Compared with the elaborate cults surrounding Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il Sung, the well-orchestrated anti-personality cult orchestrated by Ho Chi Minh, and the adulation whipped up to honor Sihanouk and Lon Nol, there is something tentative, offhand, and almost poignant about the photographs, statues, and portraits of Pol Pot. It is likely that officials in S-21 had the prisoners make the statues and portraits without being asked to do so. When the regime collapsed, Pol Pot swiftly resumed his anonymity. We can imagine his feelings of relief. Even in his years in power, no biography of Brother Number One was ever broadcast over Radio Phnom Penh or published in Tung Padevat. No photographs of him appeared in party literature. No anecdotes of his childhood, his teaching career, or his time in the maquis entered popular folklore via speeches at political meetings. There were no plays or songs about him and no published “thoughts.” On the other hand, considering the totality of his control over the party, his stifling of dissent, and his purging of anyone whose popularity he saw as threatening, it is clear that while he backed away from a cult honoring himself, he discouraged anyone else from seeking publicity and nearly everyone from sharing power. It is likely that he saw popular Communist figures like Hou Youn and Sao Phim as threats to his authority. Once again, the parallels with Stalin are suggestive, but Pol Pot’s half-warm, half-cool impersonal style was recognizably Khmer. His assaults on “individualism,” with their unspoken undertones of Buddhist teaching, were probably sincere.

Nuon Chea’s anonymity may also have been an inspiration to him. During the DK era, Brother Number Two never revealed anything about himself in public. In his statements to the visiting Danish delegation, Chea suggested—echoing one of Pol Pot’s phrases—that “secret work is fundamental”; he added that “the leadership apparatus must be defended at any price ... as long as the leadership is there, the Party will not die.” “Secret work” included moving unexpectedly to different houses, using messengers, living under guard, testing food for poison, and so on. To illustrate the importance of anonymity, Nuon Chea, unconsciously perhaps, fails to mention Pol Pot—good evidence, from another angle, that no cult of personality was in effect in Cambodia at that time.29

Except for Nuon Chea, Pol Pot was the least accessible Cambodian leader since World War II. Given the extent of the two men’s power between 1975 and 1979, we must assume that their inaccessibility was deliberate. Being hidden provided security and room for maneuver. In a sense they both spent their lives as secret agents, even when they were in charge of seven million people. Their concealment kept their enemies off balance and convinced their followers and friends that they were working full-time for the revolution. This was probably true, especially since the essence of the revolution, as Chea told the Danes, was keeping themselves in power. Their self-effacement, however, had different effects. Pol Pot’s was a key element in the loyalty and affection he commanded from those who managed to get close to him at various points in his career. Many Cambodians who came into his presence found him charismatic because he embodied the ideals of conduct—self-control, elegance, kindheartedness—that had been drummed into them for years. Foreigners, brought up to admire (or at least to single out) individuals as “personalities,” found him exasperating, hypocritical, and elusive. Nuon Chea eschewed publicity altogether. Aside from a stray reference to his “emotionalism” from the 1980s and reports that when he was in power he favored the inhabitants of his native village in Battambang, he left no personal traces.