The reeducation practices of communist Romania ended in 1951 with the transfer of political prisoners from Pitesti to the Danube-Black Sea Canal labor camps. After a mysterious process, these convicts became fanatical adherents to the regime, engaging in the torture of fellow convicts. When these acts became public, the regime responded with a series of trials against the prisoner-torturers, thereby shielding itselse and penitentiary staff members any complicity in these events.

Mircea Stanescu conducts an impartial analysis of the reeducation trials and their unfolding consequences, extracting pertinent historical information from widespread ideological distortion. In order to do this, Stanescu draws on groundbreaking investigations into Pitesti and Romanian concentration camps, drawing on the work of Robert Conquest, Annie Kriegel, and other scholars who have researched communism and communist show trials.