In February 1950, encouraged by the recent Communist victory in China, the Indochina Communist party, in a secret meeting of its Central Committee, called for “the active construction of independent Lao and Cambodian armies ... mobilizing the masses ... to participate in the liberation.” The decision paved the way for the formation of rudimentary Communist parties in both countries and inadvertently laid the foundations for Saloth Sar’s long career. The three parties, in turn, were to be controlled from the shadows by the Indochina Communist party whose leaders were all Vietnamese. Without the February 1950 decision, it is unlikely that Cambodian communism—or Saloth Sar’s rise inside the movement—would ever have made headway.10

As a follow-up to this decision, the Indochina Communist party convened a ten-day study session in March at Hatien in southern Vietnam. The meeting drew together party cadre already concerned with Cambodian affairs, and it was later referred to as the meeting at which a provisional revolutionary government for Cambodia was founded. Its high point was a lengthy speech by Nguyen Thanh Son, a middle-ranking official in the Indochina Communist party who had led Vietnamese resistance troops inside Cambodia and had been recruiting Cambodian guerrillas for over a year. The text of his speech fell into the hands of the French; translated, it is over fifty pages long. It was the first detailed discussion of the prospects for revolution in Cambodia by an astute analyst of Cambodian affairs. Son’s speech foreshadowed many of the difficulties Cambodian Communists like Saloth Sar would encounter. The most vexing of these, which Son perceived as an advantage to the movement, was the matter of Vietnamese domination.11

Son began by charging that Cambodia’s political parties were “bred or directed by the French.” The Democrats were the most influential. Son said that the French had had Yuthevong and Koeuss (“the last radical element of the Party”) killed. Cambodia’s principal mode of production, he continued, was “autarchic and family oriented”; also, he found Cambodians “honest, frank, sincere and often impulsive.” Most of them were peasants who lived “in the blackest misery. They are awakening slowly but surely.... They form the principal force of the Khmer revolution.” Son traced Cambodia’s revolutionary movement to nineteenth-century resistance to the French led by “feudal or educated people” rather than peasants or workers. The problems with bringing a revolutionary party to power in Cambodia, he noted, were compounded by the fact that so few Cambodians had any Marxist-Leninist training. “The theory of Karl Marx-Lenin [sic],” he said, “must first be spread among the most evolved elements of Cambodia, whose overall cultural, social and economic status remains backward.”