Pol Pot (14 page)

In the PCF’s scheme of things, Sâr’s lack of academic qualifications was not merely of no importance, it was actually an advantage. The French Party in the early 1950s was viscerally anti-intellectual. What mattered most was proletarian origin. Sâr, the former trainee carpenter, was better placed than the others to satisfy class criteria. He may also have been encouraged by Hou Yuon to play a more active role. The members of his cell, he recalled, ‘chose me to take charge of research on theoretical and ideological issues . . . My diploma was not as high as the others, and my French was not as good as theirs — none the less, they gave me [this] work to do.’ A French militant who met him at that time remembered him as a ‘discreet, courteous, polite young man . . . with firm convictions’. He began reading the PCF magazine,

and tried to analyse and compare the experience of different countries’ revolutionary movements.

Like other members of the Cercle, Sâr also studied Stalin’s 1912 essay

and the

— both of which, he said later, he found

easier to understand

than Lenin or Marx. The first sets out a materialist definition of the nation as a ‘stable, historically constituted community’ with a common culture, language and territory, and explicitly rejects the idea that a nation is a racial blood group — notions that accord closely with traditional Khmer ideas equating both ‘race’ and ‘nation’ with cultural behaviour. The second work, written by Stalin in 1938 in the aftermath of

the Great Terror, was used as a political primer by communist parties all over the world. The PCF, in its usual, humourless fashion, handed it out free to anyone who bought the first ten volumes of the

of the PCF leader, Maurice Thorez. Mao had it translated into Chinese. Ho Chi Minh issued a Vietnamese version. It cannot therefore, of itself, be blamed for the singular barbarism of future Cambodian communist practice. But it was a crucial formative influence.

The

hammered home

six basic lessons

. Some of them — like the need to stay close to the masses’, and not to become ‘dizzy with success’ — were typically honoured in the breach. But Stalin’s four other precepts marked indelibly the thinking of the future Cambodian revolutionaries. He stressed the importance of correct leadership — ‘without which the cause of the proletarian revolution will be ruined’ — and of criticism and self-criticism; he taught that Marxism-Leninism was not a dogma, but a guide to action, constantly enriched by new revolutionary experience; and, above all, he urged eternal vigilance. ‘One of the watchwords of the Bolshevik Party’, Stalin wrote, is that ‘the Party grows ever stronger by cleansing itself of opportunist elements’:

Without waging an intransigent struggle against the opportunists in its own ranks . . . the Party of the working class . . . cannot carry out its role . . . It might seem that the Bolsheviks have spent too much time [on this struggle] and accorded it too much importance . . . That is absolutely false. We can no more tolerate opportunism among us than we tolerate an ulcer in a healthy body . . . There is no way we can allow doubters, opportunists, capitulationists and traitors within the leading headquarters of the working class . . . A fortress is taken most easily from within. To be victorious, we must, before all else, purge the working class Party and its forward citadel, its leading headquarters, of capitulationists, deserters, criminals and traitors.

The

offered other lessons, too: on the importance of revolutionaries using both legal and illegal forms of struggle in order to win power; and on the need for a ‘monolithic and combative’, intrinsically elitist Party, for which candidates must be vigorously screened, rather than a broad-based body to which all and sundry might aspire. But the burden of Stalin’s message was that communists must constantly be on guard against ‘political crooks’, ‘tricksters’ and ‘agents of foreign spy organisations’. Such people, he wrote, would go to any lengths to camouflage their ‘vile designs’ and worm their way into the Party, using membership as a mask for sabotage and betrayal. The only correct response to these ‘dregs of the human species’was ‘pitiless repression’.

Stalinism, having been shaped by the legacy of Russian feudalism,

resonated with the Khmers, whose culture likewise had little place for the subtle checks and balances that were applied, however imperfectly, in the Confucian world of China and Vietnam. Some members of the Cercle remained unconvinced: Phuong Ton had reservations, and Hou Yuon warned against ‘confusing the elimination of the bourgeoisie [as a class] with the elimination of bourgeois [individuals]’. But Sâr, Rath Samoeun and Ieng Sary had no doubts. When the PCF purged two Politburo members, Andre Marty and Charles Tillon, for breaking Party discipline, Samoeun enthusiastically told a French comrade: ‘I’ve just been waiting for this. I was beginning to think the PCF was too moderate, too legalistic and parliamentary’

Sary, by this time, had a portrait of Stalin on his wall, as did Thiounn Thioeunn’s fellow medical student In Sokhan. That year

he confided

to Keng Vannsak: ‘I will direct the revolutionary organisation . . . I will hold the dossiers; I will supervise the ministers; I will watch that they do not deviate from the line laid down by the Central Committee in the interests of the people.’ The words, recalled decades later, may not be exact, but the sentiments ring true. By 1952, Ieng Sary, as head of the Cercle, saw himself as Cambodia’s future revolutionary leader.

Saloth Sâr had more modest ambitions. He was slowly beginning to emerge as a ‘progressive student’ in his own right.

He gave talks

to the members of his cell.

He helped

to duplicate the Cercle’s clandestine journal,

(‘the Spark’, named after Lenin’s revolutionary paper), in Ieng Sary’s hotel room. There he met for the first time Khieu Ponnary, the elder sister of Sary’s fiancee, who was about to return to Phnom Penh to teach at the Lycée Sisowath. Keng Vannsak would say later that Sâr and Sary ‘ate and slept revolution’. But Sary was in charge, Sâr followed behind.

He started reading

which until then he had avoided, disliking its strident tone. Mey Mann, too, had been repelled by the ‘quasi-monarchical’ devotion the newspaper showed towards Maurice Thorez, which reminded him of Sihanouk’s court. In the early 1950s,

had no illusions about the kind of stories that would grab the attention of its working-class readership. Alongside articles by Politburo members about the minimum wage and the iniquities of Gaullism were gruesome crime reports with headlines like, ‘Amélie Rabilloud shows how she killed and cut up her husband’; ‘I baby devoured by the family dog before the eyes of its mother’; and ‘Suzanne Feret kept the corpse of her child in a suitcase for 38 days’.

None the less,

faithfully reflected the PCF’s (and Stalin’s) priorities: the campaign to ban atomic weapons; the supposed menace of German rearmament; the Korean War; and the battle against French

colonialism. Not only Indochina but French North Africa and Madagascar were seething with unrest. Anti-colonial rallies were held at the Salle de la Mutualité in the Latin Quarter, triggering fist-fights with right-wing students on the Boulevard St Michel which often ended with a night in the cells. Khieu Samphân remembered an insurrectional atmosphere in the city, where ‘one was almost led to believe that a great revolution was about to break out’ — less fanciful than it might seem at a time when communist doctrine proclaimed that the only way to power was through a general uprising.

These were the years when 25 per cent of the French electorate voted for the PCF, more than for any other political party. To be a communist was a badge of honour, the legacy of the glory days when the communists formed the backbone of resistance against Nazi Germany. The PCF leader, Maurice Thorez, travelled in an armoured black limousine to guard against assassination attempts and lesser figures, including Politburo members, were constantly harassed by the police. Left-wing writers and painters like Paul Eluard, Picasso, Louis Aragon and Sartre issued ringing statements of support. The communist journalist André Stil was imprisoned for writing that the US had engaged in bacteriological warfare in Korea.

urged its readers to draw inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871, whose eightieth anniversary the PCF marked with grandiose celebrations and whose collapse under the assaults of the bourgeoisie was, in the words of one PCF leader, ‘an invitation to redouble our vigilance against the activities of enemy agents’. If that parallel seemed too remote, the East European show trials — of Rajk and Kostov in 1949 and the Czechoslovak leader, Rudolf Slansky, in 1952 — proved to the Party faithful that dangers lurked on every side. The fervour of those who believed was equalled only by the terror unleashed against those who did not.

It was through

that Sâr learnt for the first time of the heresy of Yugoslavia’s President Tito. The Belgrade—Zagreb motorway, on which he and his colleagues had laboured, was now, the newspaper noted smugly, the target of anti-Tito saboteurs. Sâr’s views are not recorded but he probably disapproved. According to Nghet Chhopininto, many Cambodian students secretly sympathised with the Yugoslav leader because ‘he stood up to Stalin. Apart from Yugoslavia, all the other east European countries were under Soviet tutelage. Tito was the only one who waved the flag of national independence . . . And that pleased us.’

The parallel with Cambodia, likewise struggling to affirm its identity against powerful neighbours, Vietnam and Thailand, did not need to be spelt out.

*   *   *

Another

seminal influence

, not just for Sâr but for all the members of the Cercle, was Mao’s speech

Originally delivered to cultural workers in Yan’an in January 1940, it provided a detailed blueprint for revolution in a colonial or semi-colonial state. Ho Chi Minh established the League for Vietnamese Independence (the Viet Minh) on the basis of the principles set out in this speech, and the term ‘new democracies’ soon became standard communist jargon for countries in transition, on the way to becoming socialist states. The ICP Secretary-General, Truong Chinh, looked forward to the day when ‘New Democracy [will] cover a continuous expanse reaching from Central Europe to [Vietnam’s] Cape Camau’. The word ‘democracy’ itself became a synonym for socialism. When Party workers referred to ‘democratic publications’, they meant the communist press. There were ‘people’s democracies’ in Eastern Europe; a ‘Democratic Front’ in Asia; and a ‘World Democratic Bloc’ under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Even Son Ngoc Minh and his Vietnamese mentors adopted the new fashion: Khmerland was referred to as ‘

Democratic Cambodia

’ which, with Pathet Lao and North Vietnam, formed the region’s three ‘democratic nations’.

Mao argued that revolutions in colonies, or semi-colonial semi-feudal states, had to take place in two stages: first, a ‘democratic revolution’, carried out by an alliance of different classes — the peasants, who provided the main force, the workers and elements of the bourgeoisie; and only afterwards a ‘socialist revolution’. The two were fundamentally different and could not be collapsed into one. The first stage would create ‘a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes’; the second, a socialist state under ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. In a world where socialism had become the dominant trend, it was no longer necessary, Mao said, to pass through the phase of bourgeois capitalism, as Marx had assumed. Instead the transition could be accomplished through the establishment of ‘a new-democratic republic’, which would nationalise banks and major industrial and commercial enterprises while permitting ‘such capitalist production as does not dominate the livelihood of the people’. It was true, Mao admitted, that the bourgeoisie were unreliable allies, who would turn tail at the first sign of trouble. None the less, the ‘new democracy’ phase of revolution was ‘necessary and cannot be dispensed with’, and since ‘we are [realists], not Utopians’, it would last for ‘quite a long time’.

For students from colonised nations, this was an exhilarating prospect. It meant there was a path to socialism which could elide western-style capitalism. And Mao added, as a further encouragement, that ‘the only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people’, which

seemed to mean that a revolution could be whatever the masses, or their leaders, wished. ‘The universal truth of Marxism,’ he explained, ‘must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula. Marxists who make a fetish of formulas are simply playing the fool . . .’

Only on one point was Mao, like Stalin, totally inflexible:

Either you co-operate with the Communist Party or you oppose it . . . The moment you oppose the Communist Party, you become a traitor . . . Whoever wants to oppose the Communist Party must be prepared to be ground into dust. If you are not keen on being ground into dust, you had certainly better drop your opposition.

With Stalin’s grim prescriptions for maintaining purity in a revolutionary party and Mao’s guide to revolutionary practice, the young Khmer communists-in-the-making seemed to have most of what they needed. None of them, not even Ieng Sary with his much-vaunted ‘diploma’ from the PCF Cadre School, took much interest in Marxist theory. No one indulged in philosophical speculation about metaphysics or the unity of opposites, as Mao and his companions did at a comparable stage of their careers. Nor, it seems, did they seek out Western accounts of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Edgar Snow’s