On May 19, 1925, Salot Sar, better known by his pseudonym Pol Pot, was born. His reign in Cambodia was very short-lived, but remembered by the whole world forever. Much has been written about the horrors and cruelties of the three-year reign of the Khmer Rouge leader. It was during his reign that the interests of three powerful superpowers collided in an underdeveloped and impoverished country: the USSR, the USA and China.

Until the mid-50s, Cambodia remained a colony of France. After independence, King Norodom Sihanouk came to power. He was considered a very progressive figure and received a European education. During his reign, he unexpectedly abdicated the throne in favor of his father, but at the same time moved to the chair of prime minister, retaining full power. He also created his own political doctrine, which could be called “For everything good and against everything bad.” The doctrine simultaneously combined elements of almost all known political movements: socialism, monarchism, liberalism, nationalism, etc.

Like any leader of a poor and undeveloped state, Sihanouk had to decide with whom to be friends and from whom to receive financial support. Sihanouk decided to be friends with everyone while he could. He regularly traveled to major countries, assuring them of eternal friendship and receiving financial assistance. Sihanouk enjoyed support in the USSR and made several visits to Moscow. In the late 50s, the Soviet Union, as a sign of friendship, built a modern hospital in the Cambodian capital, and a little later also an institute. The Chinese also helped, but mostly with money. But the main sponsor of Cambodia remained the United States, which annually transferred several tens of millions of dollars to them.

Between three fires

However, in the 60s the situation changed dramatically. A civil war broke out in Vietnam, in which the United States intervened on one side, the USSR and China (separately) on the other. Since Cambodia conveniently bordered Vietnam, the main flow of Chinese military supplies to the Vietnamese communists went through it.

The United States was not satisfied with this situation, and they put pressure on Sihanouk, demanding neutrality, threatening to stop his financial support. Sihanouk had to choose, and he chose the closer China, which made the second-largest financial injections into the country after the United States and, at the same time, never tired of flattering and praising Sihanouk.

The head of Cambodia pointedly refused American assistance and refocused on China. Since Moscow and Beijing were already on hostile terms, Sihanouk had to cool relations with the USSR. After several pro-Chinese statements, the USSR canceled Sihanouk's next visit to Moscow. After this, the offended prime minister organized a noisy rally in the capital, to which he appeared in person and declared that he was not a lackey of Moscow and the USSR would not find its lackeys in Cambodia.

Next, Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States and, at the insistence of China, allowed Vietnamese troops to establish bases on the territory of his country. After military operations, the Vietnamese retreated to Cambodia, which the Americans could not attack because of its formal neutrality.

However, the presence of Vietnamese soldiers in the country gave rise to unexpected problems. The soldiers needed a lot of food, and Cambodia was the poorest country. Its main export material was rice. The Vietnamese bought a significant part of the rice from local peasants at higher prices, which is why the peasants did not want to sell it to the government, which was deprived of their main export product. Attempts to send soldiers to seize rice at low prices turned into an uprising in several regions, which was coordinated by the leaders of the Khmer Rouge - a group of golden youth with Sorbonne diplomas, recently returned from France and entered the struggle for power in the country.

A low-intensity war began between communist rebels and the army. At this moment, it began to dawn on Sihanouk that he was thoroughly entangled in his cunning combinations and was about to lose power. It gradually began to reverse. He restored relations with the Americans and gave permission for secret air strikes by the American Air Force on Vietnamese bases in the country. I tried to improve relations with the USSR. Moscow began supplying weapons to the country and sent military advisers to train the army.

In 1970, while Sihanouk was visiting Moscow, he was overthrown by his own prime minister, Lon Nol. Sihanouk asked for political asylum in the USSR, but was refused, recalling his friendship with China. Then the ousted politician moved to Beijing, where he created a royal government in exile with the support of China.

Lon Nol had 100% pro-American views and immediately forbade the Vietnamese from using the territory of his country as a refuge. In addition, he blocked the transit of Chinese weapons through Cambodia.

In fact, all these actions were not in the interests of North Vietnam. However, the USSR officially recognized the Nol regime, while the Chinese broke off relations with the country and continued to consider Sihanouk as the legitimate ruler. The Kremlin approached this situation pragmatically. Soviet supplies to Vietnam were carried out along other routes, and although the pro-American regime was not beneficial for them, it weakened the influence of China, which at that time was considered enemy No. 1.

Invitation to War

However, the Vietnamese did not agree with this; the Cambodian bases were extremely beneficial to them, so they refused to obey Nol’s orders, and when trying to expel them, they entered into armed confrontation with the Cambodian army. Since the Vietnamese were already highly experienced and the Cambodians were poorly armed and trained, Nol requested US support.

The Americans and South Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and launched an offensive against communist forces. However, in America the new war was perceived extremely negatively and after violent student protests, the Americans withdrew troops from the country. This happened within a few months. Instead, they began to support Nol's regime.

A protest rally against the armed invasion of American troops in Cambodia at the Red October confectionery factory.

Meanwhile, under the wing of China, Sihanouk created a coalition with his recent enemies - the Khmer Rouge - to overthrow Nol. After several years of war, the rebels gained a foothold in most of the provincial rice-producing areas, while the Nola regime controlled only the capital and a few cities. The rebels were held back only by bombing by American aircraft at the request of Nola. Some changes also occurred in the coalition, the Chinese now provided priority support to the Khmer Rouge, and Sihanouk turned into a decorative figure.

In 1975, coalition troops entered Phnom Penh. Nola's regime fell. The USSR congratulated the coalition and Sihanouk himself, who returned to the country with the rank of head of state. However, Moscow underestimated the changes that have taken place in the coalition over the past few years.

China's Revenge

A few days after the capture of Phnom Penh, South Vietnam also fell. The Vietnam War ended in victory for the Communists. However, the Chinese, who also helped the Vietnamese, failed to win them over to their side. The country's leadership made a choice in favor of the Soviet ally. What caused indignation among the Chinese leadership, which was dissatisfied with the strengthening of Soviet influence in Southeast Asia.

Soon, under pressure from the Khmers and Chinese, Sihanouk was forced to sign a renunciation and went under house arrest. Power passed to the mysterious Angka loeu ("Supreme Organization"). This was the name of the organization of those same golden youth from the Sorbonne, united by family ties. She did not hang her posters on the streets; on the contrary, she hid the names of the members behind serial numbers: brother No. 1, brother No. 2.

China, which had invested a lot in the Khmers, wanted to get some kind of return. Cambodia was already a poor country, and after several years of wars and bombings, it was completely in ruins. The only export resource was rice. And in China there were some food problems due to urbanization. In order to thank China for its help and pay for new supplies of Chinese goods, the Khmers sent all their rice exports there. But a lot of rice was needed, and without investment, opportunities were limited.

Therefore, the Khmer leaders came to a very simple solution. They simply abolished the cities, and the entire population of the country was taken to the forest. Under the pretext of American bombings (which were not even planned), the entire population of the cities was taken to the forests in three days. There, people were settled in improvised barracks camps, where they spent free time growing rice from dawn to dusk. Once a week, as a reward for hard work, spouses were allowed to meet in visiting rooms at the camps. Private property was abolished, as was money, due to its complete meaninglessness in such conditions.

Cambodian peasants plant rice and sift grain. Collage © L!FE Photo: © RIA Novosti / Savvichev

The more or less educated sections of the population were sent to camps or exterminated, since it was believed that they would still not accept the “new democratic Kampuchea”, and there was no point in wasting time on convincing them, there were more important things to do.

Nothing has changed only for the poorest part of the peasantry. They both grew rice using primitive methods and continued to do so. But at least they could gloat over the urban ones (the antagonism between city and countryside at that time was strong in undeveloped countries).

Soon, Khmer Rouge leaders began to unleash militant anti-Vietnamese rhetoric. In general, the Vietnamese have not done anything bad to them lately, quite the contrary. The Vietnamese helped the Khmer rebels against Lon Nol's troops and handed over the areas in which their bases were located. In addition, the Vietnamese provided little financial support to the Khmers. However, China wanted to punish Vietnam for “betrayal” at the hands of its satellites and at the same time weaken the state, which had sharply strengthened after the victory in the war.

The Khmers proclaimed that if every resident of the country killed 30 Vietnamese, then to win the war they would have to sacrifice only two million people (out of a total population of about seven million). Such losses did not frighten Pot at all, who was convinced that one million was enough to build a beautiful democratic Kampuchea of ​​the future.

As anti-Vietnamese rhetoric grew, the attitude towards the new regime in the USSR became increasingly hostile. The media wrote about the bloody regime of Chinese puppets and its atrocities, and the ditty “I will torture you like Pol Pot Kampuchea” became popular in the country.

Meanwhile, the Khmers moved from threats to action. Their small detachments began to secretly cross the border, attack border villages, kill local residents and leave. Vietnam did not respond to these actions for some time, fearing China's entry into the conflict. However, after the Khmer detachment massacred the large village of Batyuk in April 1978 (more than three thousand people died), the patience of the Vietnamese leadership ran out.

A few months later, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia. The poorly armed Cambodian army, a significant part of which were rural teenagers recruited in wild areas, offered virtually no resistance and immediately fled. In addition, in many parts there had previously been dissatisfaction with the repression of Angka, so some brigades and divisions in full went over to the side of the Vietnamese troops. The war lasted only a couple of weeks. The new head of state was Heng Samrin, a former officer of the Khmer Rouge army, who had recently quarreled with them and fled to Vietnam.

First socialist war

The overthrow of the pro-Chinese regime in Cambodia and its replacement by a pro-Vietnamese, and therefore pro-Soviet, regime infuriated Beijing, and it began to plan retaliatory actions. China established diplomatic relations with the United States and invaded Vietnam a month after the end of the Vietnam-Cambodian War. Some researchers called this conflict the First Socialist War, since both warring states adhered to the socialist model and open armed conflict between such countries occurred for the first time. The USSR deployed a large squadron to the region, but it did not interfere in the fighting.

However, the war turned out to be fleeting. The active phase of hostilities lasted a month. After this, China declared its unconditional victory. Vietnam also announced the defeat of the Chinese aggressor. Who actually won that war is still being debated. A draw result should be considered the most adequate. Since the losses of both sides were approximately the same. However, in the USSR it was believed that China lost because it did not achieve its original goals.

Cambodian Gambit

The Cambodian army virtually did not exist and could not defend the new regime. Therefore, as a temporary (and ultimately very protracted) measure, support for the regime was provided by a large Vietnamese contingent. Since the Vietnamese themselves did not have money after a long war, the USSR was actually involved in maintaining the contingent at its own expense.

This, of course, could not help but attract the Americans, still frustrated by the failure in the region, who began to support the fugitive Khmers. For some reason, traditional human rights concerns did not extend to the ousted Pol Pot regime, which received support from the United States.

The conflict turned into a diplomatic confrontation. Immediately after the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot's Kampuchea, the Americans convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, demanding all possible punishments against the monstrous and barbaric Vietnamese aggression against Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. American diplomats never tired of describing the atrocities of the Vietnamese military in the occupied territories, tactfully keeping silent about the regime of Democratic Kampuchea, which exterminated in three years, according to various estimates, from 500 thousand to one and a half million people in a country of seven million.

The Americans and Chinese now presented a united front, but the vote failed. Then the United States unilaterally imposed a total embargo on Vietnam, which was in effect until the early 90s. In addition, the question arose of who would represent Cambodia at the UN. Former King Sihanouk reunited with the Khmer Rouge and other political exiles in a coalition that considered itself the legitimate government. In this they were supported by the United States, most of the American allies and China. The Samrin regime ruling the country was considered legitimate by Vietnam, the USSR and other countries of the socialist camp.

The coalition government in exile resulted from a compromise between the United States and China. The Chinese insisted on including the Khmer Rouge in the coalition, and the Americans insisted on democratic forces. As a result, very diverse forces gathered in the coalition: ex-King Sihanouk, Son Sann liberals and the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, the Khmers in the government were represented not by Pol Pot, who was too odious at that moment, but by his closest associate Khieu Samphan. At one time, he defended his doctoral dissertation in economics in France, and in Angka he was the main ideologist of the barracks economy. True, in order to enter the government in exile, he had to renounce old principles and become an apologist for the market economy. And the Khmers themselves had to rebrand. They dissolved the old organization and created a new one - the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, which now advocated democratic socialism, and not for general murder.

Pol Pot; People's Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Victims of the executioners of Pol Pot in the village of Tol, Kampuchea province. Photo: © AP Photo/Kyodo News, RIA Novosti / RIA Novosti

Pol Pot focused on leading the guerrilla movement, as the Khmer Rouge units managed to keep remote and inaccessible areas of the country under control. American and Chinese assistance was not limited to diplomatic support. Both those and others helped supporters of the overthrown regime with money and weapons. Only the Americans mainly helped Sihanouk and Sannu, and the Chinese helped the Pol Potites.

The United States managed to win a diplomatic victory. Until the end of the 80s, Cambodia's official representative to the UN was not representatives of the current regime, but the coalition government in exile with the participation of the Khmer Rouge.

The USSR was content with maintaining influence in the region. However, against the background of the beginning of the processes of disintegration, Vietnamese troops, no longer subsidized by Moscow, left Cambodia. Power in the country, through the mediation of the UN, was once again transferred to Sihanouk, who announced an amnesty for the Khmer partisans and at the same time outlawed the organization. They did not like it, and a low-intensity civil war continued between them, lasting until the end of the 90s.

Life story
Salot Sar, who became famous under the party nickname Pol Pot, was a completely atypical dictator. Being at the pinnacle of power, he adhered to absolute asceticism, ate sparingly, wore a discreet black tunic and did not appropriate the values ​​of the repressed, declared enemies of the people. Enormous power did not corrupt him. For himself personally, he did not want anything, devoting himself entirely to serving his people and building a new society of happiness and justice. He had no palaces, no cars, no luxurious women, no personal bank accounts. Before his death, he had nothing to bequeath to his wife and four daughters - he had neither his own house, nor even an apartment, and all his meager property, consisting of a pair of worn tunics, a walking stick, and a bamboo fan, burned with him in a fire made of old car tires, in which his former comrades cremated him the very next day after his death.
There was no cult of personality and there were no portraits of the leader. No one in this country even knew who ruled them. The leader and his comrades were nameless and called each other not by name, but by serial numbers: “comrade first”, “comrade second” - and so on. Pol Pot himself took the modest number eighty-seven; he signed his decrees and orders: “Comrade 87.”
Pol Pot never allowed himself to be photographed. But one artist somehow sketched his portrait from memory. Then the drawing was copied on a photocopier, and images of the dictator appeared in the barracks and barracks of labor camps. Having learned about this, Pol Pot ordered all these portraits to be destroyed and the “information leak” to be stopped. The artist was beaten to death with hoes. The same fate befell his “accomplices” – the copyist and those who received the drawings.
True, one of the portraits of the leader was still seen by his siblings, who, like all other “bourgeois elements,” were sent to a labor concentration camp for re-education. “It turns out that little Salot rules us!” – my sister exclaimed in shock.
Pol Pot, of course, knew that his close relatives were repressed, but he, as a true revolutionary, believed that he did not have the right to put personal interests above public ones, and therefore did not make any attempts to alleviate their fate.
The name Saloth Sar disappeared from official communications in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge army entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. A rumor was spread that he died in the battles for the capital. Later it was announced that someone named Pol Pot was becoming the head of the new government.
At the very first meeting of the Politburo of the “top comrades” - Angka - Pol Pot announced that from now on Cambodia would be called Kampuchea, and promised that in a few days the country would turn into communist. And so that no one would interfere with him in this noble cause, Pol Pot immediately fenced off his Kampuchea with an “iron curtain” from the whole world, broke off diplomatic relations with all countries, banned postal and telephone communications and tightly closed entry and exit from the country.
The USSR “warmly welcomed” the appearance of another small cell shaded in red on the world map. But very soon the “Kremlin elders” were disappointed. To the invitation of the Soviet government to pay a friendly visit to the USSR, the leaders of “brotherly Kampuchea” responded with a rude refusal: we cannot come, we are very busy. The KGB of the USSR tried to create an agent network in Kampuchea, but even the Soviet security officers were unable to do this. There was practically no information about what was happening in Kampuchea.

Death to bespectacled people!
As soon as the Khmer Rouge army entered Phnom Penh, Pol Pot immediately issued a decree on the abolition of money and ordered the national bank to be blown up. Anyone who tried to collect banknotes scattered in the wind was shot on the spot.
And the very next morning, the residents of Phnom Penh woke up to Angka’s order shouted through the loudspeakers to immediately leave the city. The Khmer Rouge, dressed in traditional black uniforms, pounded on the doors with rifle butts and continuously fired into the air. At the same time, the supply of water and electricity was stopped.
However, it was impossible to immediately withdraw three million citizens from the city in organized columns. The “evacuation” lasted almost a week. Separating children from their parents, they shot not only protesters, but also those who did not understand. The Khmer Rouge went around houses and shot everyone they found. Others, who meekly obeyed, found themselves in the open air without food or water while awaiting evacuation. People drank from the pond in the city park and the sewers. To the number of those who fell at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, hundreds more died of “natural” death - from an intestinal infection. A week later, only corpses and packs of cannibal dogs remained in Phnom Penh.
Disabled people who were unable to walk were doused with gasoline and set on fire. Phnom Penh became a ghost town: it was forbidden to be there on pain of death. Only on the outskirts did the quarter where the leaders of the Khmer Rouge settled survive. Nearby was “object S-21” - a former lyceum where thousands of “enemies of the people” were brought. After torture, they were fed to crocodiles or burned on iron grates.
The same fate befell all other cities of Kampuchea. Pol Pot announced that the entire population was turning into peasants. The intelligentsia was declared enemy number one and subjected to wholesale extermination or hard labor in the rice fields.
At the same time, anyone who wore glasses was considered an intellectual. The Khmer Rouge killed bespectacled people immediately, as soon as they saw them on the street. Not to mention teachers, scientists, writers, artists and engineers, even doctors were destroyed, since Pol Pot abolished healthcare, believing that thereby freeing the future happy nation from the sick and sick.
Pol Pot did not, like communists in other countries, separate religion from the state, he simply abolished it. The monks were mercilessly killed, and the temples were turned into barracks and slaughterhouses.
The national question was resolved with the same simplicity. All other nations in Kampuchea except the Khmers were subject to destruction.
Khmer Rouge troops used sledgehammers and crowbars to destroy cars, electronics, industrial equipment and construction equipment throughout the country. Even household appliances were destroyed: electric shavers, sewing machines, tape recorders, refrigerators.
During the first year of his rule, Pol Pot managed to completely destroy the entire economy of the country and all its political and social institutions. Libraries, theaters and cinemas were destroyed, songs, dances, and traditional celebrations were banned, national archives and “old” books were burned.
Villages were also destroyed, since from now on the peasants had to live in rural communes. The population of those villages that did not agree to voluntary resettlement was almost completely exterminated. Before being pushed into the pit, the victims were struck in the back of the head with a shovel or hoe and pushed down. When too many people were to be eliminated, they were gathered into groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed current from a generator mounted on a bulldozer, and then the unconscious people were pushed into a pit. The children were tied up in a chain and pushed en masse into pits filled with water, where they, tied hand and foot, immediately drowned.
To the question “Why do you kill children?” asked Pol Pot by one journalist, he answered: “Because they can grow up to be dangerous people.”
And in order for children to grow into “real communists,” they were taken away from their mothers in infancy and these “Kampuchean Janissaries” were raised to be “soldiers of the revolution.”
In carrying out his “reforms,” Pol Pot relied on an army that consisted almost entirely of fanatics twelve to fifteen years old, stunned by the power that machine guns gave them. They were trained to kill from childhood, doped with a mixture of palm moonshine and human blood. They were told that they were “capable of anything,” that they had become “special people” because they drank human blood. Then it was explained to these teenagers that if they showed pity for the “enemies of the people,” then after painful torture they would be killed themselves.
Pol Pot managed to do something that no revolutionary leader had managed before - he completely abolished the institution of family and marriage. Before entering the rural commune, husbands were separated from their wives, and women became property of the nation.
Each commune was led by a village headman, a kamafibal, who, at his own discretion, assigned partners to the men. However, men and women lived separately in different barracks and could meet only once a month, on a day off. True, this single day could only be called a day off only conditionally. Instead of working in the rice fields, the Communards worked twelve hours at a time to improve their ideological level in political classes. And only at the end of the day were the “partners” given time for brief solitude.
There was a comprehensive set of prohibitions that applied to all Khmers. It was forbidden to cry or otherwise demonstrate negative emotions; laugh or rejoice at something if there was no proper socio-political reason for it; pity the weak and sick, who are automatically subject to destruction; read anything other than Pol Pot’s “Little Red Book,” which is his creative adaptation of Mao Zedong’s quotation book; complain and ask for any benefits for yourself...
Sometimes those guilty of non-compliance with the prohibitions were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and displayed on stakes around the settlement with signs: “I am a traitor to the revolution!” But most often people were simply beaten to death with hoes: in order to save bullets, shooting “traitors to the revolution” was prohibited.
The corpses of criminals were also a national treasure. They were plowed into swampy soil as fertilizer. The rice fields, conceived by Paul Potus as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, very quickly turned into huge mass graves for burying people who were beaten to death with hoes or died from exhaustion, disease and hunger.
Shortly before his death, Mao Zedong, having met with Pol Pot, spoke very highly of his achievements: “You won a brilliant victory. With one blow you are done with classes. People's communes in the countryside, consisting of the poor and middle classes of the peasantry, throughout Kampuchea - this is our future.”
A Farewell to Arms
Pol Pot's big mistake was that he fell out with neighboring revolutionary Vietnam when the Khmer Rouge began ethnic cleansing, killing all Vietnamese. Vietnam did not like this, and in December 1978, Vietnamese troops crossed the Kampuchean border. Mao had died by that time, and there was no one to stand up for Pol Pot. Viet Cong armored forces entered Phnom Penh without encountering serious resistance. Pol Pot, at the head of the surviving army of ten thousand, fled into the jungle to the north of the country.
One day, before going to bed, his wife came to put a mosquito net over his bed and saw that her husband was already numb. Pol Pot died of a heart attack on April 14, 1998. His body was placed on a pile of boxes and car tires and burned.
Shortly before his death, seventy-two-year-old Pol Pot managed to give an interview to Western journalists. He said he doesn't regret anything...

Vladimir Simonov

An entire people, with its ancient cultural traditions and reverence for faith, was brutally mutilated by a Marxist fanatic. Pol Pot, with the silent connivance of the whole world, turned a prosperous country into a huge cemetery.
Imagine that a government comes to power and announces a ban on money. And not only for money: commerce, industry, banks are prohibited - everything that brings wealth. The new government declares by decree that society is again becoming agrarian, as it was in the Middle Ages. Residents of cities and towns are forcibly relocated to the countryside, where they will engage exclusively in peasant labor. But family members cannot live together: children should not fall under the influence of the “bourgeois ideas” of their parents. Therefore, the children are taken away and raised in the spirit of devotion to the new regime. No books until adulthood. The books are no longer needed, so they are burned, and children from the age of seven work for the Khmer Rouge state.
An eighteen-hour working day is established for the new agrarian class, hard labor is combined with “re-education” in the spirit of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the new masters. Dissidents who sympathize with the old order do not have the right to life. The intelligentsia, teachers, university professors, and literate people in general are subject to extermination, since they can read materials hostile to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and spread seditious ideology among workers re-educated in the peasant field. The clergy, politicians of all stripes, except those who share the views of the ruling party, people who made a fortune under the previous authorities are no longer needed - they are also destroyed. Trade and telephone communications are curtailed, temples are destroyed, bicycles, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, love and kindness are cancelled. In the best case - labor for the purpose of "re-education", otherwise - torture, torment, degradation, in the worst case - death.
This nightmare scenario is not the sophisticated figment of a science fiction writer's fevered imagination. It represents the horrific reality of life in Cambodia, where the murderous dictator Pol Pot turned back the clock, destroying civilization in an attempt to realize his twisted vision of a classless society. His “killing fields” were littered with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the rule of Pol Pot's regime, about three million people died in Cambodia - the same number as the unfortunate victims who perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War. Life under Sex Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that took place on the soil of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.
The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out in the ruins of French colonialism and then escalated into conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields. From 1969 to 1973, American B-52 bombers used carpet bombing to drop as many tons of explosives on this tiny country as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of World War II. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungles of the neighboring country to set up military camps and bases during operations against the Americans. American planes bombed these strong points.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's ruler and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the outbreak of the Vietnam War but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated the throne in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to lead the country as head of state.
During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with the political leadership in Washington for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the Cambodian jungle. However, he was also quite mild in his criticism of punitive air raids carried out by the United States.
On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his prime minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, carried out a coup d'etat, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but within a month it invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.
Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for the common goal of defeating American troops.
Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, was a monk for two years. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the leftist movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great power ambitions.
According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, the fattening leaders fed by the French colonial rulers, and abandon devalued bourgeois values ​​and ideals. Samphan's perverted theory stated that people should live in the fields, and all temptations of modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot had, say, been hit by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee shops and bars without crossing the boundaries of the Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.
From 1970 to 1975, Pol Pot's "revolutionary army" became a powerful force in Cambodia, controlling vast agricultural areas. On April 17, 1975, the dictator's dream of power became a reality: his troops, marching under red flags, entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. A few hours after the coup, Pol Pot called a special meeting of his new cabinet and announced that the country would henceforth be called Kampuchea. The dictator outlined a bold plan for building a new society and said that its implementation would take only a few days. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of newly appointed regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having received his education abroad, he hated educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.
The first to die were high-ranking members of the cabinet and functionaries of the Lon Nol regime. They were followed by the officer corps of the old army. Everyone was buried in mass graves. At the same time, doctors were killed because of their “education.” All religious communities were destroyed - they were considered “reactionary”. Then the evacuation of cities and villages began.
Pol Pot's perverted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "getting out of sight." “They removed” - they destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.
Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even simply slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy monasteries.
Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. Using Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forced eradication of ethnic groups was especially hard on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from what is now Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and fished along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, preserving the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.
Young fanatics from the Khmer Rouge attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were driven into swamps infested with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly prohibited by their religion, and the clergy were mercilessly destroyed. If the slightest resistance was shown, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the two hundred thousand Chans, less than half remained alive.
Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.
According to Pol Pot, the older generation was spoiled by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with “sympathies” for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by backbreaking labor.
People were killed for even trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as this was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.
In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not have envied, traders, teachers, entrepreneurs worked, the only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other citizens.
These camps were organized in such a way as to, through “natural selection,” get rid of the old and sick, pregnant women and young children.
People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the batons of cruel overseers.
Without medical assistance other than traditional herbal treatments, the life expectancy of prisoners in these camps was depressingly short.
At dawn, men were marched in formation into the malarial swamps, where they cleared the jungle for twelve hours a day in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their cup of rice, gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, during which incorrigible “bourgeois elements” were identified and punished, and the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days there was a long-awaited day off, for which twelve hours of ideological classes were planned. Wives lived separately from their husbands. Their children began working at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who raised them to be fanatical “fighters of the revolution.”
From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these bonfires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. “Lessons of hatred” were organized when people were flogged in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness.
The Polpotites severed diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country was prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the rest of the world.
To intensify the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and execution in his prison camps. As during the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his minions proceeded from the premise that those who ended up in these damned places were guilty and all they had to do was admit their guilt. To convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of “national revival,” the regime attached special political significance to torture.
Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers trained by Chinese instructors were guided by brutal, ideological principles in their activities. The Interrogation Guidelines S-21, one of the documents later submitted to the UN, stated: “The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response to it from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction. . Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated person. When torture should not be based on one’s own anger or self-satisfaction. The person being tortured should be beaten in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before starting torture, it is necessary to examine the health status of the interrogated person and examine instruments of torture. You should not necessarily try to kill the person being interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that you are engaged in political work. Even during interrogations, you should constantly conduct propaganda work. At the same time, you must avoid indecision and hesitation during torture, when there is an opportunity to get answers to our questions from the enemy. We must remember that indecisiveness can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind it is necessary to show determination, persistence, and categoricalness. We must engage in torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be broken."
Among the numerous sophisticated methods of torture that the Khmer Rouge executioners resorted to, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and strangulation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its name, was the most notorious camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were tortured here. Only seven survived, and only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their owners to manage this terrible institution.
But torture was not the only weapon to intimidate the already frightened population of the country. There are many known cases when guards in camps caught prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was terrible death. The culprits were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst, while their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. The victims' heads were then cut off and displayed on stakes around the settlement. They hung a sign around their necks: “I am a traitor to the revolution!”
Dith Pran, a Cambodian translator for American journalist Sidney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhumane ordeal he endured is documented in the film The Killing Fields, in which the suffering of the Cambodian people was revealed to the world for the first time in stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking tale of Pran's journey from a civilized childhood to a death camp left viewers horrified.
“In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I was forced to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake I continued to live, but it was not life , but a nightmare."
Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that has experienced a terrible tragedy, mass graves of nameless victims still remain, above which mounds of human skulls rise in silent reproach.
In the end, thanks to military power, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the carnage and restore at least a semblance of common sense to the tormented land. To its credit, the UK protested against human rights abuses in 1978 following reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest fell on deaf ears. Britain made a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a representative of the Khmer Rouge hysterically retorted: “The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world knows their barbaric essence. The leaders of Britain are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only for unemployment, illness and prostitution."
In December 1978, Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodia with several motorized infantry divisions supported by tanks. The country fell into such disrepair that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles.
In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him with refuge, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.
When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, help rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation discovered journals in which daily executions and torture were recorded in great detail, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to execution, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated in the initial stages of the terror, and detailed documentation about the notorious “killing fields.” These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny.
Pol Pot, who seemed to have faded into oblivion, has recently re-emerged on the political horizon as a force vying for power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those killed were “enemies of the state.” Returning to Cambodia in 1981, at a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he had been too trusting: “My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and local leaders perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago."
A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a quarter of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the famous Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more people are able to believe it - Pol Pot is still eager for power and hopes to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, are still loyal to him.
He has again become a major political figure and is waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of what he had previously begun - his “great agrarian revolution.”
There is a growing movement in international circles to recognize the massacres committed in Cambodia as a crime against humanity - similar to Hitler's genocide against the Jews. There is a Cambodian Documentation Center in New York under the leadership of Yeng Sam. Like former Nazi prisoner Sim on Wiesenthal, who spent many years collecting evidence around the world against Nazi war criminals, Yeung Sam, a survivor of the campaign of terror, is amassing information about the atrocities of criminals in his country.
Here are his words: “Those most guilty of the Cambodian genocide - members of the cabinet of the Pol Pot regime, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, military leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose troops took part in the massacres, officials who supervised the executions and supervised the system of torture - continue active in Cambodia.Hiding out in the border areas, they wage a guerrilla war, seeking to return to power in Phnom Penh.
They were not brought to international legal responsibility for their crimes, and this is a tragic, monstrous injustice.
We, the survivors, remember how we were deprived of our families, how our relatives and friends were brutally killed. We witnessed how people died from exhaustion, unable to endure slave labor, and from the inhuman living conditions to which the Khmer Rouge doomed the Cambodian people.
We also saw Pol Pot's soldiers destroy our Buddhist temples, stop our children's schools, suppress our culture, and exterminate our ethnic minorities. It is difficult for us to understand why free, democratic states and nations do nothing to punish those responsible. Doesn't this issue cry out for justice?"
But there is still no fair solution to this issue.

The amazing unanimity with which the political system of the state of Democratic Kampuchea, which existed from 1975 to 1978, was spat upon both in Western countries and in the Warsaw Pact countries involuntarily forces the researcher of this problem to ask the question: why did the worst enemies unite in opposition to the Kampuchean regime.

Of course, it was not the notorious universal values ​​that united the imperialists and revisionists into a united anti-Polpot front - for both systems this is nothing more than demagoguery. Another strange thing is that the Americans knew very well how the Soviet bloc countries knew how to manipulate statistics, but despite this, they never doubted the figures of “genocide” cited by the puppet pro-Vietnamese government of Hun Sen-Heng Samrin.

And this was at a time when the Americans provided assistance, if not to the Khmer Rouge themselves, then to their temporary allies in the anti-Vietnamese coalition - parts of Lon Nol and Sihanouk. It seemed that it was more profitable for them, if not to doubt the scale of the “genocide,” then at least to pretend that you didn’t notice it.

However, hatred of the Pol Potites united seemingly all the leading forces in world politics.

Why did this hostility become so unanimous? What is the mystery of Pol Pot? Why did he do what he did?

We will try to answer these questions during a short excursion into the history of Kampuchea in the second half of the 20th century.

Comrade Pol Pot (real name Salot Sar) was born in 1928 in Kampong Thom province. His father Pnem Lot was a large landowner who owned a herd of 30-40 bulls and hired up to 40 farm laborers during the harvest season. His relatives also prospered - his cousin was one of the wives of King Monivong, Sihanouk's predecessor, and Pol Pot's sister Lot Sarin became the king's official concubine. But Salot Sar grew up lonely and unsociable; he saw the injustice happening around him, the poverty of the peasants, and dreamed of ending it all in one fell swoop. Pol Pot's only childhood friend was his brother Salot Chhay, with whom they began to serve at the royal court.

In 1949, he received a scholarship from the French government and entered the Sorbonne to study mechanical engineering. Here he joined the French Communist Party. Together with a group of Khmer students of the future leaders of Kampuchea - Ieng Sari, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen - he created a Marxist circle and began to study the foundations of Marxist science - the theory of class struggle, tactics of organizational control, the Stalinist approach to solving national problems.

In 1953, as part of a youth brigade of French Komsomol members, he went to harvest in Yugoslavia. The case was unprecedented in its own way, because all communist parties, according to the resolution of the Cominform, were obliged to break all ties with the Yugoslav revisionists. What he saw in Titoist Yugoslavia, Salot Sar did not like it very much, but he firmly learned that in which case it is possible to build socialism on your own without the help of such giants as the USSR and China.

In 1953, before he could complete his education, he was deported from France for participating in anti-imperialist demonstrations. In the same year, he managed to fight in the jungle as part of the Issarak detachments. Then, in 1955, he maintained contact during the parliamentary elections between the legal wing of the communists and the non-communist opposition. In 1960, he actively contributed to the fact that the party began to pursue an armed struggle against Sihanouk, independent of Vietnam, which bled the party with repression.

In 1963, after being approved as the first secretary of the party, he goes underground and begins an armed struggle.

In 1965 he tries to make contacts with the international communist movement. In August, he establishes contact with the Soviet embassy in the hope that Moscow will support the armed struggle of the Khmer partisans. But Brezhnev has no reason to quarrel with the "progressive" Sihanouk and spend money on a dwarf Cambodian Communist Party. To meet with Pol Pot, the Soviet leaders sent only the third secretary of the embassy, ​​who was not endowed with any real powers. He was dismissed as a petty freeloader, and for the rest of his life he harbored a grudge against the Soviet communists.

In the same year, he visited Hanoi, but did not stay there for a long time, but spent almost a year in China, where he was received at the highest level and watched with admiration the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. From that moment on, his fate was closely connected with the policy of the PRC in Indochina. In 1967, a powerful uprising led by Pol Pot-oriented communists broke out in the provinces of Somlot and Battambang. The following year, the scope of the partisan struggle expanded even further. In Hanoi, this was received with obvious displeasure; the Cambodian communists were made to understand that they could still count on refuge in the territory of North Vietnam if something happened, but they would not help them with weapons and ammunition.

In panic, Sihanouk's government broke off secret relations with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, purged Sangkum of leftist elements and called for the normalization of previously damaged relations with America. But in vain, the American masters did not need the capricious and changeable Sihanouk, and on March 18, 1970, General Lon Nol, taking advantage of Sihanouk’s visit to the USSR, carried out a military coup and established a puppet pro-American regime.

On long evenings in Paris in a Marxist circle, later around a partisan fire, during trips to Beijing, Comrade Pol Pot again and again discussed with Son Sen and Khieu Samphan the problems of building socialism that worried him. What he saw in France, in Yugoslavia, in people's China and North Vietnam told him that the practice of building socialism leads to the fact that the country's party leadership is turning into a closed privileged caste, a kind of “new bourgeoisie”, which, even if at the first stage, it consisted entirely of ardent revolutionaries, but, gradually acquiring privileges, more and more begins to strive not for the accelerated construction of communism, but for strengthening its own position and ultimately takes the capitalist path. How they burned out such trash in China, even the entire party was dispersed and then reassembled, and lo and behold, not even ten years had passed since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when all these nits crawled out of the cracks, again took leadership positions and turned the country onto the path of market reforms.

On the other hand, ordinary citizens of socialist countries, as a rule, do not make strengthening the cause of socialism the main task of their lives. As a rule, they simply strive to get a better job, receive more money, and snatch more from the state. Thus, as experience suggested, the psychology of the average person in a socialist country was not much different from the psychology of the petty bourgeois. And then the rotten intelligentsia, always in a camouflaged form, begins to sing songs about “creative freedom”, which end with calls to restore capitalism. Moreover, socialism in Kampuchea would have to be built in a peasant country, and yet, according to Lenin, small-scale peasant farming reproduces capitalism again and again...

Of course, one could build one’s own, national version of socialism, which was widely practiced in third world countries and was only an embellished version of capitalism; one could give the petty-bourgeois element some slack and choose “socialism with a human face.” It was finally possible to simply introduce a semblance of war communism with an “iron hand.” But all these options did not appeal to the group of like-minded people who rallied around Pol Pot in the leadership.

All these options, even “war communism,” were fraught with the risk that after a change of leadership the country could easily return to the bourgeois path of development. No, this path was not suitable. The task was set differently - in the shortest possible time to create a new person, a person of the era of socialism, whose physiological needs would be reduced to a minimum, individualism, the passion for acquisition and enrichment would be completely eliminated, and the desire to work, the desire to serve the team, the country , parties would turn into natural needs.

And for this, the “human material” had to be re-educated and re-educated again. It is not easy to create a person of a new society: after all, every member of society is burdened by his previous experience - the habit of living under capitalism. And then, the elders pass on their worldview, burdened by remnants, to representatives of the new generation born after the revolution. How to deal with this? You can, of course, give up on this and wait until the once revolutionary socialism, through gradual philistinization, turns into a market swamp.

Many radical revolutionary thinkers proposed radical ways to solve this problem: for example, the Russian populist Pyotr Tkachev proposed after the revolution to exterminate everyone over 35 years of age as bearers of an inert conservative consciousness. But Comrade Pol Pot sincerely believed that human nature also contains strong collectivist principles and that within the lifetime of one generation of people, through proper education, individualists can be transformed into altruists. In Khmer Rouge language this was called political education of cadres.

The scale of the experiment begun by Pol Pot is all the more significant because Kampuchea was a backward agrarian country that practically did not have its own industrial proletariat. The few urban artisans in their worldview belonged rather to the petty bourgeoisie. Thus, the only social support for deep socialist transformations in the country was and remained the rural proletariat - farm laborers and landless peasants. The city turned out to be completely hostile to the revolution. The cities were to be destroyed.

Radical changes began in the country.

Almost the entire urban population was previously resettled to the countryside. There, “communes” and “labor armies” were put together from townspeople and local residents. Along with private property, personal property was also liquidated. The money was withdrawn from circulation.

Pol Pot was neither a “bloody butcher” nor a “pathological sadist.” Let's say, instructions on the use of special interrogation methods for enemies of the motherland and the revolution of the object §21 - a political prison in the northeast of the country. It states: “The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response from the interrogated person. Torture is not used for fun. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to evoke a quick, adequate reaction in the person being tortured. Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated person. Torture should not be based on one's own anger or self-satisfaction. The person being interrogated must be beaten in such a way as to intimidate him, and not to beat him to death. Before starting torture, it is necessary to check the health of the interrogated person, as well as check the serviceability and sterilize the instruments of torture. The interrogated person should not be killed prematurely. During interrogation, political considerations are the main ones, while inflicting pain on the person being tortured is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that you are engaged in political work. Even during interrogations, agitation and propaganda work should be constantly carried out. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid indecision and hesitation when it is possible to obtain direct answers to our questions from the enemy. We must remember that indecisiveness can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind it is necessary to show determination, persistence and categoricalness. We must begin to torture without first explaining its reasons and motives. Only in this way will the enemy be broken.” Think about it, they tried to remake, agitate and educate even the most notorious enemies of the people.

The assertions that Pol Pot was simply an ambitious adventurer who thirsted for fame and power are also deeply false. Comrade Pol Pot, although he was the permanent secretary of the Communist Party, before his appointment as prime minister in 1976, he tried not to advertise either his real name or pseudonym. He also did not like to be exhibited in public, to act or be photographed. After 1991, not a single photograph of Pol Pot was taken. It is known that the Japanese agency Asahi even offered a million dollars for a fresh photograph of Pol Pot. Pol Pot's modesty and anonymity became a Khmer proverb.

The assertions of some “zealots of the purity of Marxism” that the Pol Pot regime was “petty-bourgeois-peasant” are also an absolute lie. At the same time, they, as a rule, refer to Lenin’s quote that “the petty-bourgeois peasantry inevitably again and again gives birth to capitalism.” But Lenin said this about Russia, where the bulk of the peasantry were middle peasants. But where do commodity relations and capitalism come from in Kampuchea, if all the money was destroyed, and property was socialized so much that even eating alone was considered a crime? Kampuchea was a socialist state of the rural proletariat.

The reason why Democratic Kampuchea was destroyed, the reason why buckets of mud were poured on its leaders and accused of the most utter sins, is that, having brought all the data about Kampuchea into one register, system analysts in the Kremlin and in the White House grabbed Per head. What will it happen if the peoples of the world find out that they can easily blow up the State Bank and live without money? That it is possible to raze cities and sky-smoking factories to the ground and live in original harmony with nature in communes, that the entire elite, be it the monopoly bourgeoisie or the party bureaucracy, can be re-educated through hard and persistent peasant labor and turned into simple rural workers? "No!" - screamed those who are responsible for the fate of world politics. - “Our people will want to do this too. We won't allow it! Never! All this urgently needs to be suppressed and discredited!” And they crushed the Vietnamese with bayonets.

Morale among the Khmer Rouge troops was high: young fighters were ready to fight against the Vietnamese in a ratio of “one to thirty.” But the superiority in numbers and weapons was clearly on the side of Vietnam. Pol Pot with forty thousand of his armed supporters was forced to retreat to the territory of Thailand, but did not stop the fight.

If Pol Pot really was a “bloody maniac”, and the Vietnamese troops brought the Khmer nation deliverance from the horrors of “genocide”, as the democratic press claims, then why, I want to ask, not only his armed forces, but also hundreds of thousands of refugees left with him ? Why have the Khmer Rouge successfully waged guerrilla warfare over vast areas of the country for almost twenty years and enjoyed significant support from the local population?

Comrade Pol Pot showed tireless concern for the high moral and political spirit of his comrades. Everyone - from the ordinary soldier to the senior personnel - spent more time in political classes than in combat training classes. This system allowed the loyal Pol Potites to go from victory to victory. In March 1994, the government army, re-equipped with American money, attempted to launch a massive offensive against the southern Khmer Rouge group. For some time they even managed to capture Pailin, a city on the border with Thailand, where the main base of the partisans was located. But the Khmer Rouge managed to turn the tide.

At the end of April, they regained Pailin and, on the shoulders of the retreating government army, broke into the city of Mongkombarai. From there, a direct road to Phnom Penh opened. It seemed that a little more determination - and the banner of democratic Kampuchea would rise over the country again. About twenty percent of the country's territory was in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

But Pol Pot was approaching his eighties, he was often and seriously ill, and was tormented by recurring attacks of malaria, which he had contracted as a partisan in the late 1950s. Increasingly, he was left alone at his personal secret base, codenamed Bureau 87, located in the Cardamom Mountains. Only his personal chauffeur and bodyguard knew the way there.

In June 1996, after one such attack, a false report of his death even circulated in the world media. He could no longer control the situation all the time and was forced to rely on his closest associates. It seemed like an unbreakable circle, a single will, people whose loyalty was tested by decades of struggle and blood shed in battle. But the old, faithful and devoted friendship did not stand the test of what Comrade Pol Pot so fiercely tried to destroy - big money.

The western group of forces of Democratic Kampuchea, led by Pol Pot's brother-in-law Ieng Sari, had the world's largest sapphire deposits in their hands; the northern group, under the command of General Ta Mok, had plantations of valuable tree species on its territory. Trade in these resources brought the Khmer Rouge ten million dollars a month. And, having escaped from the firm control of Comrade Pol Pot personally, the top leaders began to allow themselves bourgeois luxury. They took the capitalist path and began to show feudal habits. Instead of investing money in the purchase of ammunition and modern types of weapons, they invested it through front men in real estate, invested in the gambling business, and bought up small businesses. Comrade Pol Pot contemptuously called such bourgeois degenerates from among the organization’s leadership apparatus “microbes that have penetrated the healthy body of the party.” Soon they were driving around the jungle in late-model jeeps, negotiating with their brokers in Bangkok and Phnom Penh via radiotelephones. From moral degradation and decay there was only a step to political treason...

Ieng Sari was the first to betray. He, along with three thousand of his supporters, concluded a truce with the government in September last year. In exchange, he was promised that his military forces would retain control of the province and allow him to take part in political life. Ieng Sari achieved the legalization of his capital. Seeing the success of Ieng Sari, the remaining decayed members of the leadership began to make plans to conclude a truce and legalize their commercial activities. Having learned about this, Comrade Pol Pot, without a moment’s hesitation, gave the order to arrest his main “assistants” - former Defense Minister Son Sen and the main ideologist Khieu Samphan - for treason against the revolution. Comrade Pol Pot ordered the traitor Son Sen to be driven over by truck, and intended to carry out educational work with Khieu Samphan. But the units of General Ta Mok loyal to Khieu Samphan detained a detachment of two hundred people under the command of Pol Pot, arrested him and freed Samphan. A few days later, the radio announced that a tribunal was being prepared for Pol Pot.

Pol Pot was arrested on June 20 by order of the commander of the Khmer Rouge army, General Ta Mok. He is being held at Anlong Veng camp in the north of the country. There was talk about the trial of Pol Pot as a “new Nuremberg.” The American bitch Albright, who is ready to do anything to strengthen the building of a new world order and erase any memory of communism from the memory of peoples, has actively joined this process. But in fact, no one wanted a tribunal, because any independent investigation would have shown that there was in fact no genocide, and that it was not the Khmer Rouge who were to blame for all the troubles of the Cambodian people, but American and Vietnamese puppets, royalists and the Pink "pseudo-communists.

Just a few days after the arrest, the winners squabbled like spiders in a jar. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge movement, as it turned out, were the only factor keeping the unnatural ruling coalition from splitting. The cunning Hun Sen again seized undivided control of the capital and most of the country. The second prime minister, Sihanouk's son Ranarith, was declared a traitor. The armed forces of the Cambodian People's Party drove the troops of the monarchist party FUNCINPEC and the Khmer Rouge renegade detachments that supported it into the territory of Thailand. Once again, the long-suffering people are plunged into the abyss of civil war.

Traitors to the cause of the revolution from among the former Khmer Rouge, who went over to the side of the monarchists, Khieu Samphan and the one-legged Ta Mok did not dare to execute the great revolutionary and only sentenced him to lifelong “house arrest.” Last October, he gave an interview for the first time in many years to a journalist from Hong Kong's Far Eastern Economic Review - the first Western journalist he had agreed to meet with in 18 years. “My conscience is clear,” said Pol Pot. “Yes, we made certain mistakes, but they were forced. We had no other choice. We had to defend ourselves from the Vietnamese who wanted to crush Kampuchea. Talking about millions of dead is too much of an exaggeration. All these memorials in memory of the victims are nothing more than a Vietnamese linden tree. Look at the piles of skulls they cite as evidence." - noted the former Kampuchean leader. - “Have the Khmers or other indigenous peoples of Cambodia ever had such small skulls? No, the infamous "mountains of skulls" cannot belong to the Cambodians, who have significantly larger skulls. Our task was to fight for socialism, not to kill people. Look at me - do I look like a tyrant? - Pol Pot emphasized. In his actions he was guided exclusively by revolutionary convictions and political expediency. In his interview, Pol Pot asked everyone to sympathize with his poor health and difficult fate.

On April 17, the fate of the Great Revolutionary was put to rest. Since the beginning of April, Clinton, who apparently had urine in his head, said that he intended to instruct special units of the American army to catch Pol Pot in order to try him in an international tribunal. Under these conditions, no one could guarantee that Khieu Samphan, who had already betrayed once, would fulfill his promise and not hand over the elderly leader into the hands of the Americans. An uprising of loyal Pol Pot soldiers broke out in the Anlong Veng camp. More than a thousand fighters, together with their great leader, went into the depths of the jungle. Khieusamphan's men rushed on their heels and overtook Pol Pot's partisans. No one knows for sure what happened there. But a few days later, on April 17, all television stations in the world broadcast a video showing the body of the dead Pol Pot. Some time later, independent medical experts, to whom the remains of the great revolutionary were transferred, stated that he was insidiously poisoned...

Yes, at times he was tough, but in this cruel world it is impossible to build a new, fair society without violence and coercion towards those who are accustomed to living at the expense of others. He used violence, but he did it on a reasonable scale, for the sake of the happiness, prosperity and prosperity of subsequent generations. He gave people perspective, faith in a bright future. Any illiterate peasant learned during political classes that even if he suffers hardships today, this is done so that his descendants can live happily in the bright future of communist society. And the peasants believed their political instructors. Today, those who are again shedding blood in Cambodia do not strive for anything other than personal power and profit; for them, human destinies, the future of the country are just bargaining chips in a gambling battle for their own success.

Comrade Pol Pot was not like that; he sought to ensure that the years of adversity and trials would lead to the birth of a new type of people, thanks to whom socialism and communism would last for centuries and millennia. His experiment may not have been a success, but as Bérenger said, “Honor to the madman who brings a golden dream to humanity.” Pol Pot has advanced the furthest this century towards building a classless, non-market socialist society. But he only had four years at his disposal. And in conclusion, I will take the liberty of asserting, at the risk of causing a storm of indignation among bourgeois “democrats” and syuganited “patriots,” that Comrade Pol Pot was the most humane person of the second half of the 20th century.

(born 1928 – died 1998)

Head of the left-wing extremist Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea. The organizer of the genocide of his own people.

“At about 9:30 a.m. the first column of winners appeared on Monivong Avenue [in Phnom Penh]. The population poured out into the street greeted them with joyful applause and cheers. But what is it? The woman, who rushed to hug the liberating soldier in a motherly manner, was thrown away with a blow from the butt. The girls, who ran up to hand over flowers, came across the cold steel of bayonets... People were brought out of their stupor by orders that came from loudspeakers installed on military jeeps: “Everyone - get out of the city! Quickly leave your home and get out of town! Forever! There will be no return!" Panic began among the townspeople. People were driven like cattle. If the family hesitated, they often threw a grenade into the yard or rushed them with a burst from a machine gun fired at the glass windows. In the ensuing chaos, confusion and haste, wives lost their husbands, parents lost their children. Even patients who were dragged from their beds were subject to violent mass abduction...”

This is how Soviet journalist V. Seregin described the first appearance in the capital, Phnom Penh, of the Khmer Rouge - the “liberators” of Cambodians from the oppression of the anti-people pro-American regime. To understand the situation, you need to go back five years.

In the first half of the 70s. power in Cambodia belonged to the so-called Phnom Penh group, which carried out a coup d'etat in March 1970 with the support of the United States. For five years, Cambodians fought against usurpers and American invaders. Finally, on April 17, 1975, the capital of the state was liberated from the troops of the American protege, General Long Nol. However, the people's aspirations for a happy, quiet life did not come true. The Phnom Penh group was replaced by the power of the Khmer Rouge, which became one of the bloodiest nightmares of the past century, the debut of which was reflected by Seregin. And at the head of this power was a man known as Pol Pot, whose ruthlessness suggests mental pathology.

Quite little is known about the life of Salot Sarah (this is the real name of the dictator). Even the exact date of his birth is unknown. They call it 1927, or more often 1928. The parents of the future tyrant - Piem Lot and Dok Niem - had Chinese roots and were peasants. In official biographies of the Pol Pot period, they were called poor people. Actually Pyem Lot. According to local standards, he was a wealthy man. He owned about forty buffaloes and was able to hire farm laborers. The children - and there were many of them: seven sons and two daughters - received a good education. Salot Sar learned to read at the age of five, successfully graduated from a local school, and at the age of 15 he went to Phnom Penh, where he entered a technical college. Growing up in the rebellious province of Kampong Thom, the young man could not help but be interested in politics. While still very young, during the Second World War, he became a member of the Indochina Communist Party. Then his father’s money and family connections allowed the young man to go abroad to study.

In 1949, Salot Sar arrived in Paris. Here he joined the French Communist Party, became close to Cambodian students who professed Stalinist Marxism, and together with them in 1950 created a circle to study the Stalinist theory of class struggle, the tactics of totalitarian organizational control and the Stalinist approach to solving national problems. At the same time, the young man was interested in French poetry and in between times wrote pamphlets directed against the Cambodian royal family.

In Paris, Saloth Sar met with Cambodian Khieu Polnary. They got married in Cambodia, where the future dictator returned in 1953 or 1954. The marriage, however, did not work out. There is information that the unfortunate woman went crazy, unable to bear living together with her monster husband.

At home, Salot Sar, armed with Stalinist ideas, began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. On this basis, many years later he began to call himself “professor of history and geography.” However, apparently, the main thing in his activity during this period was not teaching at all. Salot Sar did not advertise his political leanings, but gradually propagated Marxist ideas among students. Moreover, over time, Stalin’s theses were supplemented with a fair share of the “great teachings of Mao.”

Soon, the young propagandist joined one of the factions of the Cambodian Communist Party, which professed the idea of ​​​​creating a strong Cambodia with the help of a “super-great leap” with an emphasis on its own forces. Already in the early 60s. Salot Sar became one of the leaders of the faction, and after the death of the Secretary of the Communist Party of Cambodia Tu Samut, who died under unclear circumstances, became his successor. It was rumored that the new leader was involved in the death of his predecessor, but no one began to deal with this.

In 1963, Salot Sar left the lyceum and went into hiding. In his new role, he relied on building relationships with like-minded people abroad. To do this, he visited Vietnam in 1965, and not finding a common language with the Vietnamese communists, he went to Beijing, where he received full support from Mao.

Gradually, like-minded people of Salot Sara took a commanding position in the party. To eliminate rivals, systematic purges were used, and especially dangerous ones were simply physically eliminated. To strengthen the position of the leader, a special security service was created, which was personally subordinate to Salot Sar. Later it grew to the size of an entire army. Its fighters became known as the “Khmer Rouge” and went down in history as an example of incredible cruelty and arbitrariness.

At the beginning of 1975, the name Salot Sarah disappeared from the pages of newspapers. And about a year later, on April 14, 1976, the world learned of the appointment of a new Prime Minister of Cambodia, the unknown Pol Pot. However, it soon became clear that Salot Sar had simply changed his name and position. He did not come to power as a result of a coup: a compromise was reached between several political factions in the government; Apparently, there was also support from China.

The “Great Leap Forward” that Pol Pot sought involved the “development” of agriculture exclusively. It was supposed to build “community-village socialism.” For this purpose, the forced relocation of city residents to the countryside was carried out, where “agricultural communes” were created. Each had approximately 10 thousand people.

The cities were depopulated, and many thousands of their former inhabitants died before reaching their destination from hunger, disease and cruel treatment. Massive deaths were also observed in the communes. In “public canteens” people were fed from hand to mouth with stale food. There was one bowl of rice per 10 people. To survive, people were forced to eat the bark of banana trees. The weak and dissatisfied were killed.

In the communes, all Cambodians, starting from the age of seven, were forced to work 12–16 hours. They worked for 9 days, and the tenth day was intended for political studies. People had no right not only to personal property, but also to personal belongings. Each was given a mattress and, once a year, black work clothes. According to the leader of the country and his minions, everything else was only a consequence of bourgeois depravity.

Industrial enterprises were reoriented to the production of hoes and shovels, and all Cambodians, young and old, were required to grow rice and build irrigation structures. However, at the first spill, all the dams and dams were washed away. They were built without the participation of specialists, who simply were not left in the country. The technical intelligentsia, doctors, and teachers were subject to physical destruction as “infected with bourgeois ideology and the old culture.”

To avoid wasting ammunition, numerous victims of the regime had their skulls broken with bricks or hoes. People were killed with sticks, iron rods, knives and even sugar palm leaves, which have extremely hard and sharp edges. Those who did not please had their throats cut and their stomachs ripped open. The removed liver was often eaten, and the gall bladders were used to make medicine. People were thrown to be eaten by crocodiles, crushed by bulldozers, burned, buried alive, buried in the ground up to their necks. Children were thrown into the air, and then impaled on bayonets, their heads smashed against trees, and limbs torn off. The unprecedented repressions, directed virtually against the entire people of the country, could not but cause protest. Already in 1975, an uprising broke out against the Pol Pot regime, which was brutally suppressed. All participants and sympathizers up to the third generation were executed so that grandchildren could not avenge their fathers and grandfathers. Pol Pot was convinced that popular discontent undermined power, and therefore all those who were dissatisfied were destroyed.

But in mid-1976, the prime minister's policies began to cause protests from other members of the government. And since Pol Pot’s position was greatly weakened due to the death of Mao Zedong, he was dismissed under the pretext of deteriorating health. If we take on faith the statements of Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, who was the second-in-command in the state, the Vietnamese authorities and the KGB had a hand in this. However, the new Chinese government helped Pol Pot return to power: within two weeks he again became prime minister.

The head of the executive branch continued his previous policy, but expanded it by increasing ideological influence. Under the slogan “For the political education of personnel,” the Angka political organization was created from among the Khmer Rouge. Its goal was the destruction of thousands of people who did not show sufficient zeal in political education. People of the older generation understand that behind this “crime” lies insufficiently zealous note-taking and a reluctance to speak out during political classes in the spirit of devotion to the existing regime.

The entire population was divided into three categories: “old residents” - those who, before the Khmer Rouge came to power, lived in territories that resisted the Long Nol regime; “new residents” - inhabitants of areas under the control of Long Nol; persons who collaborated with the previous regime. First of all, the latter were subject to destruction. Then the second and first categories were purged. First of all, officers, soldiers and officials were destroyed along with their families, including even young children, who, according to Pol Pot, “could become dangerous later.”

National minorities were ordered to speak the Khmer language. Those who did not own it were also destroyed. For example, on May 25, 1975, 12 out of 20 thousand Thais living in Kah Kong province were exterminated.

The left-wing extremist government of Pol Pot, whose actions brought Marxist ideas to a bloody absurdity, of course, could not leave the religious views of the Cambodians alone. Buddhism and Islam, the main religions practiced by Cambodians, were banned. The clergy were sent to “comunes” or killed. Temples were turned into grain warehouses, pigsties and prisons.

Along the way, imitating Mao, Pol Pot carried out the “cultural revolution.” The performance of folk dances and songs was prohibited. Schools were turned into prisons and manure warehouses, museums into pigsties. All books, including textbooks and technical publications, were burned at the stake as “reactionary in nature.” Monuments of architecture and art of the ancient and unique culture of the Khmers were destroyed. Not a single one of the 2,800 pagodas that graced the country before Pol Pot and his clique came to power remains.

"Revolutionary measures" touched even such a delicate side of human relations as marriage and family. Young people were deprived of the right to create full-fledged families and choose partners according to their taste. The management determined married couples without caring at all about their feelings. Often newlyweds saw each other for the first time only at the wedding. Weddings were collective. From 6 to 20 couples were declared spouses at the same time. Songs and dances were naturally prohibited. Instead, they heard speeches about the need to work hard. What follows is even greater absurdity. The husband and wife lived separately. Once every three weeks they were allowed to retire to a specially designated empty house for the performance of marital duties. One of the victims of arbitrariness, while testifying, described her feelings this way: “We never even had lunch together. We have absolutely nothing to talk about. This depresses me. I feel sorry for my husband: they didn’t ask him either; like me, he has submitted to coercion and is also unhappy.”

In just four years of rule, Pol Pot managed to turn Cambodia, which under him became known as Kampuchea, into a cemetery. They also began to call it the Land of the Walking Death. After all, even Ieng Sary, clearly interested in downplaying the number of victims of the regime, testified that the country lost about three million people. Among these unfortunates were Pol Pot's four brothers and sister. Of the 643 doctors, only 69 survived.

Nevertheless, Cambodia was not enough for the ambitious tyrant. Putting forward the racist slogan of “caring for the Khmer race,” he decided to seize Vietnam, which, according to the ideologists of the regime, was once part of ancient Cambodia in its southern part. Pol Pot seriously said that by observing the proportion of killing “1 Khmer – 30 Vietnamese”, it was possible to destroy all the inhabitants of the neighboring state. By provoking the war, the dictator encouraged constant clashes on the border with Vietnam.

However, a tyrant who uses brutal pathological methods of mocking his own people could not remain in power for long in the 20th century. During the four years of his reign, Pol Pot did not have a moment of peace. Already in 1977, a mutiny began in the army. He, however, was suppressed, and his leaders were burned alive. However, in January of the following year, Pol Pot’s regime nevertheless fell under the onslaught of Vietnamese troops and the rebellious people. Pol Pot and his henchmen, sentenced to death in absentia, managed to escape into the jungles of Thailand. Fortified in a secret base, the former head of Kampuchea created the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. At the same time, representatives of the Khmer Rouge operated in Phnom Penh for some time. They were supported by the United States, which insisted on the presence of Pol Pot's men at the UN. But in 1993, after the first democratic elections were held in the country under UN supervision, the Khmer Rouge who had boycotted them were forced to finally go into the jungle.

For several years, scanty reports appeared in the press about imaginary illnesses and even the death of Pol Pot. Nevertheless, in 1997 he gave several interviews to journalists. The former dictator of Kampuchea said that “his conscience is clear, that the Vietnamese forced him to commit genocide of his own people... and as for the millions of dead, this is all an exaggeration.” The Tuol Seng Memorial, created in memory of Pol Pot’s “killing fields” on the site of a former torture center, was also considered by Pol Pot to be “an instrument of Vietnamese propaganda.” “My job was to fight, not to kill people,” he said cynically.

In June 1997, the former dictator's associates, frightened by the terror he had unleashed within the organization, placed Pol Pot, his second wife Mia Som and daughter Set Set under house arrest. A few months later, the United States unexpectedly demanded his extradition to an international tribunal. Thus, Washington tried to save face in front of the world community, realizing that by this time their protégé had already become a political corpse. Greatly surprised by this turn of events, the Khmer Rouge decided to exchange their leader for their own safety. But the death of Pol Pot on the night of April 14-15, 1998 disrupted their plans. According to the official version, he died of a heart attack.

Whether this is true or not, it will hardly ever be possible to say for sure. One thing is clear - Pol Pot managed to combine the most terrible aspects of fascist and communist practices on the scale of the unfortunate little Kampuchea-Cambodia.

On May 19, 1925, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement was born, who in the 1970s became famous as one of the bloodiest dictators in human history.

Common noun
“You talk about me like I’m some kind of Pol Pot,”
- the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko said offendedly in one popular Russian comedy.
“Pol Potism”, ]b]“Pol Pot regime” - these expressions firmly entered the vocabulary of Soviet international journalists in the second half of the 1970s. However, this name thundered throughout the world in those years.

In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement became one of the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of “Asian Hitler.”

Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even about the date of his birth there is different information. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Prexbauw, into a peasant family. The eighth child of the peasant Pek Salot and his wife Sok Nem was given the name Salot Sar at birth.

Village of Prexbauw. Birthplace of Pol Pot.

Although Pol Pot’s family was a peasant family, it was not poor. The future dictator's cousin served in the royal court and was even the crown prince's concubine. Pol Pot's elder brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.

Salot Sara himself, at the age of nine, was sent to live with relatives in Phnom Penh. After several months spent in a Buddhist monastery as an altar boy, the boy entered a Catholic primary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College and then at Phnom Penh Technical School.

The Marxists by royal grant

In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship for higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.

The post-war period was marked by a rapid growth in the popularity of left-wing parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students created a Marxist circle, of which Saloth Sar became a member.

In 1952, Saloth Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article, “Monarchy or Democracy?” in a Cambodian student magazine in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.

His passion for politics pushed his studies into the background, and in the same year Salot Sara was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.

In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia, Pham Van Ba. Salot Sara was recruited to party work.

"The Politics of the Possible"

Pham Van Ba ​​quite clearly described his new ally: “a young man of average abilities, but with ambitions and a thirst for power.” Salot Sara's ambitions and lust for power turned out to be much greater than his fellow fighters expected.

Salot Sar took a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is short for the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym he was destined to go down in world history.

Norodom Sihanouk

In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was very popular and oriented towards China, became the ruler of the kingdom. In the war that followed in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.

During this period, Cambodian communists operated quite freely in the country, and by 1963 Saloth Sar had risen from novice to party general secretary.

By that time, a serious split had emerged in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. The Cambodian Communist Party relied on Beijing, focusing on the policies of Comrade Mao Zedong.

Leader of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change policy, reorienting from China to the United States.

In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.

After this, the Cambodian communists launched a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called “Khmer Rouge” were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.

Very quickly, Pol Pot’s ideology began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. Coming from a peasant family himself, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to a happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and the “re-education of their inhabitants.”

Even Pol Pot’s comrades had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...

Lon Nol

In 1970, the Americans contributed to strengthening the position of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented towards the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol came to power with strong pro-American views.

Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam cease all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese responded by striking first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save his protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime ultimately survived, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.

Victory of the partisan army

The civil war in Cambodia flared up with renewed vigor. The Lon Nol regime was not popular and was supported only by American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.

By 1973, when the United States, having decided to end the Vietnam War, refused to further provide military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country. Pol Pot already managed without his comrades in the Communist Party, which was relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated experts in Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. In early April, American Marines began evacuating US citizens from the country, as well as high-ranking representatives of the pro-American regime. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.

"The city is the abode of vice"

Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most harmless of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is an abode of vice; You can change people, but not cities. Working hard to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand the true meaning of life,” this was the main thesis of the Khmer Rouge leader who came to power.

2nd General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Pol Pot.

It was decided to evict the city of Phnom Penh, with a population of two and a half million people, within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to be peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills, etc. were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, the same fate befell other cities of Kampuchea.

Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive authorities who took up the task of identifying and eliminating the dissatisfied.

It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the previous regime in the army and other government agencies.

Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot’s closest ally, had a very vague idea of ​​what was actually happening in it. They simply refused to believe the information leaking out about hundreds of thousands of people who were executed, who died during relocation from cities and from backbreaking forced labor.

At the pinnacle of power

During this period, an extremely complicated political situation developed in Southeast Asia. The United States, having ended the Vietnam War, set a course for improving relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, which supported the communists of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, began to treat them extremely hostilely, because they were oriented toward Moscow. Pol Pot, who was focused on China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge viewed the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.

Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. Brutal persecution of ethnic minorities, primarily the Vietnamese, resulted in an armed conflict with a neighboring country.

Pol Pot on a Laos postage stamp. 1977

In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to penetrate into neighboring areas of Vietnam, carrying out bloody massacres against the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, destroying all its inhabitants, young and old. The massacre killed 3,000 people.

Pol Pot went wild. Feeling the support of Beijing behind him, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire “Warsaw Pact,” that is, the Warsaw Pact Organization led by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades and previously loyal military units to rebel, considering what was happening to be unjustified bloody madness. The riots were suppressed ruthlessly, the rebels were executed in the most brutal ways, but their numbers continued to grow.

Three million victims in less than four years

In December 1978, Vietnam decided it had enough. Units of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and already on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.

China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. The fierce but short war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.

The Khmer Rouge, having suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Kampuchean-Thai border. They were saved from complete defeat by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of pro-Soviet Vietnam's position in the region, for the sake of this they preferred to turn a blind eye to the results of the activities of the Pol Pot regime.

Democratic Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Official visit of the Chinese Party and Government delegation (November 5–9, 1978). Meeting of Pol Pot and Wang Dongxing.

And the results were truly impressive. In 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Pol Pot Regime of July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, as well as several foreigners. Another 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves. The total number of victims is estimated at 3,374,768.

In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried the leaders of the Khmer Rouge in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal found Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia with confiscation of all property.

Passport of Ieng Sary, one of the most influential figures of the Khmer Rouge regime. During the Pol Pot dictatorship (1975–1979), he served as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Democratic Kampuchea.

The Leader's Last Secrets

For Pol Pot himself, this verdict, however, meant nothing. He continued his guerrilla war against the new government of Kampuchea, hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.

When processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending the long-term civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to relegate their odious “guru” to the background. There was a split in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.

In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his long-time ally, former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Along with him, 13 members of his family were killed, including young children.

However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. His comrades declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life imprisonment.

The Khmer Rouge's trial of its own leader sparked a final surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.

Pol Pot's grave

But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge said that the former leader's heart failed him. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.

The Cambodian authorities sought from the Khmer Rouge to hand over the body in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the corpse was hastily cremated.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him...