Speaking to David Ashley in 1996, the S-21 survivor Vann Nath, who had painted several portraits of Pol Pot from photographs while still a prisoner, recalled that toward the end of 1978 there were plans for a more grandiose sculpture in Pol Pot’s honor:

We had to design a revolutionary monument with the design first taken to Nuon Chea who approved it and it was then supposed to be taken to Pol Pot for his approval. The monument was like those in China and Korea and featured Pol Pot in front of a line of people with his right hand stretched skywards and his left arm grasping a copy of the revolutionary works, the red book. Pol Pot was the only figure depicted as a particular individual. Behind him were a number of people indicating the progress of the revolutionary struggle, beginning with axes and knives and ending with abundance, with guns and B-40s [rocket launchers]. [The administrator of S-21] said that the plan was to destroy the temple at Wat Phnom and replace it with the monument. If the Vietnamese hadn’t invaded, I think that’s what would have happened.28

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.