Vietnamese troops captured the capital of Kampuchea (now Cambodia), the city of Phnom Penh, and overthrew the regime of the Khmer Rouge (so called the militants of the Communist Party who came to power in the country in April 1975) led by the General Secretary of the Central Committee Pol Pot.
The party leader and his closest entourage were quite educated people - they received higher education at French universities, where they were fascinated by Marxist ideology in a radical Maoist interpretation. After returning to their native country, they began to build a society of "equal opportunities". The main driving force of social transformations was declared to be the landless and small-land peasantry, which, together with the urban lumpen, made up the army of the “pursued and hungry”. So, the units of the rebels consisted of aggressive young men with little education, who enthusiastically carried out the project of forced resettlement of townspeople to villages, where everyone had equal opportunities for hard work on the land and an ascetic life.
Private property, market trade, money – all this was prohibited. Instead of a salary for work, simple food was given. The urban population, “spoiled by civilization”, was driven on foot, barefoot, into the remote countryside under the muzzles of machine guns. It was strictly forbidden to ask any questions, take any personal belongings with you.
Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge, who remained in the empty city, had the duty to completely destroy it: destroy banks, shops, restaurants, libraries, theaters, mutilate thousands of private cars and motorcycles, break into former private residences and smash household appliances (televisions, radios, washing machines and food processors).
Labor camps were formed from those who survived the deportation - separate men's, women's and children's camps. Traditional family values were not encouraged: husbands could see their wives no more than once a month, if they had the permission of a local party functionary. For the unauthorized birth of a child, a woman was subject to execution, because both pregnancy and feeding a child were considered a way of evading labor duty. The baby was also destroyed. Children born with the permission of the party were held in special camps where they were taught to hate their parents and kill their enemies.
Dressed in uniform clothes made of the cheapest black cloth, shod in standard rubber sandals, people ate little, worked in the rice fields from morning to night, and were almost deprived of leisure time. They were offered to enjoy “joint work for the good of the people.”
The most brutal was the treatment of educated townspeople. These were “extra” people for the new society, because schools and hospitals (they were turned into prisons), banks, libraries, theaters and other cultural institutions were considered as “sources of colonizing influence”, breeding grounds of “urban parasitism” and were closed. A hunt was announced for people wearing glasses – based on this external sign, the Khmer Rouge mercilessly killed “unfortunate intellectuals”. Knowledge of a foreign language, some special skills (for example, to apply a tourniquet, to give an injection) were considered a crime for which one must pay with blood. Of course, the former military, political, and economic elite of society, its officials, were destroyed.
The “Khmer Rouge” saved bullets, so they resorted to various “wasteless” methods of killing: beheading with picks and hoes, drowning in water, suffocating with plastic bags; young children were hung from trees, and people who died of hunger were thrown into pits dug in the very fields where they had “happily” worked.
The crimes of the regime of the fanatic Pol Pot gained worldwide publicity and were classified as genocide. The remains of 1,386,734 executed people were found in about 20,000 mass graves discovered throughout the country. The total number of victims, including those who died of starvation, is estimated at 1.7–2.2 million people. According to the UN and the Red Cross, even more - about 2.5 million Cambodians - were on the verge of starvation. It is noteworthy that the end of the dictatorship did not come due to the resistance of the population, but through external intervention. After all, during his reign, Pol Pot did not forget to threaten his neighbors to extend the territory of the society of “equal opportunities” to their land as well.
The totalitarian regime, which was based on a utopian worldview, ceased to exist. In memory of the social experiment, destroyed cities, destroyed social institutions and, most horrifically, the burials of barbarically murdered citizens – about a quarter of the country's population - remain.
The historical parallels with the Soviet experience are obvious. Thus, social engineering in the USSR as a whole was more prudent, especially if we consider not the model of Stalin's classical totalitarianism (1930s-early 1950s), but the Khrushchev-Brezhnev variant. However, all of them are based on violence, mistrust of the creative principle in a person, his ability to have his own vision and free choice. The duration of such “communist construction” is much longer than the Polpots experiment – so even after three decades we have indestructible consequences in mentality and behavioral standards. And the neighboring country is re-ideologizing its population and is already dreaming of the restoration of the USSR and “communist-imperial revenge” in Europe. The historical story about the collapse of the Polpots regime is a reminder of the inhumanity of societies built on violence.
Olena Ishchenko
We suggest you to watch the museum activity “Khmer Rouge Regime in Kampuchea: Communist Death Machine”.