What the Cambodian leaders meant by independence, in large part, was that they were different from, and superior to, Vietnam, whose Communist movement had shaped and guided them for many years. Vietnamese guidance began to grate on Saloth Sar and his colleagues in the 1960s, when the Vietnamese treated them not as revolutionaries but as younger brothers in their all-absorbing war against the United States. Fighting between Cambodia and Vietnam erupted in 1977 and culminated two years later in a Vietnamese blitzkrieg that overthrew Pol Pot’s regime.

The mayhem that Democratic Kampuchea inflicted on its people led the French author Jean Lacouture to coin the word autogenocide—to differentiate events in Cambodia from previous pogroms, holocausts, purges, and vendettas. Lacouture’s horror, if not the word he coined, was justified by the facts. In less than four years, more than one million Cambodians, or one in seven, probably died from malnutrition, overwork, and misdiagnosed or mistreated illness. At least one hundred thousand, and probably more, were executed for crimes against the state. Tens of thousands perished in the conflict with Vietnam, almost certainly started by the Red Khmer. But was what happened autogenocide, without forerunners elsewhere? Clear parallels, and probably inspirations, can be found in China’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, in the Soviet collectivization of Ukraine twenty years before that, and in purges in both countries of “elements” considered dangerous to revolutionary leaders. In a sense, what happened in Cambodia, although more intense, was standard operating procedure in countries whose politics Pol Pot—or “Brother Number One,” as he was informally known to subordinates—admired.

The catastrophe of Democratic Kampuchea and its effects encourage an examination of Pol Pot’s political career to see what connections can be drawn between the man and what happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, as well as before and since. The outline of his life has been known since the early 1980s, thanks to the path-breaking work of Australian scholar Ben Kiernan and several others. Recently, new sources have come to light that have made possible a longer, more detailed view of Pol Pot’s career than Kiernan reached in his book, which dealt primarily with the period before 1975.1

Much of what has been written about Pol Pot since his time in power has been reckless and intemperate. This is not surprising in view of the impact of the revolution; but calling him a “moon-faced monster,” a “genocidal maniac,” or “worse than Hitler” (phrases picked from journalists’ reports) has no explanatory power. To understand the man and what happened in Democratic Kampuchea, we need to place him inside a Cambodian context and inside a wider set of influences from abroad.