Nguyen Thanh Son believed in a worldwide revolution led by the Soviet Union and an Indochinese revolution led by Vietnam. Because there were no progressive Cambodian institutions, Son suggested that local Vietnamese, outnumbered by Khmer seven to one, had key roles to play. “They can bring the Khmer revolution to the same intensity [élan] as the Vietnamese revolution,” he said. “They are the motor force that will start up ... the revolutionary movement.” Already the Indochina Communist party inside Cambodia was “composed for the most part of Vietnamese and does not yet have any deep roots among the Khmer people.”

Son was not deterred from sponsoring a revolution for Cambodia, even when the materials were so unpromising. He perceived the peasantry on whom the revolution’s success would depend as undeveloped, autarchic, disorganized, and asleep. The other groups that the Communists might penetrate or convert—the bourgeoisie, the Buddhist sangha, and non-Vietnamese ethnic minorities—were even more conservative. Son was probably counting on the Cambodians’ hatred of the French (which in fact was not widespread) and their impatience with oppression to draw them into an armed struggle that would benefit the international Communist movement as well as the Vietnamese. Those Khmer with enough education to absorb “Marx-Lenin” were expected to accept Vietnamese guidance and control. This is precisely what Saloth Sar did when he returned to Cambodia, as a Communist, three years later.

At the beginning of 1951, a year after Son’s speech, the Indochina Communist party secretly broke into three parts. The senior partner was the Vietnam Workers’ party, which emerged into the open at this time. The Indochina Communist party and the rudimentary parties established in Laos and Cambodia (called People’s Revolutionary parties to reflect their lower status) remained hidden. The Cambodian grouping was formally constituted, it seems, in June 1951. Its statutes were drawn up in Vietnamese and then translated into Khmer. Unlike the statutes of the Vietnam Workers’ party, the Cambodian statutes failed to mention Marx or Lenin. The Cambodian party’s provisional Central Committee included several Vietnamese and was headed by Son Ngoc Minh (a name chosen by the revolutionary activist Achar Mean to give people the idea that he was related to Son Ngoc Thanh). Cambodians joining this secret group were probably told that its aims were to drive the French from Indochina and to cooperate with the Vietnamese. The long-term Communist agenda of the movement was played down.