invented crimes in order to end the torture and prove their absolute loyalty to the ODCC and the Communist Party.
Then came “internal unmasking”, in which the tortured had to betray other prisoners, revealing the names of those who had behaved well towards them or even those who had helped them in any way.
The third stage consisted of public humiliation, a “public moral unmasking” in which prisoners were forced to renounce all their personal beliefs. The guards “baptised” the prisoners by dipping their heads in buckets of urine and excrement and forced them to blaspheme by beating them mercilessly.
Finally, the tortured had to become torturers and torture their fellow prisoners. If the prisoners fulfilled this mission satisfactorily, the re-education was considered successful; otherwise, if the prisoners refused or did not fulfil their role as executioners with sufficient enthusiasm, it had to start all over again.
The end of the experiment
“They tried to destroy our souls.”
-George Calciu
The exact number of prisoners who died as a result of the experiment’s tortures is unknown, although most historians speak of between 100 and 200 deaths.
A year after it began, the Communist authorities were satisfied with the results of the experiment, and it was decided to implement it in other prisons. On 12 July 1951, 67-year-old doctor Ion Simionescu, who was undergoing the re-education process, threw himself against the barbed wire to be killed by the guards. His death was made public and the authorities launched an “investigation”.
Someone had to pay, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the Communist rulers who had allowed the experiment. Turcanu and 21 other ODCC members were tried in secret and sentenced to death on 10 November 1954. Moreover, following the usual guidelines of Communist justice, the court found irrefutable evidence that the experiment had been the result of a successful infiltration of American agents and Iron Guard fascists into the Securitate, with the sole aim of discrediting the Romanian police and the Communist Party.
The memory of Pitesti
“Many of our people died, many of our people went mad, but in some of us good triumphed.”
-George Calciu
It was not until 2014 that a museum dedicated to the horror of the Pitesti experiment was opened in a quarter of the former prison and later, in 2023, declared a memorial. In remembrance of the victims, a religious service is held every week in the largest room of the former prison and the site of the worst tortures.
There are also several documentaries about what happened in Pitesti, including Alan Hartwick’s Beyond Torture: The Gulag of Pitesti (2007).
Finally, Pitești: The Experiment, released in 2022, is the first film to date to tell the story of what happened in Pitesti. Directed by Victoria Baltag, the film is completely independent because no Romanian state entity wanted to subsidise the project. For this reason, it took 12 years of documentation, shooting and post-production before the film was released. In an interview about her film, Baltag said:
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