Pitești Prison

Pitești Prison (Închisoarea Pitești) was a penal facility in Pitești, Romania, best remembered for the reeducation experiment (also known as Experimentul Pitești – the "Pitești Experiment" or Fenomenul Pitești – the "Pitești Phenomenon") which was carried out between December 1949 and September 1951, during Communist party rule. The experiment, which was implemented by a group of prisoners under the guidance of the prison administration, was designed as an attempt to violently "reeducate" the mostly young political prisoners, who were primarily supporters of the fascist Iron Guard, as well as Zionist members of the Romanian Jewish community. The Romanian People's Republic adhered to a doctrine of state atheism and the inmates who were held at Pitești Prison included religious believers, such as Christian seminarians. According to writer Romulus Rusan, the experiment's goal was to re-educate prisoners to discard past religious convictions and ideology, and, eventually, to alter their personalities to the point of absolute obedience. Estimates for the total number of people who passed through the experiment range from at least 780 to up to 1,000, to 2,000, to 5,000. Journalist Laurențiu Dologa estimates almost 200 inmates died at Pitești, while historian Mircea Stănescu accounts for 22 deaths during the period, 16 of them with documented participation in the "re-education". After the purging of Romanian Communist Party leader Ana Pauker, the experiment was halted because the Romanian communist regime was sidelining its hardline Stalinist leaders. The overseers were put on trial; while twenty of the participating prisoners were sentenced to death, prison officials were given light sentences. Journalist and anti-communist activist Virgil Ierunca referred to the "reeducation experiment" as the largest and most intensive brainwashing torture program in the Eastern Bloc. In even stronger terms, Nobel Laureate and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world".