by Artemy Sharapov
[REGNUM] Exactly half a century ago, on April 17, 1975, the residents of Phnom Penh – workers, intellectuals, clerks and hundreds of thousands of refugees who had gathered in the city – joyfully greeted the liberators who had entered the capital of Cambodia almost without a fight. Young partisans (among whom were many teenagers and even children) in black robes and under red flags – the Khmer Rouge – walked along the avenues and avenues laid out by the French. People hoped that the fighters who had emerged from the jungle would put an end to the long-standing civil war.
Almost 45 years ago, the same city was entered by men in khaki — the Vietnam People's Army. One of the most combat-ready forces in the Soviet bloc, which had recently defeated the Americans, drove out the "wrong" communists — the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge — in less than two weeks. No one met the Vietnamese.
The word "post-apocalypse" was not yet in the lexicon, but that's what it was. The permanent population of Phnom Penh in April 1975 was over 2 million people. The population in December 1979 was zero.
"Luxurious villas with white walls and spacious terraces, covered with bright purple flowers up to the roof. I have never seen a city in Asia that was so harmoniously built... Only Southern California could compete with its charm... But the city was completely, absolutely empty. As if after a neutron bomb. As if after an epidemic," this is how Wieslaw Górnicki, a journalist from the Polish People's Republic who arrived "in the train," described the capital of the former Democratic Kampuchea.
Soviet international reporter Viktor Pritula, who visited the same place at the same time, remembered the city as less romantic: Phnom Penh “was still beautiful, but dirty, like a whore from a village brothel. In broad daylight, rats scurried around the backyards between the high-rise buildings…” The long civil war showed no sign of ending.
The overthrown, or rather retreated to jungle bases, regime called itself more than modestly: "Angka", which simply means "Organization". The pro-Soviet press from East Berlin to Hanoi called this strange dictatorship "the bloody Pol Pot - Ieng Sary clique ". Cambodians themselves still call the years of their rule "samai a-Pot" - the era of the despicable Pot.
The era lasted less than four years. During this time, the regime of "brother number one" Pol Pot turned the country he inherited into an experimental field for building agrarian socialism (with "killing fields"). From 1.7 to 3 million people died as a result of the genocide of the "exploiting classes" and ethnic cleansing, died during deportations and from backbreaking labor on rice plantations and simply from "unforeseen" famines and epidemics.
The brutal experiment in the rapid creation of a classless society (“ the socialist regime in its development moves directly, like a flying arrow, to communism!” – stated the resolution of the “Organization” in 1978) looked like a revived and illogical dystopia – with the abolition of not only money and religion, but also culture, medicine, technology and cities.
But both the emergence of the Khmer Rouge and their rise to power were a logical consequence of the games of the great powers, into which little Cambodia/Kampuchea was drawn. And when the regime decided to act independently, to restore the greatness of the country by relying on its own forces and at the same time to be the first in the world to come to communism, then the catastrophe turned into an apocalypse.
MAKE CAMBODIA GREAT AGAIN
The country of the Khmer people once dominated its part of the world. From the 9th to the 15th century, an empire with the Sanskrit name Kambujadesha existed in Indochina (its name refers to the Indian epic Mahabharata, which mentions the warlike people of Kambuja). The founder of the Khmer Empire, Jayavarman, whose name means "protected by victory", bore the title of chakravartin - the ruler around whom the universe revolves. At the height of its power, the Khmer Empire included, in addition to modern Cambodia, all of Laos, almost all of Thailand, and the south of modern Vietnam.
But from the 13th century onwards, the warlike and refined empire weakened in wars with the Thais, Vietnamese and the Cham people who had adopted Islam. A century later, only a memory remained of the Khmer state. But a “weighty” one: the huge temple of the god Vishnu – Angkor Wat and other palaces and temples in the abandoned imperial capital of Angkor. The Khmers themselves found themselves vassals of their former subjects – the Thais.
When Cambodians developed an intelligentsia in the 20th century, all of its members – liberals, conservatives, communists – were, among other things, Khmer nationalists who dreamed of making the country great again. Angkor Wat was on every Cambodian flag, even under the Khmer Rouge – and still is.
The French colonialists “brought in” the national intelligentsia for their administrative and technical needs. As a result of the game of redistribution of the great powers that lasted throughout the 19th century, the British received India, Burma and Malaya, and the French – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Formally independent Siam-Thailand lost its possessions on the edges and found itself in the sphere of influence of Britain and France. Cambodia with its aristocracy and the royal dynasty of Norodom was considered a protectorate, but in fact it was a colony.
During the Second World War, French Indochina was occupied by Japan. Anti-French and simultaneously anti-Japanese resistance units, mostly of a left-wing nationalist persuasion, emerged throughout the colony. First of all, in the most populated and developed part of Indochina – Vietnam, and then in Laos and Cambodia.
When the French tried to restore colonial rule after 1945, the Indochina War broke out from northern Vietnam to western Cambodia. The 1946–54 conflict was one of the first proxy clashes of the Cold War. France was supported by the United States, Britain, and the Chinese Kuomintang. Behind Ho Chi Minh’s army (and the Khmer and Laotian patriots who were sponsored by Vietnam) stood the USSR, the countries of the socialist camp, and Mao Zedong ’s People’s Republic of China.
The Khmer Issarak movement for the revival of Cambodia was led by two former Buddhist monks and founders of the Cambodian Communist Party, Son Ngoc Minh and Tu Samuth. Many, however, perceived them as “not quite their own.” The independence movement was created under the supervision of the Vietnamese, both leaders came from Khmer Krom (historical Cambodian lands in the Mekong Delta, which were then and are still part of Vietnam), and Son Ngoc Minh was half Vietnamese.
Be that as it may, the Khmer Issarak successfully beat the French and by 1954 controlled up to half of the protectorate’s territory.
MR. SALOT, AN ADMIRER OF ROUSSEAU
The alternative to the "Hanoi protégés" were two men linked to both France and the Khmer royal dynasty. One would play an important role in the early years of independence, the other in the darkest years of independent Cambodia. The first, Crown Prince and later King Norodom Sihanouk, was educated at a military academy in Saumur, France, while in the metropolis the prince became acquainted with liberal and socialist ideas.
In 1941, Sihanouk was enthroned by decision of the French Governor-General of Indochina, then the king swore allegiance to the Japanese occupiers, after the war he did not contradict the French, but did not forget about the idea of reviving the state of Angkor.
The second person important for Cambodian history was born under the name Saloth Sar. From a family of wealthy peasants, but connected to the royal court. Saloth Sar's elder brother served at court, his sister and cousin were concubines of King Sisowath Monivong (and the cousin even became the mother of the royal bastard).
Saloth Sar received an excellent education - first in his homeland, at the Sisowath Lyceum, and then in Paris, at the School of Radio Electronics of the Paris-2 University. In France, Sar was imbued with socialist ideas - Stalinist and Maoist, and together with other Kampuchean comrades in the Cercle Marxiste - the "Marxist Circle" published the leaflet "Iskra", in honor of Lenin's newspaper. The more moderate experience of Josip Broz Tito, whom the Khmer met in a detachment in Yugoslavia, did not particularly inspire.
A colonial intellectual with a Parisian education, having returned to his homeland, chose a purely peaceful profession - a teacher. A quarter of a century later, the world will know the modest, delicate and ideologically strong comrade Saloth Sara under a new name - Pol Pot. According to one version, from the French pol itique pot entielle ("potential policy", which refers to the pan-European aphorism about the "art of the possible").
The author of one of the best books on the history of the Cambodian catastrophe, David Chandler, names another source of inspiration for Pol Pot, in addition to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. "A quiet teacher, educated in Paris, an admirer of Rousseau." This French educator of the 18th century taught: "natural", primitive humanity lived in peace, prosperity and freedom, while the state, private property, and even urban culture with civilization brought only evil to the world.
“Simplification” according to Rousseau, plus the communist experience of the 1920s-50s – the Red Terror, Stalin’s purges and the Maoist “Great Leap Forward”, plus the memory of the past greatness of the Khmer nation and the desire to punish all its enemies – and the ideology of Comrade Pol Pot is ready.
But in order to realize this potential, external conditions were needed.
"GET OUT OF THE WAY, YELLOW-FACED BROTHER."
In the year of Stalin's death, in 1953, Saloth Sar joined the People's Revolutionary Party of Cambodia (senior Vietnamese comrades believed that the Khmers were "not mature enough" for the Communist Party) and began to make a career - at first, quietly. He generally loved secrecy and obscurity. At the same time, as the curator from the senior comrades Phan Van Ba noted back then, Saloth, despite his average abilities, was consumed by ambition and a thirst for power.
At that time, another ambitious politician was on everyone's lips - Norodom Sihanouk. In order to untie his hands, he abdicated the throne in favor of his father and appointed himself prime minister. Sihanouk experimented with moderate leftist ideas, called himself a "Buddhist socialist" (whatever that means), but most importantly, he tried to play with multi-vectorism. Distancing himself from the conflicts of pro-Soviet North and pro-American South Vietnam, while maintaining consistently good relations with the USSR and the USA.
At the same time, the logic of the game of great powers forced the prince to drift towards Moscow and Beijing. The Americans did not forgive this - and already in 1959, with the help of right-wing generals, they tried to overthrow Sihanouk, but did not succeed.
And the following year the Vietnam War began - first as a war of the South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerrillas supported by Ho Chi Minh against the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. The further the Americans got bogged down in Indochina affairs, the less they were satisfied with the local regimes playing at "neutrality". In 1963, the Americans removed Ngo Dinh Diem as insufficiently loyal. After the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, the US directly intervened in the war between the two Vietnams and in 1965 sent troops.
"We even pushed them (loyal South Vietnamese) aside, saying, 'Get out of the way, little yellow brother. The good guys are here,' " recalled General Norman Schwarzkopf. One of the bloodiest conflicts of the second half of the 20th century had begun, in which, like the Indochina and Korean wars of the 1950s, the interests of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China clashed.
The war could not help but “affect” neighboring countries: Laos and Cambodia.
THE ROYAL WARPATH
Meanwhile, in Cambodia, Prince Sihanouk has finally turned his back on the "good guys" in Washington. Gone are the days when you could chat nicely with both John Kennedy and Mao Zedong.
Sihanouk concluded an agreement with the PRC (which was then supporting North Vietnam) on the presence of North Vietnamese troops and bases in the kingdom and on the transit of military materials through the port of Sihanoukville. The "Sihanouk Trail" stretched across Cambodia, similar to the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" that went through Laos. This flirtation with the old rival, the Vietnamese, did not please the Phnom Penh elite. The pro-Western generals and officials were "annoyed" by the fact that the ruler began to receive assistance from the USSR, Czechoslovakia and China. The elite was also unnerved by the fact that the US Air Force began to strike Cambodian territory - so far only pinpoint strikes, targeting Vietnamese bases.
At the same time, Khmer peasants were happy that the Viet Cong were buying rice at inflated prices. But the government was unhappy, because rice was the kingdom's main export commodity. Sihanouk sent "food detachments" of soldiers to the provinces to confiscate rice. In response, a peasant revolt broke out in 1967, starting in the remote province of Battambang, a traditional base for the rebels. The uprising was led by the communists - the Khmer Rouge.
Thus began the civil war.
To counter the Khmer Rouge, the "Khmer Rose" Sihanouk had to make a sharp turn - and turn to the Americans for support. At their "request", General Lon Nol, an anti-communist and friend of the United States, became prime minister.
By that time, the future "brother number one" Pol Pot had apparently already seized power, neutralizing the "founding fathers" delegated from Vietnam. Tu Samuth had died in a safe house in Phnom Penh back in 1962 (according to some accounts, he was killed on the orders of Saloth Sar). A few years later, another party leader, Son Ngoc Minh, went to Beijing for treatment and died just as mysteriously in the hospital. It is known that Saloth Sar's closest comrade, Ieng Sary, strongly advised Comrade Son to go to China for treatment.
While the future Pol Pot was intriguing at bases in the jungle, in Phnom Penh, their own intrigues were being woven against the Prime Minister, Prince Sihanouk.
In January 1970, the "Buddhist socialist" and Queen Monica went on a long vacation to a resort on the French Riviera. From there, Sihanouk flew to Moscow. It was from us, from the lips of the head of the USSR Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin, that the ruler of Cambodia learned the following: riots had broken out in Phnom Penh, nationalists had smashed the North Vietnamese embassy, where they had allegedly discovered plans to seize Cambodia with the Viet Cong. In order to "restore order," the army staged a coup and proclaimed the Khmer Republic. With the full approval of the United States, General Lon Nol was appointed president.
Parisian publications, which were cautiously disapproving of what the Americans were doing in the former protectorate, noted that the Richard Nixon administration, having placed its bets on the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and the “Vietnamization” of the conflict, clearly benefits from the establishment of a pro-American regime in the Cambodian rear.
The ex-king rushed to Beijing, where he was assured that Chairman Mao recognized Sihanouk as the legitimate ruler of Cambodia and would try to convince Comrade Kim Il Sung of the same. Moreover, His Highness Norodom Sihanouk formally became the head of the rebel coalition, where the main role was played by the most radical "leftists" in history - the Khmer Rouge.
The civil war entered a new phase.
And the United States and South Vietnam openly intervened in it on the side of their new ally, Lon Nol. The US Air Force ironed out the positions of the Viet Cong and Cambodian guerrillas, but often "worked on the ground." According to historian Ben Kiernan, by 1973, B-52s had dropped up to 500,000 tons of bombs on the small country (other sources mention 2.75 million tons of bombs). According to the most conservative estimates, up to 100,000 people fell victim to air attacks.
GENERAL'S SAND CIRCLE
Hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees headed for Phnom Penh. When the Khmer Rouge took power, many of them would become victims of the razing of the cities. But then, every American attack added points to the Khmer Rouge. Not only peasants (including peasant children and teenagers who grew up under American bombs) but also soldiers and officers of Lon Nol's army went over to their side en masse.
The jungle people promised to stop the ruin of the peasants, fight corruption and put an end to the "eternal dependence" on any foreigners if they won. The ghost of a revived Angkor empire arose again.
It is not surprising that by 1973 the guerrillas controlled two-thirds of the country's territory, and by early 1975 the rebels had surrounded Phnom Penh, beginning a blockade of the city.
The Soviet press happily stated: “Kampuchean patriots” had cut off roads number 3, 4 and 5, connecting Phnom Penh with the agricultural regions, the city was under siege, Saigon and Washington would not come to the rescue.
In March, the Nixon administration and a number of Asian countries asked Lon Nol to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge and resign. However, the head of government refused and began to "act eccentric." The president consulted with Buddhist mystics and soothsayers and, on their advice, he built a "protective line" of sand around Phnom Penh.
However, the blockade of the city led to the loyalist forces running out of ammunition. Realizing the futility of the struggle, Lon Nol resigned and fled on board an American military plane. The president did not forget to take a million dollars, which he later used to buy a villa in Honolulu.
Another pro-American client has fallen: like the Batista regime in 1959, like South Vietnam in April of the same 1975, or like the Kabul government under pressure from the Taliban in August 2021. But, as already mentioned, the fall of Lon Nol was only a prologue to the most terrible act of the Cambodian drama.
YEAR ZERO
The victors, with Maoist Beijing behind them, began in the classic way - with the Red Terror: with the execution of Lon Nol's family members and his closest supporters who had not managed to escape. It is curious that the former king Sihanouk and his wife Monica were allowed to return to their homeland, he was even declared the head of the State Council of the new country, Democratic Kampuchea. But the royal couple was immediately arrested.
And then the "Organization", headed by the "rubber plantation worker", brother number one Paul Pot, began to implement the plan.
1975 was declared the year zero — history was to start from scratch. The return to the natural state, according to the precepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was to be based not on Vietnam, the USSR, or even China, but only on one’s own strength. A kind of analogue of the North Korean Juche, with an important difference: Comrade Kim was creating an industrial power modeled on Stalin’s USSR, and not an equalizing peasant utopia. For which, moreover, there was clearly not enough rice.
On the eve of the capture of Phnom Penh, the US Agency for International Development (now abolished USAID) noted that Cambodia was facing a famine that could not be prevented without international assistance. The country needed at least 250 thousand tons of the main product. But the Khmer Rouge immediately set a course for isolation - and made a simple decision: rice would be grown by the former urban population.
And under the pretext of the danger of another American attack, Pol Pot's men began an unprecedented "evacuation" of millions of residents of the capital. Those who try to justify the actions of the Khmer Rouge compare them with the decision taken by the North Vietnamese who captured Saigon in 1975. Some of the residents of the former enemy capital were resettled in "new economic regions." But the fighters of the Vietnamese People's Army did not separate families or drive "exploiters" hundreds of kilometers to rural communes - essentially to slaughter.
Very soon, Moscow realized that the "patriots" (about whom practically nothing was known) were incapable of reaching an agreement. The staff of the Soviet embassy in Phnom Penh recalled: as the Khmer Rouge approached, diplomats hung outside - in addition to the red flag - a portrait of General Secretary Brezhnev. But the image of the "revisionist" seemed to only anger the victors.
"Having torn apart the main entrance with grenade launchers, the Khmer Rouge burst into the embassy building, " wrote journalist and Indochina specialist Mikhail Ilyinsky. " They pushed all the Soviet people in the embassy out into the street and ordered (journalist Yuri) Kosinsky, who was in the embassy, to dig a grave. For several hours, in forty-degree heat, he dug into the rock-hard earth, taking his time, hoping for a miracle. And it happened: one of the Khmer Rouge commanders ordered the prisoners to be taken to the French embassy, where the foreigners remaining in Phnom Penh were being taken." And from there the "Soviet revisionists" were taken along with the bourgeois foreigners to the border with Thailand.
"Democratic Kampuchea" has been completely encapsulated.
All Kampucheans were divided into castes, “categories” of people according to their loyalty to the regime, Ilyinsky noted: “Personal property was also liquidated along with private property… The doors of educational institutions were boarded up tightly, and one official information leaflet was issued to the entire country.” The Khmer Rouge did not forget to settle old scores – with the ethnic minority of the Cham, descendants of the ancient enemies of the Angkor Empire. But their desire for great power failed them – Democratic Kampuchea “decided” to return Khmer Krom, lands that now belong to Vietnam. The attack on the victors, the United States, turned out to be insane and suicidal.
Just as the truth about the Holocaust came to light in 1945, so in 1979 the whole picture of the accelerated construction of a bright future became known. The world saw the "killing fields", facts of mass murders in communes and labor armies became known. The new government established by the Vietnamese from repentant Pol Pot supporters - the "People's Republic of Kampuchea" - held a tribunal over the overthrown clique. Among other things, torture invented by the Khmer Rouge was mentioned:
"With hoes, picks, sticks, iron rods they beat their victims on the head; with knives and sharp sugar palm leaves they cut their victims' throats, ripped open their bellies, extracted the liver, which they ate, and the gall bladders, which they used to make "medicines". They threw people into ponds where they kept crocodiles, they hung people from trees by their arms or legs so that they would dangle in the air for a long time..."
But the organizers of the genocide did not live to see a full-fledged analogue of Nuremberg. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, who had not been completely defeated, retreated to the Thai border, to their old bases in the jungle, where they fought for another decade against the "Vietnamese occupiers and collaborators."
In this struggle they found unexpected allies, and "brother number one" himself lived to old age and died a natural death. But that's a completely different story.
...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche...
...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche...
[ZH via Rantingly] North Korea is marking the 10th anniversary of former leader Kim Jong-Il's death in somewhat characteristically bizarre ways, with dictates from Pyongyang saying citizens must mourn on a "unified" front that includes a ban on laughing for 11 days.
[Fox News] North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly ordered the execution of a top higher education official for "anti-party activities" — after he complained about not receiving support and resources from the government.
North Korea