Pitești prison

The Pitești Prison (Romanian: Închisoarea Pitești) was a penal facility in Pitești, Romania, best remembered for the reeducation experiments (also known as Experimentul Pitești – the "Pitești Experiment" or Fenomenul Pitești – the "Pitești Phenomenon") carried out between December 1949 and September 1951, during Communist party rule. The experiment, implemented by a group of prisoners under the guidance of the prison administration, was designed as an attempt at violently "reeducating" the mostly young political prisoners, primarily supporters of the ultra-nationalist Iron Guard, as well as former members of the National Peasants' and National Liberal parties or Zionist members of the Romanian Jewish community. Religious inmates also included Christian seminarians. The experiment's goal 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 up to 1,000 to 5,000. The "experiment" was stopped at the government's intervention and the overseers were put under trial; while twenty of the participating prisoners were sentenced to death, prison officials were handed down 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 Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world."

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