The goal of all Communist regimes is to exercise complete control over the citizenry. One way is to re-educate the people, particularly the non-conformists, unless annihilation is simply more economical. And it isn’t simply toting the party line. The goal has always been to completely erase any trace of their former lives, memories and beliefs, replacing them with a new beginning and an unwavering loyalty to the regime.
Take the case of Romania. In a small town, approximately 70 miles Northwest of Bucharest, there is one of the many prisons used by Romania’s Communist regime in political persecution and re-education. But it was in this one place that the regime, decided to take their methods of repression to a whole new level. The Soviet-era experiment aimed to achieve re-education not only through brainwashing, but by way of systematic torture. It transformed innocent young men into monsters in a spiral of impossible violence.
They chose the Pitesti facility as a test ground because of the large number of young, educated, bourgeois prisoners. The experiment was both psychological and physical. It all started in 1949, just two years after Romania officially became a Communist state. The crackdown was unleashed upon anyone who was seen as a potential threat and it can only be described as medieval.
The secret police charged with the mission was run by Alexandru Nicolschi, a fanatical Communist, who believed that the only way to secure the future of the regime, was to eradicate any opposition by all means necessary. But Nicolschi wasn’t just content with the usual methods of progression. He wanted to create a new kind of loyalty. One born out of total submission.
The experiment tore apart the very fabric of what it is to be human through sadistic methods design to inflict horrific pain and suffering, precisely engineered to annihilate the human spirit. The prisoners were subjected to relentless physical and mental torture administered by their own fellow inmates. The victims were systematic subjected to a level of depravities intended to break the body as a prelude to breaking the mind. The beatings were so severe, prisoners suffered unimaginable injuries.
It was impossible to resist physically or mentally. Strength was gradually stripped away through a combination of hunger, fatigue, sleep deprivation and constant physical abuse. Horrifying as the physical abuse was, it pales in comparison to the psychological trauma inflicted. Prisoners were forced to betray each other and their own beliefs and in typical Communist fashion, it made them complicit in the horrors unleashed of upon their fellow inmates. The very people that had once trusted them. The people they called friends.
East Romania has a deep Christian tradition, many of the prisoners were believers and they were specially targeted in a parody of religious rituals, forcing the desecration of religious symbols, and forced to renounce their faith in the most humiliating way imaginable. They were forced into renouncing everything that they had ever believed in. Everything that had ever given meaning to their lives. The worst part of all was the sense of betrayal enforced against friends and to become an instrument of torment as well.
Kahr Demetrius, a theology student and Christian, was forced to participate in blasphemous religious ceremonies that pushed him to the edge of madness. Despite everything he went through, he survived, and he said that it was his bruised faith that kept him alive through the darkest days. He was released in 1963 only to be sentenced to another 10 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement for no specific reason.
He was finally released in 1985 and exiled from Romania before settling in the United States. But not everyone was so lucky if you can call it luck, nor able to hold it together. Many victims were so thoroughly broken by their experience, that they were never the same again. Many survivors sank into despair and madness, or died as a result of the torture and psychological scars by the experiment.
The worst part of the experiment was how they were forced against each other. Many survivors described how the strategy of betrayal, destroyed the bonds of trust and camaraderie that once existed among people. These survivors were eventually released into a world that changed forever, haunted by memories of the torture they had endured, and the friends they lost. Many died in prison broken by the torture they endured, while others were executed, after being forced to confess crimes that they never committed. Approximately 5000 people came through the door at the prison with hundreds of those not leaving. By 1952 the experiment was finally coming to an end, but not because the regime had a sudden case of conscience. The experiment ended because it had brought out an uncontrollable primordial savagery and too uncontrollable even for the Communist regime. In fact, 22 inmates were executed for what they did in the experiment. Not because of justice, but because they didn’t want them to tell the world what they had done
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