Pol Pot (born Saloth Sar; May 19, 1925 – April 15, 1998) was the leader of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the head of state of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979, the regime that carried out the Cambodian genocide. Pol Pot is one of the most consequential and most ideologically committed communist rulers of the twentieth century — the architect of the highest per-capita killing in any Cold War regime.
Saloth Sar was born on May 19, 1925, in the village of Peambr, in Prek Sbauv district, Kompong Thom province. His family was of modest Chinese-Khmer background: his father was a rice farmer, his mother the daughter of a minor royal official. He was educated in the Buddhist monastic system in Phnom Penh, was admitted to the prestigious Lycée Sisowath, and won a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris in 1949. He was a mediocre student and a serious communist; he joined the Cercle Marxiste of French Indochinese students in 1951 and the French Communist Party in 1953. The Cercle Marxiste also included Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Hou Yuon, and Khieu Samphan — the future senior leadership of the Khmer Rouge. He returned to Cambodia in 1953, joined the Pracheachon (the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party), and taught French and history at a private school in Phnom Penh.
The “Saloth Sar” persona disappeared in 1963 when he took the nom de guerre “Pol Pot.” In that year the Khmer Rouge, the name used for the communist insurgency, was founded in a clandestine meeting at a Phnom Penh railway station restaurant. The party launched an armed struggle against the Sihanouk government in 1968. Pol Pot, who had spent time in Hanoi in 1965 and in Beijing in 1966, became the party’s Secretary-General in 1963 and its most influential ideologue. He was one of the most secretive of Cold War leaders, with few confirmed photographs of him as an adult.
The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the day after the U.S. evacuation of Phnom Penh by helicopter. The victory was followed by a reorganization of the country. Pol Pot was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense, and from 1976 to 1979 the formal head of state as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. The regime’s policy was the radical Maoist autarky — Phnom Penh emptied, money abolished, religious practice suppressed, the population organized into agricultural cooperatives, and any class enemy killed. Pol Pot’s signature contribution was the theory of “superior person” (paktomak): a Cambodian peasantry that, having been spared colonialism in the most brutal sense, was uniquely suited to the construction of a pure communist society. This doctrine, drawn from Mao’s On New Democracy and Stalin’s late writings on socialist man, justified the killing of the urban educated as a necessary precondition for revolution.
Pol Pot’s regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of December 25, 1978, and the fall of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. Pol Pot fled to the Thai border area, where he led a diminished Khmer Rouge insurgency for nearly two decades. The Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) — the political coalition in which the Khmer Rouge shared Cambodia’s UN seat with the royalist FUNCINPEC of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the republican KPNLF of Son Sann — preserved Pol Pot’s claim to international recognition as a head of state until 1990.
In the late 1990s, the Khmer Rouge’s last remaining strongholds collapsed. In June 1997, Ta Mok, the senior surviving cadre and Pol Pot’s former military commander, placed Pol Pot under house arrest. On April 15, 1998 — a date not lost on Cambodian observers — Pol Pot died in his sleep at the Khmer Rouge headquarters at Anlong Veng, near the Thai border. He was 72. He had been under indictment in Cambodia for crimes against humanity since 1997 but was never tried. His death ended the prospect of a trial, which several governments, including the United States and France, had been pursuing.
Pol Pot’s legacy is dark. His regime killed roughly a quarter of his country’s population in less than four years. He was an intellectual, fluent in French, well-read in the work of Marx and Mao, and he used the Marxist vocabulary of class struggle to rationalize the destruction of his own society. The standard scholarly treatment remains Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime (1996, 2008) and How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985, 2004). For more on the Cambodian-Vietnamese War article and the proxy wars overview.