For nearly 15 years, two of the most

powerful nations faced each other in an

epic showdown of wills and international

power. Though they never engaged in

direct combat, the United States and the

Soviet Union spent the second half of

the 20th century at each other's

throats. Capitalism, widespread

religion, and democracy were pitted

against communism, state sponsored

atheism, and totalitarian leaders. With

both nations sitting at the head of

large international coalitions, the Cold

War effectively saw half of the world

challenge the other half with the lion's

share of political and social influence.

Many people today remember the Cold War

through the international events that it

birthed, the Cuban missile crisis, the

Suez crisis, the Korean War, the Vietnam

War, and the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan were all ripple effects of

the greater conflict between East and

West. However, a topic that is not

remembered as deeply, at least in the

West, is the stark differences in views

on human rights between the two

different factions. The United States

and its allies were by no means flawless

in their upholding of human rights, but

if nothing else, they had laws in place

that theoretically supported the pursuit

of equal and humane treatment. The

Soviet Union, on the other hand, took a

different view on the question of

humanity. A chilling example of this

difference is the Petest prison

experiment. Taking place from 1949 to

1952, the Pest experiment was an attempt

by the authorities of the Pest prison in

Romania to re-educate political

descendants, students, and other

criminals and place them back into the

fold of the political ideals held by the

Romanian and by extension Soviet

government. The methods they used to

accomplish this unleashed a reign of

terror upon the inmates of the prison

for the better part of 3 years and

resulted in a secret government trial

and fatal consequences.

In this video, we will provide some

context on the situation in Romania at

the time, discuss the origins of the

experiment, the methods used, and the

final dissolution of the petest prison

experiment.

When the second world war broke out in

1939, King Carol II of Romania declared

that his nation would remain neutral in

the conflict. However, as France fell to

the German armies and Britain retreated

out of Europe, the voices of the fascist

elements in the Romanian government grew

louder and louder. In late 1940, they

staged a coup. And shortly afterward,

Romania joined the fascist alliance.

Romanian soldiers participated in the

invasion of the Soviet Union. And when

the tides of the war turned against

Germany and its allies in 1943 and 1944,

Romania found itself bombed by Allied

forces and invaded by the Red Army.

Though a handful of fascist leaders

managed to escape, the majority of them

were imprisoned or executed by the Red

Army in the communist government that

the Soviet Union installed after the

war. Installed in 1947, the government

of the people's republic of Romania

spent the next decade asserting its

relative independence from the Soviet

Union. With the last Red Army troops

being removed from the country by 1958.

Before we get into the specifics of the

PEST experiment, it is important to

acknowledge that the period from the

1950s to the 1970s were generally a time

of advancement and success in Romania.

The country saw an economic rise,

improvements in infant mortality and

life expectancy, increased literacy and

urbanization, and greater support for

women's rights. However, the early

period of Romanian communism also saw

abuses of power and examples of torture

and abuse in the name of re-education.

The Pest experiment is one of these

examples.

At the time of its construction in 1941,

Pesh Prison was the most modern

detention facility in Romania.

Initially, it was used to hold high

school students convicted for treason in

the Legionnaire's rebellion when members

of the Fascist Iron Legion tried to

overthrow the government of Romania,

which ironically was also fascist, just

led by a different group. Shortly after

the foundation of the people's republic

of Romania, PET prison was primarily

occupied by people convicted of various

misdemeanor charges. However, when the

secretariat, the Romanian secret police,

took over the domestic intelligence wing

of the Romanian government in 1948, the

prison began to receive prisoners

convicted of having Western and/or

antis-siet ideals. Most of these inmates

were university students. In 1949,

Alexander Dumatrescu took over as the

director of PEST prison. By April, he

was faced with implementing a program

that was backed by the power and

influence of the secretariat to

undertake a re-education endeavor that

would convert the political descendants

of his prison into full communists.

Prior attempts at a re-education program

had been conducted at a different

Romanian prison, but the results had

been middling at best. With this in

mind, the newly appointed enforcer of

the PEST experiment, Eugene Turkanu,

decided that the PEST program would be

different than its predecessor in one

important way. Violence.

Dimitrescue was initially opposed to the

use of violence, but by the end of the

experiment, he was as involved in the

methods used as anyone else. The main

force behind the use of violence by the

Petest experiment was Turkanu. Eugjene

Turkanu had been a member of the iron

guard before its disillusion but became

a communist shortly before the rise of

the secretariat. He was imprisoned in

Pesh after he was purged from the party

and was chosen as the leader of the

group of prisoners that would conduct

the experiment. Turkanu assembled a

group of fellow prisoners to oversee the

re-education methods being used in Pesh

and they became his personal assistants,

the ODCC.

Though at first glance it seems that

Turkanu took his orders directly from

Dumatrescue, the prison director. But

further investigations have found that

Turkanu may have been receiving his

orders directly from the deputy chief of

the secret police, Alexander Nikolski.

The re-education program implemented at

Pesh Prison was based on instruction

sessions, torture and interrogations,

and renouncement. The instruction

sessions were the least violent part of

the experiment. Prison guards would

force the inmates to attend lectures on

Stalinism, the flaws in the capitalist

system and other topics relevant to the

feud between the East and West. The

sessions were sometimes scheduled and

sometimes random, but they were always

mandatory. Often, these instruction

sessions were accompanied by violence

and announcement of crimes committed by

the inmates. Danu and his assistants did

not care who suffered from violent

treatment during the information

sessions. Nor did they care if the

prisoners were admitting to things they

had actually done or not. They only

cared if it reinforced the ideals of

communism and the repentance of

non-communist beliefs. On occasion, the

prisoner director Deatrescue would

personally conduct beatings during these

meetings. Though the instruction

sessions often involved violence, it was

not a guaranteed part of the meetings.

The same cannot be said for the main

part of the program which was organized

into three separate stages. The first

stage was a preliminary interrogation

conducted with the aim of revealing

anything that had been hidden from

previous interrogators by the prisoner

called external unmasking. The first

stage focused on dragging intimate

details of personal lives out of the

prisoners with torture being used to

ensure results. Because of this, many

inmates said whatever they thought would

make the torture stop, admitting to

things they had never done. The second

stage of the program was dedicated to

internal unmasking. This was a

particularly interesting part of the

experiment, as it was designed to

internally calibrate the prison itself.

Prisoners who were subjected to internal

unmasking were asked to reveal any

enemies of the party within the walls of

the prison, i.e. anyone who had treated

them less brutally than Turkanu and his

cohort demanded. The more enemies a

person revealed, real or imaginary, the

more likely they were to be forced into

the next phase of re-education. The

third stage of the Pesh prison

re-education program took a stark turn

away from the previous two. The first

two steps involved torture and

relatively private interrogations, but

the third step involved public

humiliation. Victims of the third step

had to forsake all their non-communist

connections from their life before

prison called public moral unmasking.

The third stage forced prisoners to

denounce all of their beliefs, values,

friends, family, and loyalties. Perhaps

most significantly, victims of the third

stage had to openly blaspheme whatever

religion they believed in and

extensively denounce their religious

beliefs. The process ended with the

fourth stage, turning victims into

abusers. Prisoners who had been

successfully re-educated by the ODCC

were given a new responsibility of

re-educating others. Turning the

tortured into torturers not only

eliminated their ability to gain

sympathy as victims, but it fully

eliminated any friendship or

companionship they had managed to build

with their fellow prisoners. At any

point during the process, a prisoner

could fail one of the stages. Most

significantly, they were sent all the

way back to stage one, regardless of

whichever part of the process they had

failed. This meant that prisoners had

both the concrete reality of torture in

the first two stages and the idea of

further torture if they failed any part

of the process as motivation to admit

whatever crimes they felt their abusers

would believe. The psychological burden

of blaming others for crimes you know

they did not commit can only be

imagined. When combined with torture,

public humiliation, and then the forced

torture of others instead of yourself,

the terror that resulted from the

program can only be imagined.

Disclaimer: Before the techniques used

in the potest prison experiment are

discussed, viewers should be advised

that they are extremely disturbing and

may be triggering. The enforcement of

the re-education program was left in the

hands of Eugene Taranu and his

handpicked assistance. What they lacked

in empathy or compassion, they made up

for in creativity and brutality. The

various methods of torture took place

primarily in room 4 hospital which had

ironically been used as an infirmary in

the early days of the prison. The most

common form of torture was beatings.

Turkanu and his thugs wielded clubs,

boards, belts, and anything else they

could use to inflict pain on their

victims. Following Turkanu's cry of, "Go

get them boys," the overseers would

descend upon their chosen prisoner with

sadistic delight. However, when more

organized or psychologically tormenting

methods were called for, Turkanu never

failed to deliver. The torture used in

the petest experiment was as diverse as

it was despicable. Weights weighing as

much as 40 kg or 88 lb were strapped to

the backs of chosen prisoners for hours

on end until they either collapsed or

the torturers decided they had had

enough. Some prisoners were forced to

stare at a lit light bulb until it

harmed their eyes. Others had their hair

systematically pulled out or their

fingers and toes crushed. Chinese water

torture was also used, especially in the

more organized interrogations that took

place in the first and second stages.

Though these methods were brutal enough,

Turkanu and his cronies didn't stop

there. Sometimes prisoners were forced

to headbutt each other like rams or eat

excessively salty foods without any

water to drink. Other times they were

forced to eat dangerously hot food with

their hands, often off of the floor.

Some were locked in solitary confinement

for hours at a time or forced to stand

in the same place facing the wall all

night. The crulest torture, however, put

all of these to shame. Turkanu liked to

view himself as a sort of re-education

master, and he loved to experiment with

torture techniques that tested the

boundaries of human psychological and

physical endurance. He found an

especially disgusting technique that

accomplished both of these goals,

excremental torture. As part of their

punishments for sins, real or imagined,

prisoners were forced to urinate

directly into the mouths of other

prisoners. They were also forced to

defecate into containers, which other

prisoners were then forced to eat.

Turkanu and the ODCC would also hang

prisoners with their heads in a recently

used toilet and force them to lick the

sides of toilet bowls. All of these

methods were used in a single goal to

force the prisoners of the pest to

recant anything in their lives that

wasn't communist ideals and to ensure

that the terror imposed by Turkanu and

his assistants completely outweighed any

benefit of the prisoners banding

together against the abuse.

For over two years, Turkanu and the

other overseers ruled Pesh prison with

an iron fist. Eventually though, the

abuses that were endemic to the prison

were revealed to authorities in the

Romanian government, or at least they

could no longer hide their knowledge of

them. When the United States and other

Western countries began to accuse the

Soviet block of human rights abuses,

Romania decided to dump their dead

weight. A purge of the entire government

was conducted with several high-ranking

officials being exiled or imprisoned as

rogue lunatics. For Yugen Turkanu, it

was the end of the line. In an attempt

to separate the horrific events in Pest

Prison from the government, a proxy

investigation of the re-education

program was launched. This investigation

culminated in a secret trial where

Turkanu and the ODCC were found guilty

of abuse and deadly violence. Turkanu

himself was found guilty on 30 counts of

murder and over 700 counts of abuse.

November 4th, 1954 saw 20 death

sentences handed out to the ODCC.

Officially, Turkanu and 16 others were

found guilty of serving the exiled

remains of the Iron Guard and therefore

acting as covert operatives. They were

executed by firing squad. Alexandrew

Deatrescu, the director of the prison,

was also found guilty and executed.

Though it only existed for less than

three years, the potest prison

experiment led to death and suffering of

massive proportions. Of the roughly 600

prisoners subjected to the experiment,

nearly 100 died as a result of their

treatment. Two committed suicide, and

more would have likely followed if the

ODCC hadn't imposed incredibly strict

anti-suicidal measures. The background

of the prisoners makes the suffering

they endured even harder to bear. The

majority of them were students whose

only crime was not being communist. The

others were people convicted of various

misdemeanors. The torture used by

Turkanu and his men would have been

impossible to justify even against the

war criminals of the Second World War.

To use them against students and petty

thieves is nearly unfathomable. The test

prison now stands as a testament to the

worst side of human nature, the ability

to shamelessly abuse and torture others.

Tourists can visit the site and be given

a tour as well as an explanation of the

horrors that occurred there. Though the

Romanian government never embraced such

a violent re-education program again,

the damage had been done. The hundreds

of souls who suffered through the potest

experiment will forever serve as a

memory of what happens when authority,

vengeance, and terror are allowed to run

Wild.