The Piteşti Experiment
The word “Gulag” immediately conjures images of primitive concentration camps, buried deep in Siberia; yet, there were camps in other communist countries that rivalled, and even exceeded, Russian camps in intensity, like the Jilava prison and Piteşti prison in Romania. These names may mean nothing to many in the Western world, but to Eastern Europeans represent one of the darkest pages in their history. According to Sorin Iliesiu (2005), the Piteşti prison was a socio-psychological experiment engineered by the Securitate to re-educate “recalcitrant” students “through physical and psychical destruction.” By 1949, the destruction of the Romanian bourgeois was complete; the way forward was the education of the youth to produce the new communist man (Iliesiu, 2005). Yet, some university students kept resisting the introduction of Leninism and Bolshevism in the curricula, and the regime decided to reform them into unquestioning subjects of the Communist state through a degrading experiment on behavior alteration.
The inspiration was probably the experience with the son of King Louis XI during the French revolution. The ten-year-old prince was subjected to sleep deprivation, …show more content…
A slightest hesitation by the “reformed” prisoners would subject them to torture anew (Iliesiu, 2005). The prison administration slowly transformed inmates into torturers, turning them against their own friends; such was the “educated” atheist man of Ceaușescu’s Communism.
The Piteşti experiment lasted about three years, from 1949 to 1951, with about five thousand students having received “treatment.” The experiment was ended by the Minister of the Interior and some people were trialed and sentenced; yet, the experience carried over to fifteen “psychiatric hospitals” where “patients” were subjected to re-education
The word “Gulag” immediately conjures images of primitive concentration camps, buried deep in Siberia; yet, there were camps in other communist countries that rivalled, and even exceeded, Russian camps in intensity, like the Jilava prison and Piteşti prison in Romania. These names may mean nothing to many in the Western world, but to Eastern Europeans represent one of the darkest pages in their history. According to Sorin Iliesiu (2005), the Piteşti prison was a socio-psychological experiment engineered by the Securitate to re-educate “recalcitrant” students “through physical and psychical destruction.” By 1949, the destruction of the Romanian bourgeois was complete; the way forward was the education of the youth to produce the new communist man (Iliesiu, 2005). Yet, some university students kept resisting the introduction of Leninism and Bolshevism in the curricula, and the regime decided to reform them into unquestioning subjects of the Communist state through a degrading experiment on behavior alteration.
The inspiration was probably the experience with the son of King Louis XI during the French revolution. The ten-year-old prince was subjected to sleep deprivation, …show more content…
A slightest hesitation by the “reformed” prisoners would subject them to torture anew (Iliesiu, 2005). The prison administration slowly transformed inmates into torturers, turning them against their own friends; such was the “educated” atheist man of Ceaușescu’s Communism.
The Piteşti experiment lasted about three years, from 1949 to 1951, with about five thousand students having received “treatment.” The experiment was ended by the Minister of the Interior and some people were trialed and sentenced; yet, the experience carried over to fifteen “psychiatric hospitals” where “patients” were subjected to re-education