Good grandfather half a sweat. Situation of ethnic minorities

Prince of Cambodia.

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.

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'état, 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.

Entering into power.

Pol Pot's real name was Salot Sar (also known as Tol Saut and Pol Porth). He was born in the rebel province of Kampong Thom. 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, spent two years as a monk, receiving the supposed science of tolerance and humility. However, what was actually taught and taught in Buddhist monasteries is well known. These are techniques from various schools of oriental martial arts, meditation, occultism, etc. Therefore, it is not difficult to guess who set the future Pol Pot on the “true path.”

During World War II, Salot Sar joined the Indochina Communist Party. 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 unknown whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great power ambitions. In Paris, he joined the ranks of the French Communist Party and became close with other Cambodian students who preached Marxism as interpreted by Maurice Therese. Returning to his homeland in late 1953 or 1954, Salot Sar began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. At the turn of the sixties, the communist movement in Cambodia was split into three almost unrelated factions operating in different parts of the country. The smallest, but most active was the third faction, united out of hatred for Vietnam. In 1962, the secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party, Tu Samut, died under mysterious circumstances. In 1963, Salot Sar was approved as the new party secretary. He became the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the communist guerrillas of Cambodia. Salot Sar left his job at the lyceum and went underground. By the beginning of the 70s, the Salot Sara group captured a number of posts in the highest party apparatus. He physically destroyed his opponents. For these purposes, a secret security department was created in the party, reporting personally to Salot Sar.

In 1975, the Lon Nol government, despite American support, fell to the Khmer Rouge. American B-52 bombers, using carpet bombing, dropped as many tons of explosives on this tiny country as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of the Second World War. 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. The Khmer Rouge not only survived, but also captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 23, 1975. By this time, the Salot Sara group occupied strong, but not sole, positions in the leadership of the party. This forced her to maneuver. With his characteristic caution, the head of the Khmer Rouge retreated into the shadows and began to prepare the ground for the final seizure of power. To do this, he resorted to a number of hoaxes. Since April 1975, his name has disappeared from official communications. Many thought he was dead.

On April 14, 1976, the appointment of a new prime minister was announced. His name was Pol Pot. The unknown name raised eyebrows at home and abroad. It did not occur to anyone, except a narrow circle of initiates, that Pol Pot was the disappeared Saloth Sar. The difficult situation in which the Pol Pata faction found itself by the fall of 1976 was aggravated by the death of Mao Zedong. On September 27, Pol Pot was removed from the post of prime minister, as announced, “for health reasons.” Two weeks later, Pol Pot became prime minister again. The new Chinese leaders helped him. The dictator and his henchmen set out to destroy everyone they considered potentially dangerous, and indeed they destroyed almost all the officers, soldiers and civil servants of the old regime. 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.

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.

Wheel of Death.

On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot ordered the forced assimilation of 13 national minorities living in Democratic Kampuchea. They were ordered to speak Khmer, and those who could not speak Khmer were killed. On May 25, 1975, Pol Pot's soldiers carried out a massacre of Thais in Koh Kong province in the southwest of the country. 20,000 Thais lived there, but after the massacre only 8,000 remained.

Inspired by Mao Zedong's ideas on communes, Pol Pot launched the slogan "Back to the Village!" To implement it, the population of large and small cities was evicted to rural and mountainous areas. On April 17, 1975, using violence combined with deception, the Pol Pot forces forced more than 2 million residents of newly liberated Phnom Penh to leave the city. Everyone indiscriminately - the sick, the old, the pregnant, the crippled, the newborn, the dying - was sent to the countryside and distributed among communes, 10,000 people in each. Residents were forced to do backbreaking work, regardless of age or health. With primitive tools or by hand, people worked 12-16 hours a day, and sometimes longer. As those few who managed to survive said, in many areas their daily food was only one bowl of rice for 10 people. The leaders of the Pol Pot regime created a network of spies and encouraged mutual denunciations in order to paralyze the people's will to resist. The Polpotites tried to abolish Buddhism, a religion professed by 85 percent of the population. Buddhist monks were forced to give up their traditional clothing and were forced to work in "comunes." Many of them were killed. Pol Pot sought to exterminate the intelligentsia and, in general, all those who had any education, technical connections and experience. Of the 643 doctors and pharmacists, only 69 remained alive. The Polpotites liquidated the education system at all levels. Schools were turned into prisons, places of torture, and dumps of manure. All books and documents stored in libraries, schools, universities, and research centers were burned or looted.

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.

According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, the fattening leaders nurtured 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.

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.

In the “commune” of Psot, the reprisal usually took place as follows: a person was buried up to his neck in the ground and beaten on the head with hoes. They didn’t shoot - they saved the bullets.” “Those who reached the age of fourteen or fifteen were forcibly sent to the so-called “mobile brigades” or to the army... The Polpot soldiers trained killers, recruiting 14-17 year old teenagers, who were taught that if they did not agree to kill, then after painful torture they would be killed themselves. In addition, selected teenagers were deliberately molested, taught to kill, and drunk with a mixture of palm moonshine and human blood. They were told that they were “capable of anything,” that they became “special people” because they drank human blood.” In this cannibalism we also see traces of the ancient religion of Cambodia. The entire population of the country was divided into three categories. The first group included residents of remote mountain and forest areas of the state. The second consisted of residents of those areas that were controlled by the overthrown pro-American regime of Lon Nol. The third group consisted of former military personnel, the old administration, their families and the entire (!) population of Phnom Penh. The third category was subject to complete destruction, and the second partial.

This was the course of the faithful Marxist Pol Pot, who had well mastered the principles of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On April 16, 1975, over two million people were evicted from Phnom Penh, and they were not allowed to take anything with them. “In accordance with the order, all residents were required to leave the city. It was forbidden to take food or belongings. Those who refused to obey orders or hesitated were killed and shot. Neither the elderly, nor the disabled, nor pregnant women, nor the sick in hospitals escaped this fate. People had to walk, despite the rain or the scorching sun... During the journey, they were not given any food or medicine... On the banks of the Mekong alone, when Phnom Penh residents were transported to remote areas of the country, about five hundred thousand people died.” According to another Pol Pot plan, villages were to be destroyed. The massacre carried out in them defies description: “The population of the village of Sreseam was almost completely destroyed... the soldiers rounded up children, tied them in a chain, pushed them into craters filled with water and buried them alive... People were driven to the edge of the trench, struck in the back of the head with a shovel or hoe , and pushed down. When there were too many people to be eliminated, they were collected into groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, current was passed from a generator mounted on a bulldozer, and then the unconscious people were pushed into a hole and covered with earth.” Pol Pot even ordered his own wounded soldiers to be killed so as not to spend money on medicine.

Following the example of his teachers Stalin and Mao Zedong, Pol Pot also fought with the intelligentsia. “The intelligentsia was completely destroyed: doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, scientists, students were declared mortal enemies of the regime. At the same time, anyone who wore glasses, read books, knew a foreign language, and wore decent clothes, in particular European cut, was considered an intellectual.” How can one not remember the 20-30s in the USSR, when people were fired and killed for wearing a tie and ironed clothes? When everyone was forced to wear shirts and wrinkled trousers. “Schools were either destroyed or turned into prisons, places of torture, grain and fertilizer warehouses. Books from libraries, institutes, research centers, museum property were destroyed, and the most valuable objects of ancient art were stolen.” And again, the analogy is with the USSR, where the most valuable works of art were sold abroad, while others were destroyed. “The bloody experiment of Pol Pot led to the destruction of all Cambodian cities with their industry and developed infrastructure, to the physical liquidation of millions of people, especially educated and specialists, to the transformation of the country into a huge concentration camp, where the Khmer Rouge ruled with impunity.

For the Pol Potites, oriented towards the values ​​of Marxist socialism, a person’s life was worth nothing: in order not to waste bullets, people were killed with shovels and other improvised means, starved, not to mention sophisticated bullying. It is worth noting in this regard that the attempts of communists in a number of countries, primarily Soviet ones, to dissociate themselves from these crimes and not see in them repressions akin to all communist dictatorships, are unconvincing. Of course, the Khmer Red Terror may be perceived as a caricature, but if you look closely and compare it with what has become known about our Red Terror in recent years of open publications and revelations, there will be no doubt about the relationship. The source of the beliefs of the Khmer Rouge, as well as their unceremoniousness and disrespect for people’s lives, is still the same - the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe destruction of hostile classes and in general all enemies of the revolution, which, as you know, can include anyone who does not kill with a shovel (and on occasion, himself too).”

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. Stalin and Hitler are resting.

At dawn, people were sent in formation into the malarial swamps, where they cleared the jungle for 12 hours a day in unsuccessful attempts 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. In the “commune” it was strictly forbidden to read... If they found a magazine or a book, they dealt with the whole family...

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 henchmen 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 the will of the interrogated. When torture, one should not proceed from one’s own anger or self-satisfaction. You should beat the person being tortured in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before starting the torture, it is necessary to examine the health of the interrogated person. instruments of torture. You should not necessarily try to kill the interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you must not forget that even during interrogations you should constantly conduct propaganda work. 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."

The foreign policy of the Pol Pot regime was characterized by aggressiveness and a disguised fear of strong powers. After his final assertion in power, Pol Pot decided to isolate himself from the outside world. In response to Japan's proposal to establish diplomatic relations, the Pol Potians stated that Cambodia "will not be interested in them for another 200 years." Exceptions to the general rule were only a few countries for which Pol Pot, for one reason or another, had personal sympathy. In January 1977, after almost a year of silence, shots were heard on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. Detachments of the Khmer Rouge, having crossed the Vietnamese border, killed residents of border villages with batons. In 1978, Vietnam signed a pact with Kampuchea's only ally China and launched a full-scale invasion. On Dec. 1978 Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodian territory with the help of 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. The Chinese did not come to Pol Pot's aid, and in January 1979 his regime fell to the onslaught of Vietnamese troops. The fall happened so quickly that the tyrant had to flee Phnom Penh in a white Mercedes two hours before his triumphant appearance in the capital of the army of Hanoi. However, Pol Pot was not going to give up. He established himself in a secret base with a handful of his loyal followers and created the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. The Khmer Rouge retreated in an orderly manner into the jungle on the border with Thailand.

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. “After three years of the existence of the Pol Pot regime, Kampuchea was called nothing less than a “huge concentration camp”, a “giant prison”, “a state of barracks socialism”, where blood flows like a river and a policy of genocide is mercilessly and systematically carried out against its own nation.” Of the country's eight million population, 5 million survived.

After the overthrow.

On August 15-19, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Kampuchea examined the case on charges of genocide against the Pol Pot-Ieng Sari clique. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Polpot's troops left Kampuchea in a very difficult state. Despite all this, representatives of the Khmer Rouge, led by Khieu Samphan, remained in Phnom Penh for some time. The parties have been looking for ways to mutual reconciliation for a long time. The support of the United States helped the Polpot residents feel confident. At the insistence of the superpower, the Pol Potites retained their place in the UN. But in 1993, after the Khmer Rouge boycotted the country's first parliamentary elections held under UN supervision, the movement completely hid in the jungle. Every year, contradictions among the leaders of the Khmer Rouge grew. In 1996, Ieng Sari, who was deputy prime minister in the Pol Pot government, went over to the side of the government with 10,000 fighters. In response, Pol Pot traditionally resorted to terror. He ordered the execution of Defense Minister Song Sen, his wife and nine children. The tyrant's frightened associates organized a conspiracy led by Khieu Samphan, Ta Mok, the commander of the troops, and Nuon Chea, the currently most influential person in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. In June 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest. He left with him his second wife Mia Som and daughter Seth Seth. The dictator's family was guarded by one of Pol Pot's commanders, Nuon Nu.

In early April 1998, the United States suddenly began to demand the transfer of Pol Pot to an international tribunal, pointing out the need for “just retribution.” Washington's position, difficult to explain in light of its past policy of supporting the dictator, caused a lot of controversy among the Angka leadership. In the end, it was decided to exchange Pol Pot for his own safety. The search for contacts with international organizations began, but the death of the bloody tyrant on the night of April 14-15, 1998 immediately solved all the problems. According to the official version, Pol Pot died of a heart attack. His body was cremated, and the skull and bones remaining after the burning were given to his wife and daughter.

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. It is unlikely that Pol Pot knew the work of the artist Vereshchagin, but he apparently decided to recreate his painting “The Apotheosis of War” in real life.

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."

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 third 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 was still eager for power and hoped to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, were still loyal to him. He again became a major political figure and was waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the work he had previously begun - his “great agrarian revolution.”

By the way, the United States then ensured that Pol Pot’s members retained their place in the UN. This is another example of American “democracy”. In 1982, Pol Pot regained power, holding it until 1985, when he suddenly announced his resignation. Soon, civil war breaks out again in the country, and the elderly dictator returns to political life, leading the pro-communist Khmer Rouge group. Now he is already ordering the execution of his own ministers, fearing treason on their part. The cold blood he showed in killing his closest supporters inspires horror in those around him. And it decides, in order to save its life, to remove Pol Pot from power, which they managed to do in June 1997. Over the next year, the dictator lived under house arrest until he died in 1998. According to beliefs, Pol Pot's body was burned in a ritual fire. By the way, before placing the body in the coffin, the nostrils of the dead man were plugged with cotton so that the spirit of the deceased would not escape the fire. Such was the fear of people before the man who “is rightly called the most terrible villain of the outgoing century.”

An entire people became victims of a communist experiment

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 did not have his own house, or 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.

Leader. 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 we are ruled by little Salot!” the 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.

This is how Salot Sar, the future Pol Pot, entered into the fight against imperialism

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 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 killed by the Khmer Rouge were added hundreds more who died a “natural” death - from an intestinal infection. A week later, only corpses and packs of cannibal dogs remained in Phnom Penh.

Cambodia has been turned into a big dump of corpses...

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 country's entire economy 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.

Pol Pot ruled with an iron fist

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 short solitude.

Death machine. 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.

With such installations they are trying to recreate the horrors of Pol Pot's reign

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 Pol Pot 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.

Doomed Pol Pot. Installation by Erbosyn Meldibekov

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'état, 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 unknown 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 nurtured 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...

At the end of his life, Pol Pot outwardly turned into a kind grandfather...

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.

As already mentioned, Pol Pot’s decree actually 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, like locusts, attacked the vats. 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 exterminated 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 spent twelve hours a day clearing the jungle 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, where 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 broke off diplomatic relations with 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 henchmen 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 from those being interrogated. Torture is not used for fun. 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. 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 examine the health of the interrogated person and examine the instruments of torture. You should not try to kill the person being interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are primary, causing pain 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 during torture, when it is possible to obtain 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, which brought the suffering of the Cambodian people to the world's attention for the first time. 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 at the UN Commission on Human Rights, but the Khmer Rouge representative hysterically retorted: “The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. Their barbaric nature is well known to the whole world. Britain's leaders wallow in luxury while the proletariat has only the right to unemployment, disease 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, then 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 distorted my orders. Accusations of mass murder are a 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 Pol Pot's name 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 was still eager for power and hoped to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, were still loyal to him.

He became a major political figure and was waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the work 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 camp prisoner Simon 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 who are 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. Taking refuge 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?”

One day, before going to bed, Pol Pot’s wife came to put a mosquito net over the 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, “Our power: deeds and faces”

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 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” deaths - from intestinal infections. 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 country's entire economy 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 short 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.”
Farewell to weapons
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'état, 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 unknown 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 nurtured 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 spent twelve hours a day clearing the jungle 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 henchmen 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 the will of the interrogated. When torture, one should not proceed from one’s own anger or self-satisfaction. You should beat the person being tortured in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before starting the torture, it is necessary to examine the health of the interrogated person. instruments of torture. You should not necessarily try to kill the interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that even during interrogations you should constantly conduct propaganda work. At the same time, you must avoid indecisiveness. 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 Cambodian territory with the help of 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 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.

“You can’t wage a political struggle without killing people!”

Pol Pot

Sometimes history, moving in a spiral, takes unexpected turns. The Maidan, with all that it entails, is often compared to Hitler’s fascism, but such a comparison is only partly true, primarily because, despite all the cannibalism of Hitler’s idea, the actions of those Nazis were aimed at raising the standard of living of the German people through the enslavement of others. In modern Ukraine, the exact opposite process is happening.

The people are forced to make movements aimed solely at the collapse of the country with all the ensuing consequences. Moreover, if the Germans, seeing the success of the German economy and the improvement of their lives, simply did not want to notice the atrocities that the Nazis committed in the name of this, then the reaction of the Ukrainians, who lost even the little that they had, but continued self-destruction, is inexplicable from the point of view of logic and increasingly resembles hysterical fanaticism. However, there was still a historical example of such self-destruction, with its “Maidan”, “pravosek”, schizophrenic formulation of the issue in economic terms and the war that marked the fall of the regime.

From prosperity to collapse

Cambodia could have remained in history as a country of tropical paradise if not for the events of the 1970s, which shocked the whole world with their bloody scope. Why this happened is still unclear. After all, neither the culture nor the history of this country foreshadowed such a scenario.

The history of Cambodia is like a patchwork quilt, consisting of different segments connected by threads of culture. The first information about human settlement of Cambodia dates back to the Paleolithic era. By about the 14th millennium BC, as shown by excavations at Moluprey, Long Prao and Samrongsen, the population was already engaged in early agriculture, gathering, fishing and hunting.

The first major state on the territory of modern Cambodia was Bapnom (1st-6th centuries), also known as Funan (from the Chinese transliteration of the Khmer word "phnom" - mountain). The early period of the empire's history is associated with the activities of Jayavarman II (802-54), the unifier of the Khmer lands and the founder of a new dynasty. In the last of the capitals he founded, Mahedraparvata, he proclaimed the independence of his state from the Javanese rulers, built the country's first religious center and established the official cult of the deva-raja (god-king). The type of state that emerged under Jayavarman II was a form of unlimited monarchy, where the king was considered the incarnation of God. Similar ideologies were formed in most European countries, but in Asia it rather distinguished the state from the general mass of Asian state formations rather than being the rule.

The greatest rise of ancient Kambujadesha is associated with the names of Suryavarman II (1113-1150) and Jayavarman VII (1181-1220). Suryavarman II, having managed to establish good relations with China, began wars in the east with Dai Viet and Tjampa, and in the west with the Mon state of Haripunjaya and the Thai principalities. The territory of the empire at this time significantly exceeded the territory of modern Cambodia. In addition to the Khmers, Mons, Thais, Tyams, Malays, and mountain tribes lived in the empire. At this time, the majestic Angkorwat Temple was being built in the capital, which became the tomb of this monarch.

But in history, as nowhere else, the so-called laws of the pendulum work. The faster and more powerful a state develops, the stronger and deeper its decline is subsequently observed. Thus, after several centuries of prosperity, Kambujadeshi begins to internally decay. The difference in cultures and the treacherous carelessness of officials take their toll. Kambujadeshi loses all the territories of the non-Khmer population and turns into a mono-ethnic state. Gradually, the country becomes increasingly dependent on its rapidly growing neighbors - Vietnam and Siam. The rivalry of these states for dominance on the Indochina Peninsula extremely aggravated the internecine strife of the Khmer feudal lords, who sought to rely on the support of foreign rulers in the struggle for power.

In 1863, following the conquest of the territory of Cochin China (modern South Vietnam), France forced King Norodom of Cambodia (1860-1904) to sign a protectorate treaty, which deprived the country of the right to pursue an independent foreign policy. As part of the agreements that followed, the post of French Supreme Resident and French residents in the provinces was established in the country, a colonial administration was created, which took control of the establishment and collection of taxes, indirect taxation, and customs duties. The same fate befell other states in the region, endlessly fighting among themselves.

During the period of the French protectorate (1863-1953), the country went through “upper-level modernization”, which affected mainly the urban strata and the Khmer ruling elite. Serious changes in the agricultural sector that would significantly improve the life of the Cambodian peasantry, who made up up to 90% of the population, never happened. The Khmer peasantry, within the framework of the economic model created in the country, found itself virtually completely dependent on moneylenders and officials, balancing on the brink of survival.

Salot Sar - a boy from a decent rich family

But, despite this, rich people appeared among the peasants of that time. By collecting and selling rice for generations, they were able not only to survive, but also, having amassed some capital, to still enter the social elite. In one of these families in the village of Prexbauw in 1928, the boy Salot Sar was born. At the age of nine, he was sent to Phnom Penh to live with relatives. After moving, he spent several months as a servant at the Buddhist monastery Wat Botum Vaddey, where he studied the Khmer language and the basics of Buddhism. In 1937, Sar entered a French Catholic primary school, where he received the basics of a classical education. Parents spared no capital for their son's education, so after graduating from school, Sar continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College in Kampong Cham.

The year was 1942, Europe was bleeding, metropolis France was occupied by the Nazis, and the young man Sar continued to acquire knowledge, being far from all these horrors. During the war, Cambodia was occupied by the Japanese, but in October 1945 the French returned here and restored their order. Meanwhile, the liberation movement was flaring up in Indochina. In 1946, Prince Sihanouk managed to obtain “internal autonomy” for Cambodia from the French. A year later, the first constitution in the country's history was put into effect, which abolished the institution of absolute monarchy. The country held its first parliamentary elections.

But all these events touched upon young Salot Sara only in passing. In 1949, he received a government scholarship to pursue higher education in France. It was assumed that he would continue his studies at a vocational school in Limoges or Toulon. But for further knowledge he went to Paris. Arriving in France, Sar began to study radio electronics. Recalling his first year as a student, he later noted that he worked hard and was a good student. And his peers noted his remarkable desire for knowledge. These were usually called “crammers”; they turned out to be good technicians who thoroughly knew the entire process of operation of a particular machine. No one could have imagined then that Sar’s knowledge of technology would be completely transferred to working with people and would go down in history under the name that would later become a household name - Pol Pot.

At the end of 1950, Sarah's old friend, Ieng Sari, arrived in Paris. He introduced Saloth Sara to Keng Vannsak, a patriotic nationalist with whom he had studied at the Sisowath Lyceum. It was in the apartment of Keng Vannsak that the Marxist circle began to work, the initiators of the creation of which were Ieng Sari and Rat Samoyon. Subsequently, social ideas began to crowd out technical skills from the student’s head. It would be more correct to say that working with mechanisms was less interesting to him than studying man as a mechanism. In mid-1952, Salot Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political work - his article “Monarchy or Democracy?” was published in a special issue of the Cambodian students’ magazine “Khmer Nisut”. At the same time, Salot Sar joined the French Communist Party.

Thus, in the luxury of Paris, the future was prepared for Cambodia. Within the walls of a circle or over a cup of coffee in the capital's bistro, Salot Sar and Ieng Sari developed a new ideology that had not yet been tested anywhere. For underdeveloped countries, they advocated the complete expropriation of the peasantry and the creation in the countryside of a system of essentially forced peasant labor, proposing the socialization of even personal property. In essence, “Marxists” with incomplete technical education were preparing a laboratory experiment on people on a whole country scale. By this time, Salot Sar had completely lost interest in studying and was expelled from the Sorbonne University.

In January 1953, Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia and settled in Phnom Penh with his older brother Lot Suong. A month later, he made attempts to establish contact with anti-French partisan detachments, and then met the local representative of the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI), Pham Van Ba. Salot Sar approached him with a request to be accepted into the CPI on the basis of his membership in the CPF. Pham Van Ba ​​contacted Paris through Hanoi, and in August 1953, Salot Sar joined the CPI, began working in the mass propaganda department of the headquarters cell, and attending a school for party cadres. At the same time, Pol Pot began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. Later, he sometimes referred to himself as "Professor of History and Geography."

Having started working in the capital's party organization, Pol Pot soon attracted attention. He was well educated, knew how to persuade, and at the same time was friendly, gentle and polite in his interactions with people. He was better versed in urban environments than many party veterans who had previously spent many years in the jungle fighting alongside Laotian and Vietnamese communists against the French colonialists.

From half-hearted socialism to dictatorship

Meanwhile, unprecedented changes were taking place in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk suddenly and unexpectedly declared it a country of socialism. He founded the “People's Socialist Community” (“Sangkum”), designed to build “Khmer, Buddhist, royal socialism.” “Our socialism is primarily the application of Buddhism in the aspect of its struggle against social ills, injustice and inequality. He extols the spirit of brotherhood and mutual assistance and calls for sacrifice and personal improvement in the name of helping society,” the prince himself explained this unprecedented symbiosis to the international community.

This idea, of course, led nowhere. As before, the beginnings of a socialist society appeared only in Phnom Penh, where they ended. The peasants still languished under the weight of taxes and levies from unfair purchasing policies and, for the most part, could not explain to themselves how royal socialism differed from French colonialism.

Meanwhile, the underground Communist Party of Cambodia began to be torn apart by clan disputes over leadership. In fact, it was falling apart. The party essentially found itself split into three factions located in different parts of the country. The first is the surviving “party veterans”, people who are largely divorced from the real situation in the country. The second is young “romantic” intellectuals: students, teachers, college and lyceum teachers. Pol Pot and his associates were part of the third group, whose ideological platform was distinguished by its overt national chauvinist character and anti-Vietnamese sentiments. The leaders of this faction, which initially numbered no more than 30 people, advocated the creation of a strong Cambodia through a “super-high leap” (similar to the “Great Leap Forward” in China), relying on its own forces.

In 1962, under unclear circumstances, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Thu Samut, was killed in a safe house in Phnom Penh. Later evidence emerged that he was killed on the orders of Pol Pot. In any case, the elimination of Tu Samut opened up a direct path for Pol Pot and his associates to seize full power in the party. Pol Pot leaves his teaching job and goes underground. The People's Revolutionary Party is increasingly clearly becoming a party of a “new type”, an organization of “professional revolutionaries” and an instrument for implementing the plans of the Pol Potites. In 1965, Pol Pot visited China, where he met with Mao Zedong. Later, he visited this country several more times, where the “cultural revolution” was in full swing. The leader of the Khmer Rouge praised it, calling it “cleansing the body of painful phenomena.” Pol Pot later said more than once that Chairman Mao “always supported and encouraged us.”

Meanwhile, Prince Norodom Sihanouk's star began to decline. At the end of the 60s, opposition sentiments grew in Cambodia, and the army elite entered the political arena as an independent political force. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was on an official visit to the Soviet Union and China, the Royal Council and the National Assembly, under pressure from General Lon Nol, removed him from power. Essentially, it was a coup d'etat organized by Lon Nol with the support of the army elite and pro-American politicians. Sentenced to death, Sihanouk did not dare return to Cambodia and remained in Beijing. However, not accepting the removal, he turns to the left forces led by the Communist Party for support.

The beginning of the Kampuchean Maidan

1970 marked the beginning of the destruction of Khmer society. It was then that Cambodia began to “get used” to blood and death. The Civil War, American intervention, mass migrations - all led to social disintegration. “After five years of aiding a feudal government it despised and fighting a war it knew was hopeless, the United States has nothing to show the world but the sad picture of an evacuation with an ambassador carrying out an American flag, and in the other - his giant suitcase. But there are a million dead and wounded Cambodians (a seventh of the population), there are hundreds of thousands of refugees who live in shacks, there is a devastated country, children dying of hunger, and carpenters who have learned to make coffins from boxes in which ammunition was transported,” she wrote. The New York Times shortly after the fall of the Lon Nol regime.

To the joy of the USSR, the pro-American regime collapsed in Cambodia and was shamefully thrown out of Vietnam. It seemed that the lives of these two countries were now hard-won and inextricably linked with the Soviet Union and the ideals of socialism. But strange, inexplicable events suddenly began to occur in Cambodia.

At first everything was more than decent. Khmer Rouge military units entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. At that time, about three million people lived in it. Crowds of capital residents greeted the soldiers in black uniforms with joyful shouts and handshakes. On the streets of the city they danced, sang and had fun. It was believed that peace had finally come to Cambodia. The people have long been tired of war. But soon the “liberators” were already prowling the streets of the capital, breaking open the locks of shops. Cars, motorcycles, even bicycles were confiscated from residents. The soldiers - often 14-16 year old boys - uttered one phrase: “Angka.” Pointing the gun at the man, they declared: “Angka demands that you give me your motorcycle.”

The use of children in the ensuing “bloodbath” was no coincidence. Unlike the veterans of the revolution, their minds had not yet been formed by any idea, and the presence of a machine gun and undivided power turned crime into an exciting game. Teenagers, incited by older “educators,” began to break into houses and drive residents - often their parents - out of cities; the disobedient were killed on the spot.

A hoe as a means to achieve an unclear goal

The Polpotites immediately broke off diplomatic relations with all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry and exit from the country were prohibited. The KGB of the USSR, on instructions from the CPSU Central Committee, tried to “make inquiries.” But even this powerful organization was unable to obtain sufficiently complete information. Then the leaders of “brotherly Kampuchea” were sent an invitation to visit the USSR. Relax, swim in the Black Sea. To get treatment, in the end. The answer stunned even seasoned Kremlin party members: “We can’t come, we’re very busy, we have a lot to do.” Then there is complete silence.

There really was a lot to do. In Cambodia, renamed Kampuchea, a purely Khmer society was proclaimed (“Kampuchea is for the Khmers!”). Those fellow citizens who professed religions “uncharacteristic” for Kampuchea, Christians and Muslims, were also persecuted. In order to complete the complete isolation of the country, decrees on language were passed. Using any language other than Khmer was prohibited: speaking Vietnamese, Thai or Chinese was punishable by death. But the biggest crime was speaking in European languages, in particular French.

The history of their country in Kampuchea was sorted out just as quickly as everything else. The year the Khmer Rouge came to power was declared zero, and everything that came before that was declared a legacy of the bourgeois past - prohibited or destroyed, from non-Khmer architectural monuments to the imperial ballet, the pride of the Cambodians. From the cities, all people were driven in huge streams to the fields, where the new classless society, declared by Pol Pot, was immediately divided into two classes - slaves and overseers. No one in Kampuchea knew who was leading the country. Moreover, the Cambodians did not know that those who ruled them called themselves communists. In fact, this system had the same relation to communism as it did to capitalism. It was an original but bloody experiment by a bunch of Sorbonne dropouts.

All “innovations” were carried out in the name of “Angka Loeu” - the “supreme organization”. In fact, the country was ruled by four family clans of “best comrades” - Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen. “Angka” was only a tool in their hands. There was no cult of personality, no biographies of leaders, no portraits befitting this. Pol Pot did not allow himself to be photographed. One - later beaten to death with hoes - the artist sketched his portrait. When this drawing, reproduced on a rotator, was hung in the common dining rooms, brother and sister Salot Sarah, sent, like other bourgeois elements, to re-education, recognized their relative. “We are ruled by little Sar!” - exclaimed the dictator's sister. The portraits were taken.

Pol Pot, who came from among them, had a special attitude towards the intelligentsia. “We need to suppress the intelligentsia’s craving for the Western way of life. There shouldn't be an intelligentsia as such. Its representatives will engage in useful physical labor, live together, and learn from the people.” These words belong to a man who spent his youth within the walls of prestigious institutions in France. How can one not recall the words of our famous satirist: “Maybe something should be corrected at the conservatory?” Later, even more radical methods of correction were applied to the intelligentsia, which included all technicians, doctors and teachers. Exhausted from working in the fields (Cambodia was completely isolated, and domestic production had completely stopped), they were simply slaughtered with hoes due to a shortage of ammunition - right there, on the rice plantations.

Torture was used in the camps on a state basis, and the worst thing is that they were carried out on their fathers and mothers by the same children from whom Pol Pot formed his assault troops. There was even a special decree created for them, “Interrogation Guidelines S-21,” which read: “The purpose of using torture is to obtain an adequate response to it from those being interrogated. Torture is not used for fun. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction. Another goal is psychological breakdown, loss of will of the interrogated person. The person being interrogated must be beaten in such a way as to intimidate him, and not to beat him to death. You should not try to kill the person being interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are primary, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that you are doing political work.” Here is what one of those teenagers who were then turned into a blind instrument of brutality and fear says: “I killed first of all those who wore glasses. If he wears glasses, it means he could read. And therefore, he could have harmful thoughts. And in general, glasses are an invention of the bourgeoisie.”

Ignorance as a way of control

Let's take a moment away from the Kampuchean events and move to modern Ukraine. It doesn’t matter whether Pol Pot’s people wanted to build instant communism, or whether they were guided by a more strange and mundane idea of ​​joining the EU, or something else. Another thing is important - the technology of processing the masses, when children (they are children) take up arms and kill their parents, declaring themselves the founders of a new nation with a new ideology, renouncing their past, vaguely imagining their future. When the general ignorance of the population is masterfully used to plant ideas in their heads that are incompatible with the title of a person. When a progressive idea is twisted into the barbed wire of nationalism and a monster is created that kills itself. After all, it was on the Maidan that something that should not happen happened. Ignorant children, taking up arms under the leadership of maniacs and scum, began to kill their parents, and an ignorant country, having spat on and destroyed the ideology with the help of which it was built, began to build a monster on its ruins (after all, being ignorant of all major state issues, it is difficult to build something worthwhile).

Puppeteers, as a rule, understand what exactly they are doing, but, having gone too far, they no longer have the opportunity to stop, since they will be instantly destroyed by the very Minotaur that they themselves gave birth to.

By the way, Pol Pot himself signed his orders “Comrade 87”. Everything related to “Angka” was also classified. Apparently, Pol Pot’s men also understood that they were actually committing a crime. From neighboring Vietnam, where at that time there was a systematic socialist restoration of the economy destroyed by the war with the United States, terrible news leaked into the world, but the world preferred not to hear it. Only the Soviet Union responded to them out loud, but this too was not heard. “An insult to the idea”, “stinking homunculus”, “pauper-socialism” - these were the definitions our press awarded to Pol Pot’s ill-fated experiment. In September 1976, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote:

“What is happening in Kampuchea leaves no doubt whose ideas are the theoretical basis of the people who came to power in this country. And in vain the Kampuchean leaders are trying to convince someone that a special form of socialism is being created in Kampuchea. This is just the Kampuchean version of Maoism, which envisages the creation of faceless states in the field of foreign policy. Kampuchean leaders think in Maoist categories and speak in familiar phrases from the quotation book of the “great helmsman.”

Unlike the Soviet Union, Chinese leaders believed that Pol Pot was truly building socialism. When in the summer of 1978, Pol Pot gave a reception in honor of Chinese specialists, the Chinese Ambassador said: “During our work in Kampuchea, we were able to see with our own eyes how the Kampuchean people, under the leadership of the Party, are carrying out a socialist revolution, building socialism in conditions of independence and sovereignty.”

When the forester arrives

The Vietnamese army put an end to this ideological dispute. On December 25, 1978, its liberation offensive against Cambodia began. The young men, who were good at killing unarmed people, were unable to provide serious resistance to the regular troops. Most of them simply fled, the rest, along with the party leaders, went into the jungle. This action of Vietnam, unlike the bloody massacre of Pol Pot, immediately found a “response” from the international community. Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia was condemned not only by China, but also by most countries in the world. Industrialized countries organized an economic blockade of Vietnam. And the new regime in Phnom Penh was recognized only by the Soviet Union and its allies in the socialist camp.

After the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime, a very peculiar situation developed in and around Cambodia. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in which the new government of Heng Samrin was not recognized, and Cambodia's place in the UN was retained by the Khmer Rouge. In December 1979, Khieu Samphan became Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, that is, the government in exile, instead of Pol Pot.

The Khmer Rouge settled in Thailand. Pol Pot himself often visited Bangkok, where he underwent medical examinations and even met with officials. He and his companions claimed that the years of their reign were “the most brilliant period in the history of Kampuchea in the last two thousand years.” They say there were mistakes and some excesses, but the general course remained correct. Only those who were “hopelessly corrupted by imperialism” were liquidated. This three-year "brilliant period" was marked by three million people killed by the Khmer Rouge - a third of the country's population. Pol Pot himself died quietly on April 15, 1998. The body was burned and the ashes were scattered.

The bloody dictator had no property. During illnesses, he used only herbal infusions. A few bottles with traditional medicines and a mosquito net are all that remains of little Sarah.

This is, perhaps, one of the few differences between Comrade 87 and the “comrades” who took power in Ukraine today. The little half-pots who set up Kampuchea in the light version from Ukraine have enough money not to think about their future; they hope to end their lives in their own villas on the Cote d'Azur of Europe, surrounded by luxury and abundance. Another difference is that if then the West was silent about the atrocities of the Pol Potites, now it actively supports the Ukrainian junta and is trying with all its might to maintain this regime. There is no USSR, but there is Russia, whose cry is also not heard by the “enlightened community.” The Vietnamese have a vague idea of ​​where the Donbass is, but there are the DPR-LPR, which can, as then, “drive the Kyiv polpots into the jungle”, while constantly listening to accusations against them of “terrorism”, “hybrid wars”, “invasions in sovereign state”, etc. Moreover, they have an advantage - they are fighting on their own land. And although this is not important for the “capitalist international”, this factor strengthens the anti-junta resistance in its correctness. The main thing is that after the destruction of the Ukrainian “Minotaur,” an idea is found for building a new state, more just and at least somehow insured against the emergence of other destructive ideas and ideologies.

Now in the liberal press they often say that the Pol Pot regime “crystallized communism, showing its true face.” Of course, this nonsense is said and repeated for a reason; many want to turn the leftist idea into a “scarecrow” for society, and here the personality of Pol Pot really comes in handy. However, the fact that it was socialist Vietnam, with the support of the Soviet Union, that stopped the experiment of the Parisian “major” is also deliberately hushed up or distorted.

Today Cambodia is building capitalism, tourists enjoy its monuments and nature, and peasants still live in hopeless, horrific poverty, foreign observers are increasingly writing about the growth of corruption and abuse of power, but that is another story.

Vitaly Svobodin

Materials used: Information and reference site dedicated to the countries of the Near and Middle East; V.N. Shevelev, “Pyramid of two million skulls”; S. Lavrovich “Pol Pot - Top People”).

“You talk about me like I’m some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine said offendedly Lyudmila Gurchenko in one popular Russian comedy.

“Pol Potism”, “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. Eighth child peasant Pek Salota and his wife Nem Juice received a name at birth Salot Sar.

Village of Prexbauw. Birthplace of Pol Pot. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Albeiro Rodas

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.

Pol Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

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. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Became the ruler of the kingdom Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which was very popular and focused on China. 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 bet on Beijing, focusing on politics 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. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

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 he came to power. Prime Minister Lon Nol 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 your protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American troops 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 an 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. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

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 become peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills, etc. were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, other cities in Kampuchea suffered the same fate.

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 nationalism, 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 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

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 pro-Soviet Vietnam from strengthening its 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. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

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 Crimes of the Pol Pot regime dated July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 were 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 recognized Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sari 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. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

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. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

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...