Pol Pot. The story of a peasant who made the world shudder

Our reader Igor M. continues his story about his trip to Cambodia. Today we are not talking about the ancient history of this country, but about the very recent past, when the dictator Pol Pot led the country of Khmers to an unprecedented tragedy. A Cambodian guide who miraculously survived the Khmer Rouge regime told Igor and other tourists about the horrors of that time.

This is a continuation of the story about an excursion to Cambodia. Read the beginning here:

I thought for a long time whether to include this in the story or not. After all, what our guide tells is very different from what people want to hear on a tour. And yet he decided that this story deserves to be known and remembered ...

As I said, we had two guides - Russian and Cambodian. Most of all I was amazed and shocked by the story told by the Cambodian guide. He was born in 1970, studied in the USSR, so he knows Russian. And he also remembers Pol Pot's regime well, although he was a child in those years. What he told us shocked many. But I don’t remember his name - Cambodians have very complicated names. But I remember the nickname 🙂 Usually Cambodians (Vietnamese, Thais) have straight hair, but this one has a little curly. Therefore, in a Soviet university he was given the Russian nickname "Kucheryavenky". So just let it be "our guide".

Unhappy intellectuals

In the early 70s, Lon Nol was the president of Cambodia, who opposed the communists and enjoyed the support of the United States. But in 1975, the communists, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, won the civil war. He was the bloodiest dictator - according to some estimates, up to three million people (a third of the then population of the country) died during several years of his rule.

As soon as Pol Pot came to power, the next day he announced: all residents must leave the cities, otherwise they will be bombed by Americans who do not like communism. The country's capital, Phnom Penh, was evicted in 72 hours. Moreover, all residents - including the elderly, children, pregnant women - were forced to leave the city on foot in the midst of the hot season. On the way, many died from torment. Tens of thousands of people expressing dissatisfaction were shot. And as soon as the cities were empty, by order of Pol Pot, all money and banks, all industry and the cities themselves, which were declared breeding grounds of vice and anti-communism, were destroyed.

In fact, no Americans were going to bomb Cambodia. It's just that, according to Comrade Pol Pot's plan, everyone needs to live in villages and grow rice in order to build communism.

After the deportation of the urban population in the country, the first thing they did was to destroy the intelligentsia. It is clear that communism cannot be built with them; it must be built with the peasants. Everyone who wore glasses was exterminated - once wearing glasses, it means "an unfortunate intellectual" and, of course, will support the imperialists. At first, people were shot, but this had to spend ammunition. Then they began to massively blow up with TNT explosives, and then they simply began to smash the skull with a hoe.

The only Cambodian with glasses I saw on the excursion was a boy who appeared on the stage after the end of the Apsara folklore show. Probably the director (otherwise why would he go on stage?) And very smart (otherwise, why would he need glasses?). Under Pol Pot, he would not have lived long ...

Together with the intelligentsia, all teachers in the country were destroyed and schools were canceled. It would seem that school is not an obstacle to communism, because even Lenin bequeathed "to study, study and study." But Pol Pot had a special view of many problems, fundamentally different from what the founders of communism taught. And in general, despite his communist views, Pol Pot considered the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries to be enemies, and even called for a fight against Soviet expansion.

Traitor Frog

In his atrocities, Pol Pot relied on teenagers, whom he armed and trained to kill people without a twinge of conscience.
Photo: Juandax.

By the way, according to the stories of our guide, even before the communists, the Khmers had a very interesting institution of marriage. Grandmothers decided whom to marry their grandchildren and wooed the young. And in the days of Pol Pot, the Communist Party made lists where it randomly indicated who to marry whom. For disobedience and even the very idea that the Party could be wrong, punishment was imposed - you yourself understand what.

And what about the "international community"? Foreign powers knew about the horrors of Pol Pot's regime, but until he touched them directly, they preferred not to interfere. Although the deeds of the Khmer Rouge have become firmly established in folk art, leaving us a legacy of the Soviet ditty "I will torture like Pol Pot Campuchia" and the song Holiday in Cambodia by the American group Dead Kennedys, which has become a classic of punk rock.

The Troubled Times ended in 1979 when Cambodia decided to attack Vietnam. Raised by Paul Pot, youngsters with machine guns fought badly, so Vietnam easily repulsed the aggression, entered Cambodia and overthrew the tyrant.

After the end of the communist nightmare, life began to improve. The international community began to actively help Cambodians, young people were invited to study. The guide said that the inhabitants of the then Cambodia did not know anything about other countries. And when he was sent to study abroad, he opened the map and saw that the USSR is a very large country. Which means she is very rich! - our guide realized and chose the USSR as a place of study. “I came to study in 1989, and you have perestroika there ...” - the guide summed up sadly. All the tourists nodded sympathetically - they say, we remember. But our guide went through the Pol Pot camps, you will not scare him with some kind of restructuring! Therefore, he was not afraid of the new "time of troubles", he graduated from a university in our country and returned safely to his homeland.

By the way, the twin brother of our guide was not so smart and went to study in some small (judging by the size on the map) country - Japan. And now he also works as a guide, but with Japanese groups.

After exterminating the teachers, the Khmer Rouge found new uses for educational institutions. So, on the territory of a school in Phnom Penh, they set up a prison in which they tortured tens of thousands of people to death. Now it houses the Tuolsleng genocide museum, which contains not only photographs of the victims, but also much more terrible exhibits.
Photo Tuolsleng Genocide Museum .

Pol Pot lived, Pol Pot lives, will Pol Pot live?

According to the official version, Pol Pot died in 1998 - either from heart failure, or from poisoning, or committed suicide. But the guide convinced everyone that he had not died, but had gone somewhere. And he gave a bunch of evidence - starting with some rituals that would have been performed by his family if he really died, and ending with the stories of his neighbor, who was once Pol Pot's guard.

Pol Pot died, but his work lives on. He ruled the country for more than three years, but it is precisely “thanks” to the Khmer Rouge regime that modern Cambodia is so poor. A salary of about $ 70 is considered quite normal. Most adults are illiterate (remember, schools were destroyed along with the teachers). There is no industry - it was deliberately destroyed under Pol Pot. And since there is no own electricity either (it is bought at a high price in Thailand), there will be no industry. In some large cities, electricity is still available (it was supplied from Thailand), but outside the cities it is not there in principle, or it costs a lot of money. Therefore, there are no electrical appliances, including refrigerators - what was cooked was immediately eaten. The guide himself told us that he also has no light at home, but he has a laptop. Therefore, he usually arrives at the hotel for a meeting with tourists early in order to have time to charge it at the hotel for free.

After the occupation of the country, the whole world learned about the unprecedented genocide against its own population, carried out by the government of the Khmer Rouge. The mass media of both the capitalist countries and the countries of the Soviet bloc competed with each other in describing the "horrors of the Pol Pot regime", the universal extermination of the intelligentsia, and the destruction of cities. In Hollywood in 1984, the film "Killing Fields" was hastily concocted, which, thanks to the opportunistic themes, smashed a pack of "Oscars", and the Cambodian party and state leader, comrade Pol Pot, was ranked by the recorded humanists of all countries among the bloodiest "dictators" in the history of mankind ...

The condemnation of the Khmer Rouge was strikingly amicable, condemned by both the right and the left, and even left-wing radicals such as Enver Hoxha. The only countries that condemned Vietnam's invasion of Kampuchea were the PRC and the DPRK. And this despite the fact that according to all the laws of the "world community", the Pol Pot government was the only legitimate government of the country and before the "free elections" in the country in 1993, it was the Khmer Rouge delegate who represented Kampuchea at the UN.
The striking unanimity with which the political system of the state of Democratic Kampuchea, which existed from 1975 to 1978, was spat upon, both in the Western countries and in the Warsaw Pact countries, involuntarily forces the researcher of this problem to ask the question: why in opposition to the Cambodian regime the worst enemies united. What is Pol Pot's mystery? Why did he do what he did?

From the late 1960s to 1975, there was a civil war in the country, in which North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the United States actively intervened. In 1970, a military coup took place, as a result of which General Lon Nol came to power and proclaimed the creation of the Khmer Republic. In the same year, to support the Lon Nol government, which launched military operations against the Cambodian communists - the Khmer Rouge, the armed forces of the United States and South Vietnam invaded Cambodia. American aviation began massive bombing of the southern and eastern regions. By 1973, American B-52 bombers were carpet-bombing the tiny country as many tons of explosives as had been dropped on Germany in the last two years of World War II.

This five-year war, accompanied by American carpet bombing, has killed or disabled more than a million people. Then the losses will be attributed to the "bloody regime of Pol Pot and Ieng Sari.
In 1975, after winning a bloody civil war, the Khmer Rouge came to power, led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge (not because they were staunch Marxist-Leninists, but because they came from the Red Lands - the mountainous regions of Kampuchea) entered Phnom Penh without encountering any resistance. Thirty of the most influential officials, including General Lon Nol, and eighty-two American advisers in 36 helicopters, accompanied by US Marines, left the capital on April 14. The evacuation operation was aptly named "Eagle Pool".

Here is what the New York Times wrote about this: "... After America for five years helped the feudal government, which it despised, and fought a war about which it was known to be hopeless, the United States had nothing show apart from the sad picture of the evacuation with the ambassador holding the American flag in one hand and a giant suitcase in the other ... But there is a seventh of the population killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands of refugees, there is a devastated country, children dying of hunger. "

Having come to power, three simple tasks were set that require immediate solutions:
1. To end the policy of ruining the peasantry - the basis of the Cambodian society, to end corruption and usury;

2. Eliminate the eternal dependence of Kampuchea on foreign countries;

3. To restore order in the country, which is sinking deeper and deeper into anarchy, for which, first of all, it is necessary to establish a tough political regime.

Money played a fatal role in the history of Kampuchea in the 50s and 70s. It was foreign loans that turned the country into completely dependent, first on France, then on the United States, deprived of its own industrial production. Billions of francs and dollars, allegedly invested in the development of the economy, actually settled in the pockets of a handful of officials, high-ranking officers and especially talented black-marketeers, leaving the majority of the population poor with no prospects, and creating a small "elite" of bartenders, dealers, prostitutes, whose relative prosperity, against the background of a lack of industrial production and a collapsed agriculture, looked more than strange. Prince Sihanouk's experiments with "Khmer socialism" and then the regime of General Lon Nol forced more than 3.5 million people to flee to the cities. Agriculture, ravaged by economic experiments and military actions, could not feed the country. The loans were used to buy food abroad. A familiar picture, isn't it? The Lon Nol regime has left a sad legacy behind it. Agricultural production (rice) accounted for only one fourth of the 1969 level, industrial production - only one eighth. Three-quarters of the enterprises were destroyed, two-thirds of the rubber plantations were destroyed. Rubber was for Kampuchea, that oil for Russia is the main export item. Railways and highways have fallen into disrepair by three quarters. If we compare the position of Kampuchea in 1970 and the position of Russia after the civil war, then the young Soviet republic would seem to be a flourishing land. Then, of course, all this economic decadence will be dumped on the "bloody clique" of Pol Pot and Ieng Sari.

The entire population of the country was divided into three main categories by the decision of the people's power. The first - the "main people" - included the inhabitants of the regions where partisan bases arose in the 1950s, those who knew firsthand what it was like to live under socialism, who, from the beginning of 1970, lived in the liberated regions, the most affected from American air raids. This was the driving force of the country - people who felt grateful to the communists for liberation from the age-old oppression.
The second part is “new people” or “people of April 17th”. These are residents of cities and villages that were for a long time in the territory temporarily occupied by the Americans or under the control of the puppet forces of Lon Nol. This part of the population had to undergo a serious re-education. And, finally, the third category consisted of the rotten intelligentsia, reactionary clergy, persons who served in the state apparatus of the previous regimes, officers and sergeants of the Lonnol army, revisionists who were trained in Hanoi. This category of the population had to be subjected to large-scale cleansing.
Pol Pot understood this very well and said more than once: “It is not enough to prune a bad bush. We must uproot it. "
But was there really such a large-scale terror against all categories of the population in Kampuchea, which bourgeois and revisionist scribblers call "genocide"? Let us start with the fact that they cannot even name any exact figure. The last example: when it became known about the death of Pol Pot, NTV in its program first named the number of deaths in Kampuchea for the period from 1975 to 1979 at 2 million, and five minutes later the same announcer said that during the entire period of the reign Khmers "killed 1 million people. And the next day, the same program announced the figure of 3 million. Whom to believe?

The Whistleblowers show mountains of skulls on film. But in and of itself, that doesn't mean anything. Kampuchea is indeed a long-suffering country and anyone could have been in these graves. It could be victims of massive American bombing, it could be victims of Lonol's military, the graves of partisans who fought for the freedom of the country against the French colonialists, it could, finally, be the remains of bygone eras, say, the Thai invasion of Cambodia.
Think of, say, the factual movie Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. It is about the fact that several American commandos, spitting on their superiors, leave South Vietnam on the territory of Cambodia and establish a bloody kingdom of terror there. Is this an isolated case?

The depth and scale of the transformations surpassed everything that was done in this direction in the whole world history. A few days after the entry of the Khmer Rouge troops into Phnom Penh, prices for all goods were reduced by a factor of one hundred on the orders of the central government. And after the joyful population rushed into stores and shops and bought up all the goods in them, the money was canceled as unnecessary, and the National Bank, as the main hotbed of commodity-money relations, was exemplarily blown up. So, without the slightest effort, without forced nationalization, the market economy was completely destroyed in one day.
In the spring of 1976, a new constitution of the country was adopted, proclaiming the creation of Democratic Kampuchea - "the state of peasants, workers and military personnel." For the peasants, in accordance with the constitution, two-thirds of the seats in parliament were reserved. The rest were equally divided between the military and workers.
Soon the entire urban population of the country set off on the road. All city dwellers were distributed among agricultural communes. Phnom Penh was completely evacuated and turned into a ghost town with wild animals roaming its streets, which gradually devoured the jungle. There was nothing left in it except foreign embassies.

The entire population was distributed among agricultural communes and had to work every day in the rice fields, which, of course, did not like the city bums, who subsequently composed tales of the horrors of the Pol Pot regime.

The life of the poorest peasants was to become a model for the educated. Former monks and city loafers, perhaps for the first time in their lives, engaged in socially useful work: they helped their country to solve the food problem and were engaged in business - they erected dams, dug canals, cleared the impenetrable jungle.

After the destruction of the Bank, the Khmer Rouge carried out a series of mass executions in the capital. Not people were executed, things were executed. That which, in the eyes of the guerrillas, personified evil imperialism. "Merces", "Sharps", toasters and mixers were publicly smashed with sledgehammers. A kind of performances conducted by semi-literate peasants who have never heard of either postmodernism or the underground. Then the eviction began, rather the return of the townspeople to the countryside. The country needed rice. The population of Phnom Penh was 350 thousand people in 1960, and in 1979 it was already 3 million. The city was the only place where it was somehow possible to feed. Moreover, the proletariat in the classical sense of the word constituted an insignificant percentage of the total number of townspeople and was represented mainly by transport and repair workers. Within 72 hours, "new residents", as the townspeople were called in the "Angki" language, were taken to rural areas on buses and trucks confiscated under the name "Angki". Angka's slogans read: "The country must feed itself"; "From now on, if people want to eat, they have to get their own food in the rice fields"; "The city is an inhabitant of vice." The obsessive phantom of the octopus city demanding sacrifices, the all-devouring Moloch, so hated by Batka Makhno and Emil Verhaarn, was eliminated by the willful decision of Angka in just three days.

Lon Nol's gendarmes and punishers, as well as the soldiers who did not side with the Khmer Rouge until April 17, 1975, were shot on the spot. How else to deal with the geeks who destroyed the captured partisans by burning them alive in car tires or pumping Mehc gas through the anus?
When the adherents of abstract humanism write with indignation and tears about sending the Phnom Penh parasites to agricultural work, they forget, or rather simply do not know about the period in the history of Kampuchea from 1952 to 1955! It was the time of the "regrouping". The rural population, which supported the then anti-French and anti-monarchist movement "Khmer Issarak", was expelled from their native places, habitual villages and farmsteads and moved to "model villages" newly built with American money, located along the highways. The barracks houses in these villages were assembled from sheets of corrugated tin, which, according to the humanists from UNICEF, was the best fit for the conditions of the jungle. The opportunity to grow rice was completely ignored in the construction of these "islands of tranquility". Convenience of control by the local police and rural gendarmerie was put in the first place. Previous crops and villages were rendered unusable with flamethrowers. The way out for the inhabitants of the tin villages was either to partisans, or to the city for any job. It is not known how many people who did not want to leave their homes were killed, only according to official statistics, about a million. On the basis of these villages, Prince Sihanouk tried to create the so-called "Khmer socialism" by the hands of state officials.
The organization with the beautiful name "Royal Cooperative Service" quickly plundered the allocated loans. The peasants were again left with nothing, and the cooperatives by the mid-60s were recognized as "unprofitable". The same trick was done in Russia, which does not seem to be attributed to the third world countries, by the Gorbachev administration with farms that were supposed to feed Russia and half the world ... and did the same with their offenders.
Until 1979, when the moderate wing of the Communist Party, with the support of Vietnamese troops, drove the "bloody clique of Pol Pot and Ieng Sari" out of Phnom Penh, Kampuchea fully supported itself with food, without asking anyone for help.

If Pol Pot really was a "bloody maniac", and the Vietnamese troops brought the Khmer nation deliverance from the horrors of "genocide", as the democratic press claims, then why, I want to ask, not only his armed formations left with him, but also hundreds of thousands of refugees ? Why have the Khmer Rouge been successfully conducting guerrilla warfare over vast areas of the country for almost twenty years and enjoy significant support from the local population?

Power in the country was seized by the pro-Vietnamese clique of Hun Sen - Heng Samrin. In the fight against Vietnamese puppets, the Khmer Rouge were forced to conclude a temporary alliance with their yesterday's mortal enemies - the paramilitaries of Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol. Even the Americans, considering Pol Pot no longer dangerous, began to throw some humanitarian aid to him out of a desire to annoy the Vietnamese. After all, the formations of the Khmer Rouge were the only real military force in the region. The Sihanoukites had at most five thousand fighters, while Lon Nol had only one thousand.

The Khmer Rouge began to gain strength again and recaptured one area after another. This greatly frightened the international gendarmes from the UN, who put pressure on the Lonnol and Sihanouk people to become more compliant. As a result, in 1993, under the guise of UN members, the so-called "free elections" were held in the country re-named Cambodia. Comrade Pol Pot's supporters, of course, boycotted this farce imposed by international imperialism. As a result, the aged Sihanouk returned to power, the monarchy was restored in the country, and the real executive power in the country was divided by two prime ministers: the son of Sihanouk, Prince Norodom Ranarit and the leader of the Vietnamese People's Party of Cambodia (they removed the word "revolutionary" from the name of the party somewhere in the region 1991) Hong Sen. Both prime ministers hated each other to death, only one thing brought them closer together - they hated the Khmer Rouge even more.
Government forces tried to launch an offensive against the Khmer Rouge in the fall of the same year, but received a serious shock. And although the size of the government army exceeded 145 thousand people, and at that time no more than 8-10 thousand were fighting in the Khmer Rouge units, the Khmer revolutionaries invariably beat government troops in battles.

Unions of the Khmer Rouge were welded together by iron discipline and high consciousness - Pol Pot still managed to educate a fairly significant part of the population in the spirit of new ideas. And the pro-government units were a rabble made up of warriors from three previously rival groups - a truly operetta bunch! In the regular army of Cambodia, there are two generals, six colonels and about twenty majors for every hundred soldiers.

But the regular army more than compensated for its inability to fight at the expense of senseless atrocities and bullying of the country's civilian population. This is where it would be appropriate to talk about butchers and bloody sadists. “When we take Khmer Rouge militants prisoner, we cut off their heads and send them to commanders,” one such soldier told the Phnom Penh Post on May 20, 1994. - "Usually we do not kill prisoners immediately, but slowly saw off their heads with a rusty saw ...". According to the Australian Ambassador to Cambodia John Halloway, "the peasants in the countryside are most afraid of government troops, and the Khmer Rouge are viewed as intercessors."

Established in 1993 with the support of UN blue helmets, Prince Norodom Ranarith's regime is no different from the Lon Nol regime of the seventies. The same venality, financial scams. Loans from the West are used to purchase food and maintain the super-army, which, with a number of 60 thousand people, has two thousand generals and ten thousand colonels. The Russian Defense Ministry is resting. Fashionable AIDS was brought from Thailand. New beautiful paper money has been released with the image of the Ankgor Temple blown up by the Khmer Rouge. In 1997 Angka decided to donate Pol Pot to enhance its international prestige. He was judged solemnly. Nobody guarded the dictator, there was no prosecutor, no lawyers. Pol Pot was sentenced to life imprisonment in his own hut with his wife and daughter, where he died on April 14, 1998, 3 days before the official holiday of "Kampuchea Liberation Day".

Being at the pinnacle of power, Pol Pot adhered to absolute asceticism, ate meagerly, wore a low-key black tunic and did not appropriate the values ​​of the repressed, declared enemies of the people. The immense power did not corrupt him. For himself personally, he did not want anything, devoting himself entirely to serving his people and building a new society of happiness and justice. He had no palaces, no cars, no luxurious women, no personal bank accounts. Before he died, he had nothing to bequeath to his wife and daughters - he did not have a house of his own, not even an apartment, and all his meager property, which consisted of a pair of worn tunics, a walking stick, and a bamboo fan, burned down with him in a fire made of old car tires, in which he was cremated by former associates on the very next day after his death.

Until now, the history of the eight-year reign of the Khmer Rouge is presented as some kind of anomaly. Say, a kind of "born killers" appeared from the jungle and began to kill good financiers, just gendarmes and wise officials. In fact, it was a riot, a Cambodian riot, not so senseless and absolutely merciless.

Environment - ecological problems: illegal logging and logging and open mining of precious stones in the western region along the border with Thailand have led to the disappearance of many species of flora and fauna and disruption of biological balance (in particular, the destruction of mangrove swamps threatens natural fish stocks in the region) ; soil erosion; in rural areas, the majority of the population does not have access to drinking water; the dumping of toxic waste in Kampong Saom (Sihanoukville) brought from Taiwan was the cause of public outcry in December 1998
High mortality due to AIDS
Literacy rate: 35%

The population lacks education and production skills, especially in impoverished rural areas that suffer from a complete lack of any infrastructure. Recurrent political strife and internal government corruption scare off foreign investors and postpone international aid.
Population below poverty line: 36%

Narcotics: a transshipment base for heroin from the Golden Triangle; money laundering; some politicians, members of the government and the police are involved in the drug business; small production of opium, heroin and amphetamine; large-scale production of hemp for international markets.

“You talk about me like I'm some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine insulted Lyudmila Gurchenko in one popular Russian comedy.

"Polpotovschina", "Polpotov regime" - these expressions firmly entered the lexicon of Soviet international journalists in the second half of the 1970s. However, this name thundered all over the world in those years.

In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement has become on a par with the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of "Asian Hitler".

Little is known about the Cambodian dictator's childhood, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to disclose this information. Even the date of his birth is different. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Prexbauv, into a peasant family. Eighth child peasant Pek Salota and his wife Juice Nem got the name at birth Salot Sar.

The village of Prexbauv. Place of birth of Pol Pot. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Albeiro Rodas

The Pol Pot family, although they were peasant, did not live in poverty. The future dictator's cousin served at the royal court and was even the concubine of the crown prince. Pol Pot's elder brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.

Salot Sarah himself, at the age of nine, was sent to his relatives in Phnom Penh. After spending several months in a Buddhist monastery as a servant, the boy entered a Catholic elementary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College and then at Phnom Penh Technical School.

To Marxists on a royal grant

In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship to pursue higher education in France and went to Paris, where he studied radio electronics.

Pol Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

The post-war period was marked by a rapid rise in the popularity of left-wing parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students formed a Marxist circle, of which Salot Sar became a member.

In 1952, Salot Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article "Monarchy or Democracy?" In the Cambodian Students' Journal in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.

Passion for politics pushed studies into the background, and in the same year Salot Sarah was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.

In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for contacts with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia - Pham Wang Ba... Salot Sarah was recruited into party work.

"The politics of the possible"

Pham Wang Ba quite clearly described the new associate: "a young man of average ability, but with ambition and lust for power." Salot Sarah's ambition and lust for power turned out to be much greater than his comrades in the struggle had assumed.

Salot Sar took on a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is an abbreviation for the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym, he was destined to enter world history.

Norodom Sihanouk. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

In 1953 Cambodia gained independence from France. Became the ruler of the kingdom Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which was very popular and focused on China. In the Vietnam war that erupted after this, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but the units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.

During this period, the Cambodian communists operated in the country quite freely, and by 1963 Salot Sar had gone from a novice to the general secretary of the party.

By that time, a serious split was outlined in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. Cambodian Communist Party bet on Beijing, focusing on politics Comrade Mao Zedong.

Leader of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change policy, reorienting from China to the United States.

In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized townspeople.

After that, Cambodian communists unleash a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called "Khmer Rouge" were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.

Very quickly, Pol Pot's ideology began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. A native of a peasant family, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to a happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and "re-education of their inhabitants."

Even Pol Pot's associates had no idea where such a program would lead their leader ...

Lon Nol. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

In 1970, the strengthening of the position of the Khmer Rouge was promoted by the Americans. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented to the United States, was not a reliable ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which he came to power Prime Minister Lon Nol with firm pro-American views.

Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam curtail all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese responded by striking first, so much so that they nearly occupied Phnom Penh. To save your henchman, US President Richard Nixon sent American troops to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime eventually survived, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.

Guerrilla army victory

The civil war in Cambodia flared up with renewed vigor. Lon Nol's regime was not popular and rested only on American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.

By 1973, when the United States, having decided to put an end to the Vietnam War, refused to continue to provide military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country. Pol Pot dispensed with his comrades-in-arms in the Communist Party, which had been relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated connoisseurs of Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. In early April, US Marines began evacuating US citizens and senior representatives of the pro-American regime from the country. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.

"The city is the abode of vice"

Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most innocuous of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is the abode of vice; you can change people, but not cities. Working in the sweat of his brow to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand the true meaning of life, "- this was the main thesis of the leader of the" Khmer Rouge "who came to power.

2nd General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Pol Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

It was decided to evict the city of Phnom Penh with a population of two and a half million people within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to work as peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills and the like were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, other cities in Kampuchea suffered the same fate.

Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive bodies, who took up the task of identifying and eliminating the disaffected.

It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the previous regime in the army and other state structures.

Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot's closest ally, had a very vague idea of ​​what was actually happening in it. They simply refused to believe in the leaked information about hundreds of thousands of those shot, who died during the resettlement from cities and from backbreaking forced labor.

At the height of power

During this period, an extremely confusing political situation developed in Southeast Asia. The United States, after ending the Vietnam War, embarked on a course of improving relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, which supported the communists of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, began to treat them extremely hostilely, because they were guided by Moscow. Pol Pot, who was oriented towards China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge viewed the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.

Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on nationalism, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. Violent persecution of ethnic minorities, primarily the Vietnamese, resulted in an armed conflict with a neighboring country.

Pol Pot on a Laos postage stamp. 1977 year. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to infiltrate the neighboring regions of Vietnam, staging bloody massacres of the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, killing all its inhabitants, young and old. 3000 people became victims of the massacre.

Pol Pot sold out in earnest. Feeling Beijing's support behind his back, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire Warsaw Pact, that is, the Warsaw Pact Organization led by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades-in-arms and formerly loyal military units to rebel, who considered what was happening as unjustified by bloody madness. Riots were ruthlessly suppressed, the rioters were executed in the most brutal ways, but their numbers continued to grow.

Three million victims in less than four years

In December 1978, Vietnam decided that it was enough. Parts of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.

China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. A fierce but short war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.

The Khmer Rouge, who suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Cambodian-Thai border. They were saved from complete defeat by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of their positions in the region of pro-Soviet Vietnam, for the sake of this preferring to close their eyes to the results of the Pol Pot regime.

Democratic Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Official visit of the Party and Government Delegation of China (November 5-9, 1978). Meeting of Pol Pot and Wang Dongxing. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

And the results were truly impressive. For 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Pol Pot regime of July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, and several foreigners. Another 568,663 people went missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves. The total number of victims is estimated at 3,374,768.

In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried in absentia the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal recognized Pol Pot and his closest associate of Ieng Sari guilty of genocide and sentenced them in absentia to death with confiscation of all property.

Passport of Ienga Sari - one of the most influential figures in the Khmer Rouge regime. During the Pol Pot dictatorship (1975-1979), he served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

The last secrets of the leader

For Pol Pot himself, this sentence, however, meant nothing. He continued the guerrilla war against the new government of Kampuchea, hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the Khmer Rouge leader, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.

When the processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending a long-term civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to push their odious "guru" into the background. A split occurred in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.

In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his longtime associate, the former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Together with him, 13 members of his family were killed, including young children.

However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. Companions declared him a traitor and conducted their own trial over him, sentencing him to life imprisonment.

The Khmer Rouge trial of its own leader sparked the last surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.

Tomb of Pol Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Khmer Rouge officials said the former leader was heartbroken. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.

The Cambodian authorities sought the Khmer Rouge to hand over the body in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the body was hastily cremated.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him ...

Prince of Cambodia.

The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out on the rubble of French colonialism, and then escalated into a conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians were killed on the battlefields.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced the royal title ten years before the outbreak of the Vietnam War, but remained the head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to the leadership of the country as the head of state.

During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with the political leadership of Washington for not taking decisive action against the smuggling of weapons and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the Cambodian jungle. However, he was also quite lenient in his criticism of punitive US air raids.

On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, its Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, staged a coup d'etat, returning Cambodia to its ancient name of Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic but invaded it a month later. Sihanouk ended up in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, having entered into an alliance with the devil himself.

Entry into power.

Pol Pot's real name is Salot Sar (also known as Tol South and Paul Porth). He was born in the rebellious province of Kampong Thom. Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, was a monk for two years, allegedly receiving the science of tolerance and humility there. However, what was actually taught and taught in Buddhist monasteries is well known. These are the techniques of various schools of oriental martial arts, meditation, occultism, etc. Therefore, it is not difficult to guess who guided the future Pol Pot on the "true path".

During the Second World War, Salot Sar joined the Communist Party of Indochina. In the fifties, he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of the time, became involved in the leftist movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known if they met - about another student, Khieu Samfan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great-power ambitions. In Paris, he joined the ranks of the French Communist Party and became close to other Cambodian students who preached Marxism as interpreted by Maurice Therese. Returning to his homeland in late 1953 or 1954, Salot Sar began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. At the turn of the sixties, the communist movement in Cambodia was split into three almost unrelated factions operating in different parts of the country. The smallest, but the most active was the third faction, rallying on the basis of hatred of Vietnam. In 1962, secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party, Tu Samut, died under mysterious circumstances. In 1963, Salot Sar was approved as the new party secretary. He became the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist guerrillas. Salot Sar left his job at the Lyceum and went into an illegal position. By the early 1970s, the Salot Sara group had seized a number of posts in the highest party apparatus. He physically destroyed his opponents. For these purposes, a secret security department was created in the party, subordinate to Salot Saru personally.

In 1975, the Lon Nol government, despite American support, fell under the attacks of the Khmer Rouge. American B-52 bombers dropped on this tiny country as many tons of explosives as were dropped on Germany in the last two years of the Second World War. Vietnamese fighters - Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungle of the neighboring country to set up military camps and bases for operations against the Americans. These strongholds were also bombed by American planes. The Khmer Rouge not only survived, but also captured Phnom Penh on April 23, 1975, the capital of Cambodia. By this time, the Salot Sara group occupied a strong, but not sole position in the leadership of the party. This forced her to maneuver. With his usual caution, the head of the Khmer Rouge stepped into the shadows and began to prepare the ground for the final seizure of power. To do this, he resorted to a number of hoaxes. Since April 1975, his name has disappeared from official communications. Many thought he was dead.

On April 14, 1976, the appointment of a new prime minister was announced. His name was Pol Pot. The unknown name has raised eyebrows at home and abroad. It never occurred to anyone, except for a narrow circle of initiates, that Pol Pot was the disappeared Salot Sar. The difficult situation in which the Paul Pata faction found itself by the fall of 1976 was aggravated by the death of Mao Zedong. On September 27, Pol Pot was ousted from the post of prime minister, as it was announced, "for health reasons." Two weeks later, Pol Pot became prime minister again. New Chinese leaders helped him. The dictator and his henchmen set out to destroy everyone who was considered potentially dangerous, and indeed destroyed almost all the officers, soldiers and civil servants of the old regime. Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a noble old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It is with this monster that Sihanouk has teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for a common goal - the defeat of American troops.

The dictator laid out an audacious plan to build a new society and said it would take only a few days to complete. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of newly minted regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the disbandment of all religious communities. Educated abroad, he harbored a hatred of educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.

The wheel of death.

On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot ordered the forcible assimilation of 13 national minorities living in Democratic Kampuchea. They were ordered to speak Khmer, and those who could not speak Khmer were killed. On May 25, 1975, Pol Pot soldiers massacred Thais in Kahkong province in the southwest of the country. 20,000 Thais lived there, but only 8,000 remained after the massacre.

Inspired by Mao Zedong's ideas about communes, Pol Pot threw back the slogan "Back to the village!" In pursuance of this, the population of large and small cities was moved to rural and mountainous areas. On April 17, 1975, using violence combined with deception, the Pol Pot people forced more than 2 million residents of the newly liberated Phnom Penh to leave the city. All indiscriminately - sick, old, pregnant, crippled, newborn, dying - were sent to the countryside and distributed among communes, 10,000 people each. Residents were forced into backbreaking work, regardless of age and health. With primitive tools or by hand, people worked 12-16 hours a day, and sometimes longer. The few who survived said that in many areas their daily food was as little as one bowl of rice per 10 people. The leaders of the Pol Pot regime created a network of spies and encouraged mutual denunciations in order to paralyze the will of the people to resist. The Pol Pot people tried to abolish Buddhism, a religion that 85 percent of the population professed. Buddhist monks were forced to give up their traditional dress and were forced to work in "communes". Many of them were killed. Pol Pot sought to exterminate the intelligentsia and, in general, all those who had some kind of education, technical connections and experience. Out of 643 doctors and pharmacists, only 69 survived. Polpotovtsy liquidated the education system at all levels. Schools were turned into prisons, places of torture, manure stores. All books and documents stored in libraries, schools, universities, research centers were burned or looted.

His "death fields" were strewn with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world, which he and his bloodthirsty minions formed. During the reign of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, about three million people died - the same as the unfortunate victims perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War. Life under Paul Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that unfolded on the land of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.

According to Samfan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, fattening leaders fed by French colonial rulers, renounce devalued bourgeois values ​​and ideals. Samfan's twisted theory was that people should live in the fields, and all the temptations of modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot at that time, say, had been hit by a car, this theory would probably have died out in coffee houses and bars, without crossing the Paris boulevards. However, she was destined to be embodied in a monstrous reality.

Pol Pot's deputy, Ieng Sari, assisted Pol Pot's twisted dream of turning back time and making his people live in a Marxist agrarian society. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "out of sight". They were "removed" - they destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.

Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldier's brothels, or even just slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy monasteries.

In the “commune” of Psot, the massacre usually took place as follows: a person was buried up to his neck in the ground and beaten with hoes on the head. They didn’t shoot - they took care of the bullets ”. “Those who reached the age of fourteen or fifteen were forcibly sent to the so-called“ mobile brigades ”or to the army ... In addition, the selected adolescents were deliberately corrupted, accustomed to murder, they were soldered with a mixture of palm moonshine with human blood. They were taught that they are “capable of anything,” that they became “special people” because they drank human blood. ” In this cannibalism, we also see traces of Cambodia's ancient religion. The entire population of the country was divided into three categories. The first group included residents of remote mountainous and forest areas of the state. The second consisted of residents of those areas that were controlled by the ousted pro-American regime of Lon Nol. The third group consisted of former military personnel, the old administration, their families and the entire (!) Population of Phnom Penh. The third category was subject to complete destruction, and the second - partial.

This was the course of the faithful Marxist Pol Pot, who had well mastered the principles of the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On April 16, 1975, over two million people were evicted from Phnom Penh, and they were not allowed to take anything with them. “In accordance with the order, all residents were obliged to leave the city. It was forbidden to take food and things. Those who refused to obey the order or delayed were killed and shot. Neither the elderly, nor the disabled, nor pregnant women, nor the sick in hospitals escaped this fate. People had to walk, despite the rain or the scorching sun ... During the journey they were not given food or medicine ... Only on the banks of the Mekong, when the people of Phnom Penh were transported to remote regions of the country, about five hundred thousand people died. " According to another plan of Pol Pot, the villages were to be destroyed. The massacre carried out in them defies description: “The population of the village of Sreseam was almost completely destroyed ... the soldiers drove the children, tied them in a chain, pushed them into funnels filled with water and buried them alive ... People were driven to the edge of the trench, stabbed in the back of the head with a shovel or a hoe , and pushed down. When too many people were to be liquidated, they were gathered into groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed current from a generator installed on a bulldozer, and then pushed the unconscious people into a pit and covered them with earth. ” Even his own wounded soldiers Pol Pot ordered to kill, so as not to waste money on medicines.

Following the example of his teachers Stalin and Mao Zedong, Pol Pot fought against the intelligentsia. “The intelligentsia was completely destroyed: doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, scientists, students were declared mortal enemies of the regime. At the same time, anyone who wore glasses, read books, knew a foreign language, wore decent clothes, in particular European cut, was considered an intellectual. " How can we not recall the 20-30s in the USSR, when people were fired and killed for wearing a tie, ironed clothes? When everyone was forced to walk in shirts and wrinkled trousers. “Schools were either destroyed or turned into prisons, places of torture, grain and fertilizer storage facilities. Books from libraries, institutes, research centers, property of museums were destroyed, and the most valuable objects of ancient art were stolen. " And again the analogy with the USSR, where the most valuable works of art were sold abroad, and others were destroyed. “Pol Pot's bloody experiment led to the destruction of all Cambodian cities with their industry and developed infrastructure, to the physical elimination of millions of people, primarily educated and specialists, to the transformation of the country into a huge concentration camp, where the Khmer Rouge ruled with impunity.

For the Pol Pot people, focused on the values ​​of Marxist socialism, a person's life was worth nothing: in order not to waste bullets, people were killed with shovels and other improvised means, starved to death, not to mention sophisticated bullying. It is worth noting in this regard that the attempts of the communists of a number of countries, primarily Soviet ones, to dissociate themselves from these crimes and not see in them repressions akin to all communist dictatorships are unconvincing. Of course, the Khmer Red Terror can be perceived as caricature, but if you look closely and compare it with what has become known about our Red Terror in recent years of open publications and revelations, then there will be no doubts about kinship. The source of the Khmer Rouge's convictions, as well as their impudence and disrespect for people's lives, is the same - the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea of ​​eliminating hostile classes and, in general, all enemies of the revolution, which, as you know, can include anyone who does not kill himself with a shovel. (and, on occasion, himself too) ”.

The Pol Pot decree virtually eradicated ethnic minorities. The use of Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The violent eradication of ethnic groups has had a particularly hard impact on the Chan people. Their ancestors - immigrants from present-day Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. Vats migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and fished along the shores of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, retaining the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.

Young fanatics from the Khmer Rouge attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were expelled into the swamps infested with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was categorically forbidden by their religion, the clergy were ruthlessly destroyed. With the slightest resistance, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Less than half of the two hundred thousand vats survived. Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death is better than hellish torment under the new regime.

According to Pol Pot, the older generation was spoiled by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with "sympathy" for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their homes to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by overwork.

People were killed even for trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as it was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.

In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat as bedding and a bowl of rice at the end of the day, in conditions that would not have been the envy of even Nazi concentration camp prisoners during World War II, traders, teachers, entrepreneurs who survived only because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other townspeople. These camps were organized in such a way as to get rid of the elderly and sick, pregnant women and young children through "natural selection".

People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the clubs of cruel overseers. With no medical attention other than traditional herbal treatments, the life expectancy of the prisoners in these camps was frustratingly short. Stalin and Hitler are resting.

At dawn, people were sent in formation to the malaria swamps, where they cleared the jungle for 12 hours a day in unsuccessful attempts to reclaim new crops from them. At sunset, again in formation, driven by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their bowl of rice, liquid gourd and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite the terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political studies on Marxist ideology, in which incorrigible "bourgeois elements" were identified and punished, and the rest, like parrots, all repeated phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days there was a long-awaited day off, for which twelve hours of ideological studies were planned. Wives lived separately from their husbands. Their children began to work at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who raised them to be fanatical "fighters of the revolution."

From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were set up in the city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these bonfires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. Organized "lessons of hatred" when people were flogged with a whip in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of terror and despair. In the “commune” it was strictly forbidden to read ... If they found a magazine or a book, they dealt with the whole family ...

Pol Pot residents severed diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country was prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the whole world.

To intensify the fight against real and imagined enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and executions in his prison camps. As in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his henchmen proceeded from the premise that those who entered these accursed places were guilty and they had only to admit their guilt. In order to convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of "national revival", the regime attached particular political significance to torture.

Documents seized after Pol Pot's overthrow show that Khmer security officers, trained by Chinese instructors, were guided by cruel ideological principles in their activities. The S-21 Interrogation Manual, one of the documents later transferred to the UN, read: "The purpose of torture is to get an adequate response from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to induce a quick reaction. Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated. During torture, one should not proceed from one's own anger or self-gratification. Beat the one being worn out in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. instruments of torture Do not try to kill the interrogated without fail. During interrogation, political considerations are the main, inflicting pain is secondary. Therefore, do not forget that you are engaged in political work. Even during interrogation, you should constantly carry out propaganda work. At the same time, you should avoid indecision and hesitation during torture, when possible get answers to our questions from the enemy. It must be remembered that indecision can slow down our work. In other words, in agitation and educational work of this kind, it is necessary to show decisiveness, perseverance, categoricalness. We must proceed to torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be broken. "

Among the many sophisticated methods of torture used by the Khmer Rouge executioners, the most popular were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and suffocation with a cellophane bag. Object S-21, which gave its name to the document, was the most notorious camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were tortured here. Only seven survived, and even then only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their masters to manage this terrible institution.

But torture was not the only weapon used to intimidate the already intimidated population of the country. There are many cases when the guards in the camps found prisoners driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was a terrible death. The guilty were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slow death from hunger and thirst, while their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and put on stakes around the settlement. A sign was hung around the neck: "I am a traitor to the revolution!"

Death Pran, the Cambodian translator of the American journalist Sydney Schoenberg, has lived through the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhuman ordeals that he had to go through are documented in the film "The Field of Death", in which the suffering of the Cambodian people first appeared before the whole world with stunning nudity. The heartbreaking narrative of Pran's journey from civilized childhood to the death camp horrified the audience. “In my prayers, - said Pran, - I asked the Almighty to relieve me of the unbearable torment that I had to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to escape from the country and take refuge in America. For their sake I continued to live, but it was not life but a nightmare. "

The foreign policy of the Pol Pot regime was characterized by aggressiveness and masked fear of powerful powers. After the final confirmation in power, Pol Pot decided to isolate himself from the outside world. In response to Japan's proposal to establish diplomatic relations, the Pol Pot residents said that Cambodia "will not be interested in them for another 200 years." Exceptions to the general rule were only a few countries, to which Pol Pot, for one reason or another, had personal sympathy. In January 1977, after almost a year's lull, shots sounded on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. Detachments of the "Khmer Rouge", crossing the Vietnamese border, killed residents of border villages with truncheons. In 1978, Vietnam signed a pact with Kampuchea's only ally, China, and launched a full-scale invasion. Dec. 1978 Vietnamese troops, for many years clashing with the Khmer Rouge over the disputed border areas, entered Cambodia with the help of several motorized infantry divisions, supported by tanks. The country fell into such a decline that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles. The Chinese did not come to Pol Pot's aid, and in January 1979 his regime fell under the onslaught of Vietnamese troops. The fall happened so swiftly that the tyrant had to flee from Phnom Penh in a white Mercedes two hours before the triumphant appearance in the capital of the army of Hanoi. However, Pol Pot was not going to give up. He entrenched himself in a secret base with a handful of loyal followers and formed the National Front for the Liberation of the Khmer People. The Khmer Rouge retreated in an organized manner into the jungle on the border with Thailand.

In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot had left the empty capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who gave him refuge, but did not support him in the fight against the Viet Cong, armed to the teeth.

When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, help rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis at the time, were very meticulous in filing their crimes. The investigation found magazines in which daily executions and tortures were recorded in detail, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to death, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated at the initial stages of the terror, detailed documentation of the notorious "death fields". These fields, conceived as the basis of a working utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be the mass graves of the day of the burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny. "After three years of the existence of the Pol Pot regime, Kampuchea was called nothing other than a" huge concentration camp "," a giant prison "," a state of barracks socialism "where blood flows like a river and the policy of genocide against its own nation is ruthlessly and systematically carried out." Out of the country's 8 million population, 5 million survived.

After the overthrow.

On August 15-19, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Kampuchea tried the case on the charge of the "Pol Pot - Ieng Sari clique" of genocide. Pol Pot and Ieng Sari were found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. The Pol Pot people left Kampuchea in a grave condition. Despite all this, representatives of the "Khmer Rouge" headed by Khieu Samphan remained for some time in Phnom Penh. The parties have been looking for ways to mutual reconciliation for a long time. The Pol Pot residents helped themselves to feel confidently the support of the United States. By the insistence of the superpower, the Pol Pot people retained their place in the UN. But in 1993, after the Khmer Rouge boycotted the country's first parliamentary elections under UN supervision, the movement completely hid in the jungle. With every year, the contradictions among the leaders of the Khmer Rouge grew. In 1996, Ieng Sari, who was deputy prime minister in the Pol Pot government, joined the government with 10,000 fighters. In response, Pol Pot has traditionally resorted to terror. He ordered the execution of Defense Minister Song Sung, his wife and nine children. Terrified associates of the tyrant orchestrated a conspiracy led by Khieu Samfan, Ta Mok, the commander of the troops, and Nuon Chea, the most influential person in the Khmer Rouge leadership. In June 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest. He was left with his second wife Mia Som and daughter Seth Seth. The family of the dictator was guarded by one of the Polpot commanders Nuon Nu.

In early April 1998, the United States suddenly began to demand the transfer of Pol Pot to an international tribunal, pointing out the need for "just retribution." The position of Washington, which is difficult to explain in the light of its past policy of supporting the dictator, has caused a lot of controversy among the Angka leadership. In the end, it was decided to trade Pol Pot for his own safety. The search for contacts with international organizations began, but the death of the bloody tyrant on the night of April 14-15, 1998, immediately solved all the problems. According to the official version, Pol Pot died of a heart attack. His body was cremated, and the skull and bones left after the burning were handed over to his wife and daughter.

Pran was fortunate enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of the devastated country, which survived a terrible tragedy, there are still mass graves of nameless victims, over which mounds of human skulls rise in mute reproach. It is unlikely that Pol Pot knew the work of the artist Vereshchagin, but he seems to have decided to recreate his painting "The Apotheosis of War" in real life.

In the end, thanks to military power, and not morality and law, it was possible to end the bloody massacre and restore at least a semblance of common sense on the torn earth. Great credit should be given to Great Britain's protest in 1978 against human rights abuses following reports of terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but the protest went unheeded. Britain issued a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a Khmer Rouge spokesman retorted hysterically: “British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world is well aware of their barbaric nature. only unemployment, sickness and prostitution. "

Pol Pot, who seemed to have faded into oblivion, has recently reappeared on the political horizon as a force claiming power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that the victims were "enemies of the state." Returning to Cambodia in 1981, in a secret meeting among his old friends near the border with Thailand, he declared that he was too gullible: “My policy was correct. Too zealous regional commanders and leaders on the ground twisted my orders. lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago. "

A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a third of the country's population, is too innocent a word to denote what was done on behalf of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the well-known Nazi principle - the more monstrous a lie, the more people are able to believe in it - Pol Pot continued to rush to power and hopes to gather strength in rural areas, which, in his opinion, are still loyal to him. He again became a major political figure and was waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and the completion of the earlier business - his "great agrarian revolution".

By the way, the United States then achieved that the Pol Pot members retained a place in the UN. This is another example of American "democracy". In 1982, Pol Pot regains power, holding it until 1985, when he suddenly announces his retirement. Soon, civil war breaks out in the country again, and the aged dictator returns to political life, heading the pro-communist Khmer Rouge group. Now he already orders to shoot his own ministers, fearing treason on their part. The composure shown by him in killing his closest supporters instills terror in his entourage. And it decides, in order to save its life, to remove Pol Pot from power, which they managed to do in June 1997. For the next year, the dictator lived under house arrest until he died in 1998. According to beliefs, Pol Pot's body was burned at a ritual fire. By the way, before putting the body in the coffin, the nostrils of the dead man were plugged with cotton so that the spirit of the dead man would not escape the fire. Such was the fear of people in front of a man who "is rightfully called the most terrible villain of the outgoing century."

In world history, there are several names of dictators who have caused large-scale wars and deaths of millions of people. Undoubtedly, the first on this list is Adolf Hitler, who became the measure of evil. However, in Asian countries there was an analogue of Hitler, who, in percentage terms, caused no less damage to his own country - the Cambodian leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, the leader of Democratic Kampuchea Pol Pot.

The history of the Khmer Rouge is truly unique. Under the communist regime, in just three and a half years, the country's 10 million population fell by about a quarter. The losses of Cambodia during the reign of Pol Pot and his associates ranged from 2 to 4 million people. Without underestimating the scope and consequences of the Khmer Rouge domination, it is worth noting that their victims are often counted among those killed by American bombing, refugees and those killed in clashes with the Vietnamese. But first things first.

Humble teacher

The exact date of birth of the Cambodian Hitler is still unknown: the dictator managed to shroud his figure in a veil of secrecy and rewrote his own biography. Historians agree that he was born in 1925.

Pol Pot himself said that his parents were simple peasants (this was considered honorable) and he was one of eight children. However, in fact, his family held a fairly high position in the power structure of Cambodia. Subsequently, Pol Pot's older brother became a high-ranking official, and his cousin became the concubine of King Monivong. [C-BLOCK]

It should be noted right away that the name under which the dictator went down in history is not his real name. His father named him at birth Salot Sar. And only many years later, the future dictator adopted the pseudonym Pol Pot, which is an abbreviated version of the French expression "politique potentielle", which literally translates as "politics of the possible."

Little Sar grew up at a Buddhist monastery, and then, at the age of 10, was sent to a Catholic school. In 1947, thanks to the patronage of his sister, he was sent to study in France (Cambodia was a French colony). There, Salot Sar became interested in leftist ideology and met future associates Ieng Sari and Khieu Samfan. In 1952 Sar joined the French Communist Party. True, by that time the Cambodian had completely abandoned his studies, as a result of which he was expelled and was forced to return to his homeland. [C-BLOCK]

The internal political situation in Cambodia in those years was not easy. In 1953, the country gained independence from France. The European colonialists could no longer hold Asia in their hands, however, they did not intend to leave it either. When Crown Prince Sihanouk came to power, he severed ties with the United States and tried to establish strong ties with communist China and pro-Soviet North Vietnam. The reason for the severance of relations with America was the constant invasions of Cambodia by the American military, who pursued or looked for North Vietnamese fighters. The United States took into account these claims and promised to no longer enter the territory of a neighboring state. But Sihanouk, instead of accepting the US apology, decided to go even further and allowed the troops of North Vietnam to be based in Cambodia. In the shortest possible time, part of the North Vietnamese army actually "moved" to its neighbors, becoming inaccessible to the Americans, which caused great displeasure in the United States.

The local population of Cambodia suffered greatly from this policy. The constant movement of foreign troops damaged agriculture and was simply annoying. The peasants were also displeased with the fact that the already modest grain reserves were bought by government forces several times cheaper than market value. All this led to a significant strengthening of the communist underground, which included the Khmer Rouge organization. It was to her that Salot Sar joined, who, after returning from France, worked as a teacher at a school. Taking advantage of his position, he skillfully introduced communist ideas among his own students.

Rise of the Khmer Rouge

Sihanouk's policies led to a civil war in the country. Both Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers plundered the local population. In this regard, the Khmer Rouge movement received tremendous support, which conquered more and more cities and settlements. Villagers either joined the communists or flocked to the big cities. It should be noted that the backbone of the Khmer army was made up of adolescents aged 14-18. Salot Sar believed that older people were too influenced by Western countries.

In 1969, against the backdrop of such events, Sihanouk was forced to turn to the United States for help. The Americans agreed to restore relations, but on the condition that they were allowed to attack the North Vietnamese bases located in Cambodia. As a result, both the Viet Cong and the civilian population of Cambodia were killed in the course of their carpet bombing. [C-BLOCK]

The actions of the Americans only made the situation worse. Then Sihanouk decided to enlist the support of the Soviet Union and China, for which he went to Moscow in March 1970. This provoked outrage in the United States, as a result of which there was a coup in the country and the American protégé, Prime Minister Lon Nol, came to power. His very first step as the country's leader was the expulsion of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia within 72 hours. However, the communists were in no hurry to leave their homes. And the Americans, together with the South Vietnamese troops, organized a ground operation to destroy the enemy in Cambodia itself. They were successful, it did not bring Lon Nol in popularity - the population was tired of other people's wars.

Two months later, the Americans left Cambodia, but the situation was still extremely tense. There was a war in the country, in which pro-government troops, the Khmer Rouge, North and South Vietnamese, and many other small groups participated. From that time to the present day, a considerable number of various mines and traps have remained in the jungles of Cambodia.

Gradually, the Khmer Rouge began to emerge as leaders. They managed to unite under their banners a huge army of peasants. By April 1975, they had surrounded the state capital of Phnom Penh. The Americans - the main support of the Lon Nol regime - did not want to fight for their protégé. And the head of Cambodia fled to Thailand, and the country was under the control of the communists. [C-BLOCK]

In the eyes of Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge were real heroes. They were greeted with applause. However, after a few days, Pol Pot's army began to rob civilians. At first, the disaffected were simply pacified by force, and then they moved on to executions. It turned out that these atrocities were not the arbitrariness of rabid teenagers, but a purposeful policy of the new government.

The Khmers began to forcibly resettle the inhabitants of the capital. People were lined up at gunpoint and driven out of the city. The slightest resistance was punishable by firing squad. In a matter of weeks, two and a half million people left Phnom Penh.

An interesting detail: members of the Salot Sara family were also among the expelled. They found out that their relative had become the new dictator by chance when they saw a portrait of the leader, which was sketched by a Cambodian artist.

Pol Pot politics

The rule of the Khmer Rouge was significantly different from the existing communist regimes. The main feature was not only the absence of a personality cult, but the complete anonymity of the leaders. Among the people, they were known only as Bon (older brother) with a serial number. Pol Pot was the No. 1 older brother.

The first decrees of the new government declared a complete rejection of religion, parties, any free thinking, medicine. Since there was a humanitarian disaster in the country and medicines were sorely lacking, a recommendation was made to resort to “traditional folk remedies”.

The main emphasis in domestic politics was on rice cultivation. The management gave the order to collect three and a half tons of rice from each hectare, which in those conditions was practically unrealistic.

The fall of Pol Pot

Khmer leaders were extreme nationalists, in connection with which ethnic cleansing began, in particular, the Vietnamese and Chinese were killed. In fact, the Cambodian communists staged a full-scale genocide, which could not but affect relations with Vietnam and China, which initially supported the Pol Pot regime.

The conflict between Cambodia and Vietnam was growing. Pol Pot, in response to criticism, openly threatened the neighboring state, promising to occupy it. Cambodian border troops staged sorties and harshly cracked down on Vietnamese peasants from border settlements. [C-BLOCK]

In 1978, Cambodia began to prepare for a war with Vietnam. Each Khmer was required to kill at least 30 Vietnamese. There was a slogan that the country was ready to fight with its neighbor for at least 700 years.

However, it didn't take 700 years. At the end of December 1978, the Cambodian army attacked Vietnam. Vietnamese troops launched a counterattack and in exactly two weeks defeated the Khmer army, consisting of teenagers and peasants, and captured Phnom Penh. The day before the Vietnamese entered the capital, Pol Pot managed to escape by helicopter.

Cambodia after the Khmers

After the capture of Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese imprisoned a puppet government in the country and sentenced Pol Pot to death in absentia.

Thus, the Soviet Union has already gained control over two countries. This categorically did not suit the United States and led to a paradoxical situation: the main stronghold of world democracy supported the communist regime of the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot and his associates hid in the jungle near the border between Cambodia and Thailand. Under pressure from China and the United States, Thailand granted refuge to the Khmer leadership. [C-BLOCK]

Since 1979, Pol Pot's influence has slowly but surely waned. His attempts to return to Phnom Penh and dislodge the Vietnamese from there failed. In 1997, by his decision, one of the high-ranking Khmer leaders, Son Sen, was shot together with his family. This convinced Pol Pot supporters that their leader had lost touch with reality, as a result of which he was ousted.

In early 1998, Paul Pot's trial took place. He was sentenced to life in prison under house arrest. However, he did not have to sit in captivity for a long time - on April 15, 1998, he was found dead. There are several versions of his death: heart failure, poisoning, suicide. This is how the cruel dictator of Cambodia ended his life ingloriously.