For seven years after his flight from Phnom Penh, Saloth Sar was on the run, hiding in makeshift camps in eastern and northeastern Cambodia. The only respite occurred in 1965-1966, when he spent several months in North Vietnam and China. Most of the time, Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and others on the Central Committee were cut off from developments in Phnom Penh and elsewhere in the world, except as filtered through intermittent party couriers (known as nir‘sei, or “trusted people”) and shortwave radio broadcasts from China and Vietnam. This isolation affected their decisions.

After 1963 Sar and his friends met few nonbelievers. They talked continuously to each other, bonding together and reinforcing their paranoia and their self-assurance. They probably spent most of their time identifying “enemies” (khmang) and constructing scenarios for the Cambodian people. Gaps between the scenarios and what Cambodians wanted—to say nothing of what was feasible—were numerous and wide. They went unnoticed. When the leaders of the party said that theory was subordinate to practice, what they meant was not that theoreticians had much to learn from ordinary people but that the integrity of the leaders themselves, rather than a theoretical stance, determined which strategies and tactics the party would follow.

For Saloth Sar this period, discouraging as it seemed, probably reinforced his sense of destiny and self-importance. Approval of his ideas came from subordinates in the party who were forced by his status to be deferential. Moreover, with no territories or populations to administer, he made few practical mistakes. Because his realm was insubstantial, his ideas could be utopian. The party members he met were all, in a sense, his students. To extend the metaphor, he ran the school he taught in—a school that had no inspectors, no parents, and no external governing body, except, perhaps, the Vietnam Workers’ party in faraway Hanoi.

Isolation, comparative safety, and self-importance were decisive in the formation of the policies that guided the leaders of the Cambodian Communist party when they came to power. Also decisive were events outside the country. Between 1963 and 1970, the leaders did not have to temper or dilute their ideas with practice, compromise, or competition. Although their belief that they would seize power someday fueled their dedication to the party, this belief did not become a possibility until 1970, when Sihanouk was overthrown. Even then, it took five years of fighting for the Red Khmer (khmer krohom; in French, Khmers rouges)—as Sihanouk had always referred to the movement—to gain control. Their victory in 1975, given their resources and history, was unexpected.1