Everything about Pite Ti Prison totally explained
The
Piteşti prison (
Romanian:
Închisoarea Piteşti) was a penal facility in
Piteşti,
Romania, best remembered for the
brainwashing experiment carried out by
Communist authorities in
1949-
1952 (also known as
Experimentul Piteşti - the "Piteşti Experiment" or
Fenomenul Piteşti - the "Piteşti Phenomenon"). The latter was designed as an attempt at violently "reeducating" the mostly young
political prisoners, male members of banned groupings such as the
National Peasants' and
National Liberalparties, as well as those who claimed inspiration from the
fascist Iron Guard or
Zionist members of the
Romanian Jewish community.
The experiment's goal, compliant with the regime's take on
Leninism, was for prisoners to discard past political and religious convictions, and, eventually, to alter their
personalities to the point of absolute obedience. Estimates for the total number of people passed through the experiment range from 1,000 to 5,000. It is considered the largest and most intensive brainwashing torture program in the
Eastern bloc.
History
Beginnings
The prison itself was built at an earlier stage — according to Eugen Măgirescu, work on it had begun in the late 1930s, under
King Carol II, and had been completed during
Ion Antonescu's rule (
see Romania during World War II). For a while after the proclamation of a Romanian
People's Republic, it continued to house primarily those found guilty of
misdemeanors.
The early stages of "reeducation" had occurred at the prison in
Suceava, being soon adopted in Piteşti and, less violently, in
Gherla prison. The group of overseers had been formed from people who had themselves been arrested and found guilty of
political crimes, and was headed by
Eugen Ţurcanu, a student at the
University of Iaşi and former member of the Iron Guard, who had joined the
Communist Party before being purged. Ţurcanu, who was probably acting on the orders of
Securitate deputy chief
Alexandru Nikolski, selected a tight unit of reeducation survivors, as his assistants in carrying out political tasks; named
Organizaţia Deţinuţilor cu Convingeri Comuniste (ODCC, "Organization of Convinced Communist Detainees") - it included the future
Orthodox priest and
dissident Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa and the Jewish Petrică Fux.
The wave of Suceava inmates who had passed through the early stages was sent to Piteşti, where the initially humane treatment became subject to increasing restrictions — according to Măgirescu, the situation rapidly degenerated in June.
Stages of "reeducation"
The process begun after that date involved
psychological punishment (mainly through humiliation) and physical
torture.
Detainees, who were subject to regular and severe beatings, were also required to engage in torturing each other, with the goal of discouraging past loyalties. Guards would force them to attend scheduled or ad-hoc political instruction sessions, on topics such as
dialectical materialism and
Joseph Stalin's
History of the CPSU(B) Short Course, usually accompanied by random violence and encouraged
delation (
demascare, lit. "unmasking") for various real or invented misdemeanors.
Each victim of the experiment was initially subject to regular
interrogation, during which torture was applied as a means to expose intimate details of his life ("external unmasking"). Hence, they were required to reveal everything they were thought to have hidden from previous interrogations; hoping to escape torture, many prisoners would confess imaginary misdeeds. The second phase, "internal unmasking", required the tortured to reveal the names of those who had behaved less brutal or somewhat indulgently towards them in detention.
Public humiliation was also enforced, usually at the third stage ("public moral unmasking"), inmates were forced to denounce all their personal beliefs, loyalties, and values. Notably, religious inmates were dressed as figures of
Christ, and all others were required to address them insults; they'd to
blaspheme religious symbols and sacred texts.
The inmates were required to accept the notion that their own family members had various criminal and grotesque features; they were required to author false autobiographies, comprising accounts of deviant behavior. According to Dumitru Bacu: "By injecting gradually into the victim's
subconscious information different from what he'd always accepted as real and true, by altering and constantly deprecating existing reality and substituting for it a fictitious image, the re-educator at last achieved the final purpose of the unmasking: to make the lie so real to the victim that he'd forget what had formerly for him made sense." This led to a "complete reversal, for an indeterminate time, of the values in which the student had always believed".
In addition to physical violence, inmates subject to "reeducation" were supposed to work for exhausting periods in humiliating jobs (for example, cleaning the floor with a rag clenched between the teeth).
Malnourished and kept in degrading and unsanitary conditions, inmates were prevented from engaging in contacts with the outside world, and forced to cover their eyes in the few instances where they could walk out of their cells.
It has been argued that techniques used by the OSCC were ultimately derived from
Anton Makarenko's controversial
pedagogy and
penology principles in respect to
rehabilitation. On at least one occasion, Makarenko was allegedly cited as inspiration by Ţurcanu himself.
The prison also ensured a preliminary selection for the
labor camps at the
Danube-Black Sea Canal,
Ocnele Mari, and other sites, where squads of former inmates were supposed to extend the experiment.
Ending and legacy
In 1952, as
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej successfully maneuvered against the
Minister of the Interior Teohari Georgescu, the process was stopped by the authorities themselves. The ODCC secretly faced trial for
abuse, and over twenty
death sentences were handed out (Ţurcanu was held responsible for the murder of 30 prisoners, and the abuse exercised on 780 others);
Securitate officials who had overseen the experiment, including Colonel Teodor Sepeanu, were tried the following year — all were given light sentences, and were freed soon after. Responding to new ideological guidelines, the court concluded that the the experiment had been the result of successful infiltration of
American and
Horia Sima's Iron Guard agents into the Securitate, with the goal of discrediting Romanian law enforcement.
Abandoned and partially in ruin, the building was sold to a construction firm in 1991 (after the
Revolution of 1989; several of the facilities have either been torn down or suffered major changes). A memorial was built in front of the prison's entrance.
Inmates
Further Information
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