Other high-ranking figures executed in 1978 included Vorn Vet, deputy prime minister for the economy; Chou Chet, secretary of the western zone; and Muol Sambath, secretary of the northwestern zone. All three men had been intimately associated with Pol Pot and Nuon Chea in the 1950s. In Phnom Penh, confessions at the end of 1978 began to implicate Son Sen, the chief of the general staff, a member of the party center, and the man responsible for S-21. In July he had visited China as minister of defense. That his name should crop up as an acquaintance of military men and party veterans being purged is not surprising, but the possibility that he was plotting against the party is remote. All the same, the flames burning through the party were drawing closer to the center, and had the Vietnamese held up their attack, it is likely that Son Sen and others near the top would have been “called to study.”24

Did Pol Pot consider these former associates genuinely guilty? Stalin’s biographer, Robert Tucker, in dealing with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, asked a similar question: “Why was Stalin driven to believe things he had no grounds for believing about the huge number of people who were victimized?” Tucker argued that “only by believing in the victims’ treasonous designs ... could [Stalin] come to terms with their failure to share his grandiose beliefs about himself.” There is not enough evidence to form a similar indictment of Pol Pot, but it is conceivable that he viewed people with different strategic views or those unwilling to extinguish personal ambition as traitors to the amalgam of revolution and party with which he and Nuon Chea (“the organization”) identified themselves. The existence of enemies was necessary for class warfare, which was essential in Maoist theory for the transition between socialism and communism. Contradictions among the people impelled the party forward. To maintain momentum, instability was essential. The party’s leaders nourished themselves on suspicion, and they prided themselves on their ability to uncover plots. Those suspected of treason provided the instability the nation needed to move forward, but whether any of them were truly guilty is difficult to ascertain.25

A Cult of Personality?

In the second half of 1978, scattered evidence suggests that Pol Pot was being edged toward a personality cult that, had his regime lasted longer, might have transformed his taciturn, clandestine style of government into a more personalistic one and deepened continuities with previous, nonrevolutionary regimes. Like many Communist leaders—Mao, Castro, and Tito spring to mind—Pol Pot had to contend with pressures for deification by some of his colleagues and supporters, who were the beneficiaries of the revolution. After all, it had been his clear-sighted strategies and tactics that had wrested control of Cambodia from the United States and its feudal puppets; it was Brother Pol who had uprooted enemies from the party, encouraged vigilance, built the alliance with China, and masterminded the Four Year Plan. Colleagues in the party held him responsible for the achievements of the nation. Others found it prudent to say so, because of his frequent resorts to terror and because they wanted to retain their posts.