The most important foreign influence on Pol Pot was probably Communist China, which he first visited in 1965-1966. From Mao Zedong’s notions of autonomous revolution, voluntarism, and continuous class struggle, Pol Pot drew an inspiring ideology that freed him from what he considered to be the domination of the Vietnamese and that provided a model for Cambodia’s transformation. From the high-ranking Chinese official K‘ang Sheng, who befriended him in 1965, Pol Pot absorbed the importance of rooting out concealed enemies of the party. The timing of his conversion to a Maoist vision of the world was important. He visited China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution—in other words, before it had turned out to be a disaster—and he came to power in 1975, shortly before Mao’s death, during another radical phase of Chinese politics.

These foreign influences and conjunctions are important in understanding Pol Pot’s political career, but after taking them into account there is still something elusive about him that makes a biographical inquiry unsatisfactory and incomplete. Often in my research I have had the uneasy feeling that Saloth Sar/Pol Pot was just outside my line of vision observing me—an impression confirmed in 1997 when, talking to Nate Thayer, he spoke agreeably about the first edition of this book, while taking issue with some of my phrasing. This elusiveness has been frustrating to me as his biographer but also indicates the kind of impression that this instrument of history—as Pol Pot might call himself—always preferred to leave, or to fail to leave, while proceeding in secret with incandescent revolutionary tasks.

CHAPTER TWO

“Original Khmer,” 1928—1949

Who Was Pol Pot?

The man known to the world as Pol Pot started life with the name Saloth Sar. Pol Pot was his revolutionary name. When he announced his pseudonym in 1976, he followed precedents set by several Communist leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Tito, and Ho Chi Minh. Their intentions, when in the underground, were to conceal their true identities from the police and in some cases to inspire their followers (“Stalin,” for example, means “steel”; “Ho Chi Minh” means “the enlightened one”). Pol Pot, however, took a new name after he had come to power, concealing his former identity from the nation he was about to govern. The name he chose, although common enough among rural Cambodians (the Khmer), had no independent meaning.

In making this bizarre, self-effacing gesture, Saloth Sar/Pol Pot was behaving true to form. Beginning in the 1950s, he preferred working in secret to living in the open. When Pol Pot came to power in 1976, it took analysts more than a year to identify him with certainty as a former schoolteacher named Saloth Sar who had been the secretary of the Cambodian Communist party since 1963. Pol Pot admitted his original name offhandedly to an interviewer in 1979, several months after he had been driven from power.