For over a year he revealed almost nothing about himself. When he made a state visit to China in September 1977 and was photographed there, Cambodia watchers identified Pol Pot as a fifty-two-year-old former schoolteacher named Saloth Sar, who had been secretary of the Central Committee of the clandestine Communist party of Kampuchea (CPK) since 1963. Pol Pot had announced the existence of the CPK for the first time in a triumphal speech recorded for Radio Phnom Penh just before he left for China. But very few Cambodians knew that Pol Pot was Saloth Sar. He admitted his former identity only after he was overthrown in 1979.

Mystery clung to him as news of what was happening in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978—the DK period—filtered into the outside world. Most of the news was horrible. Refugees spoke of forced labor, starvation, random executions, and the tyrannical, anonymous “organization.”

What did Pol Pot and his colleagues have in mind?

This handful of men and women presided over the purest and most thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist movement in an era of revolutions. No other regime tried to go so quickly or so far. No other inflicted as many casualties on the country’s population.

At one level, the revolution was a courageous, doomed attempt by a group of utopian thinkers to break free from the capitalist world system, abandon the past, and rearrange the future. Many radicals in other countries interpreted events in Cambodia in this way. At another level, the revolution sprang from a colossal misreading of Cambodia’s political capacities, its freedom of maneuver vis-à-vis its neighbors, and the interests of the rural poor on whose behalf the revolution was ostensibly being waged. At a third level, Pol Pot and his colleagues displayed a thirst for power and an unlimited capacity for distrust. Believing himself surrounded by enemies, Pol Pot approved the torture and execution of almost fourteen thousand enemies (khmang) at the regime’s interrogation facility in Phnom Penh, known by the code name S-21. And thousands more died in the regional purges he set in motion in 1977. Most of those put to death at S-21 were loyal members of the party. Victims elsewhere seem, for the most part, to have been innocent of treason.

What were the sources of the revolution and its extraordinary violence? Between 1975 and 1979, those in power in Phnom Penh frequently declared that they followed no foreign models and that the Cambodian revolution was incomparable. In fact, many DK slogans—such as “storming attacks,” “leaps forward,” “independence-mastery,” and “three tons (of rice) per hectare”—came without acknowledgment from Communist China, where the regime, on the eve of Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976, was going through a peculiarly radical phase.