It took the Communists more than a year to set up a government. The decisions they made during this time were concealed. Fortunately, however, seventeen crucial texts from this period have come to light: the minutes of party standing committee meetings held between October 1975 and June 1976. Only five copies of the minutes were prepared at the time; the file probably covers less than 10 percent of the meetings that took place in those eight months. Even so, the documents offer a revealing glimpse of Cambodia’s tiny governing body and of its modus operandi following the liberation of Phnom Penh.48

Most of the texts were triumphalist in tone. At several points Saloth Sar or one of his colleagues spoke of the incomparability of the Cambodian revolution and expressed the hope that larger nations would learn from its revolutionary experience. A corollary of the triumphalism is the lack of information about the outside world. Sar and his colleagues read no newspapers and absorbed little about foreign events. They nourished themselves on their own documents, conversations, and broadcasts and on material produced by other Communist parties. Because they had achieved a revolutionary victory, the Red Khmer assumed that similar ones would occur elsewhere in the world.

On October 9, 1975, the items on the standing committee’s agenda were the “allocation of tasks and operational matters”; “overall arrangements”; and “the handling of a number of specific tasks.” The party, concealed by the facade of the Revolutionary Organization (the name it had assumed among Cambodians), was still officially hidden behind the National Front, with Sihanouk ostensibly the chief of state. Layers of disguises, revolutionary names, and secret meetings protected Saloth Sar from the judgment of ordinary people. Party members who had been assigned new responsibilities took up their work in secret, disguised by revolutionary names. The complex charade hid the real division of spoils, whereby high-ranking members of the party carved out areas of patronage and control.49