The Genocide of the Souls. The Pitesti Experiment. "The delirious imagination of Turcanu (the chief torturer - our note) was unleashed above all when he was dealing with students who believed in God and who strove not to renounce their belief. The human being was thereby annihilated. beatings on the head to induce stupefaction; beatings in the face, for disfigurement; thousands of blows to the back, below the ribs, in the plexus, on the soles of the feet. If it was known that the victim loved his parents, Turcanu would provoke him thus: Tell me, X, how did you sleep with your mother? On such occasions, it was the theology students who were to suffer the most, dressed up as 'Christs', clothed in cassocks smeared with excrement. The Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide, Polirom, Bucharest, 2008. On Good Friday, he shared out the roles: the 'ass' is fellated by 'Mary Magdalene', 'Joseph' sodomises the 'ass', which in its turn stands with its muzzle in the lap of the 'Virgin Mary whore', concomitantly sodomised by 'Jesus'. The Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide, Polirom, Bucharest, 2008. After they had given him a few more kicks to the head, two of them picked him up and threw him on the bunk, making him sit with his hands in his pockets and his head bowed, according to the order. Between 1949 and 1951, the destruction of society"s elite was almost complete: intellectuals, diplomats, priests, officers, magistrates, policemen, and politicians of the "bourgeois-landowner regime" were in prison; the most industrious peasants had been deported to forced labour camps. As a result of the Appeal, the President of Romania established the Presidential Commission for Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (made up of 19 members and 20 experts) – presided over by Prof. Part of the documentary material has been drawn from the Memorial to the Resistance and the Victims of Communism at Sighet, founded by Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan in 1993. Bush, the President of the United States, affirmed what hundreds of millions of people in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union had waited to hear for six decades: "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Certainly, the goal was ninety per cent achieved. December 1, 1918 (the national day of post-communist Romania): at Alba Iulia, the National Assembly of Transylvania votes for the Union of Transylvania and the Banat (both former provinces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire) with Romania. August 1919: the Romanian army occupies Budapest and liberates Hungary from the Soviet regime installed in March 1919 by Bela Kun (at the initiative of and supported by Lenin). 1921: at the initiative of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Romania is founded and will be controlled exclusively from Moscow. The Romanian Communist Party is outlawed due to its anti-national and anti-state activities. The Romanian populace will be subject to repression, terror and massacres, and the anti-Soviet elite will be exterminated. June 1941: the government led by Marshal Ion Antonescu declares war on the Soviet Union and liberates the territories lost the previous year. The Romanian Army begins to liberate its own country, which has been occupied by German troops (liberation will be complete by 25 October 1944). At the same time, the Romanian army liberates the north of Romania (north-west Transylvania was ceded to Admiral Horthy"s Hungary in 1940, through the Dictate of Vienna). Betrayal of Romania's interests by the communist-dominated government imposed by Stalin in March 1945. One of the official charges of the puppet government was to organise "free and fair elections". In the conditions of terror imposed by the communists, the elections of November 1946 were won with a massive majority by the anticommunist opposition, who obtained between seventy and ninety per cent of the vote, according to documentary evidence and eye-witness accounts. The premises are presented in the historical preamble of this report, as well as in the preceding two paragraphs. By accepting the conditions of the Peace Treaty, the communist regime (in Romania) was thereby guilty of ceding to the Soviet Union the territories of Bassarabia, North Bukovina and the Hertza region, with a surface area of 44,000 square kilometres and a population of 3,200,000, the majority ethnic Romanians. By destroying the three traditional Romanian parties (the National Peasants" Party, National Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party), the communists made the transition from multiparty democracy to single party state, in form of the Romanian Workers" Party, subsequently renamed the Romanian Communist Party. Of all the nations that were to be Sovietised, Romania was the only country which had a king loved by the people. The leaders of the main religions were replaced (with the object of total subjugation of the Orthodox Church) and the Graeco-Catholic (Uniate) Church was outlawed. Under the pretext of "re-education through labour", hundreds of thousands of persons were sent to various labour sites, where they became victims of mass extermination through hunger, exhaustion and deprivation. During the Ceausescu regime, the number of political detainees as such was in the mere hundreds or thousands, since the real figures were deliberately camouflaged as common criminals or patients in psychiatric hospitals, the latter of whom were treated with electric shocks and mind-altering drugs. The terrorisation by interrogators of the families and relatives of those in the mountains, the expulsion of their children from school and the use of brutal methods against them determined many partisans to surrender rather than have their loved ones be subjected to torture. In the case of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the hierarchy were replaced in 1948, some of them dying in suspicious circumstances, others being arrested and placed under "house arrest" in monasteries. The revolt at Vadu Rosca (in the Galati region), during which nine peasants lost their lives, was repressed by Nicolae Ceausescu personally. The majority of the deportees were detained in eighteen such settlements until 1956, although others remained permanently. The history of Romania was falsified. The reaction of the authorities was swift: students were arrested, courses suspended, teachers purged, and student associations set up to supervise the activities of students. Some of the miners, who were protesting against living conditions, were arrested and sent to prison, while most were forced to move to other parts of the country, in a form of camouflaged deportation. The founders of the new union and those registered as members were arrested and interned in psychiatric institutions to be re-educated. Similarly, the historic centres of other towns were demolished to make way for "civic centres". With the official object of increasing the population, from 1966 until the December 1989 Revolution abortions were forbidden, following a decree made by Ceausescu. As a rule, these cuts were frequent, came without warning and lasted for unpredictable periods. Moreover, during the 1980s, street lighting was wholly, or almost wholly, suspended. The massacre of civilians during the anticommunist Revolution of December 1989. The number of victims speaks for itself as to the criminality of the communist regime in Romania. A number of ideas were suggested by Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of political sciences at the University of Maryland (USA), as well as by Prof.