Page 80 - Communism in Ambush

The Soviet Union brought Communism and brutality to occupied coun-
tries of the Eastern Bloc. Every movement against Moscow was re-
pressed with bloody reprisals. After an independence movement sprang
up in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, the Red Army occupied the
country. (Above) Soviet tanks in Prague during the occupation in
August 1968.

periment began in early December 1949 and lasted approximately three
years… The goal of the organization was the reeducation of political pris-
oners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and
physical torture. 53
The purpose of this was to destroy the prisoners' religious faith; at
the end of it they were expected to deny the existence of God:
The Securitate, the Romanian secret police, used all the classic methods of
torture during their interrogations: beatings, blows to the soles of the feet,
hanging people upside down, and so forth. But in the prison built in the
1930's in Piteşti, about 110 kilometers from Bucharest, the cruelty far sur-
passed those usual methods: The philosopher Virgil Ierunca recalls: "The
most vile tortures imaginable were practiced in Piteşti. Prisoners' whole
bodies were burned with cigarettes: their buttocks would begin to rot, and
their skin fell off, as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced
to swallow spoonfuls of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they
were forced to eat their own vomit.
...According to Virgil Ierunca, reeducation occurred in four phases. The