Everything that is true in this book was true for four years before Progress Publishers printed a word of it.
That sentence is the whole problem, and it needs stating at the start because nothing else in this introduction is intended to cast doubt on what the volume describes. The Khmer Rouge did empty Phnom Penh at gunpoint on 17 April 1975. They did abolish money, markets, schools, hospitals, postal services and the practice of medicine. They did work, starve and beat to death a substantial fraction of the Cambodian population between 1975 and the end of 1978. The Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, which this book calls "the former Tuolsleng school", did exist, and its photographic archive survives. The reportage collected here is, in its substance, accurate. It was among the earliest sustained accounts available in English from a socialist publisher, and a reader who comes to it expecting fabrication will not find much. The falsification in this volume is not in what it says happened in Cambodia. It is in the dates, in the framing, and in what is left out — and each of those is visible without leaving the book itself.
Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth is not a monograph. It is a clippings dossier: roughly thirty pieces of journalism, reprinted and translated, arranged in two parts. Part I, "The Tragedy of the Kampuchean People", gathers atrocity reporting. Part II, "The Rebirth of Kampuchea", prints the founding documents of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation, the Manifesto of the People's Revolutionary Council, Heng Samrin's victory speech, and then a run of Soviet correspondents filing from a Phnom Penh they had just been allowed to enter.
The Soviet contributors are staff foreign correspondents — A. Usvatov and G. Shmelyov of New Times, I. Shchedrov, A. Levin of Komsomolskaya Pravda, M. Ilyinsky of Izvestia, M. Ozerov of October. The foreign contributors are a deliberately assorted set: Martha Rojas of Granma, Tiziano Terzani of Der Spiegel and Corriere della Sera, Isao Takano of the Japanese Communist Party's Akahata, Wilfred Burchett writing in the Paris Afrique-Asie, and — the striking inclusion — John Barron and Anthony Paul of Reader's Digest.
The commission is not hard to reconstruct. This is a rush job, assembled in Moscow in the first months of 1979 and published inside the year, in English, for export. Its purpose is stated in its own vocabulary. The word "Peking" occurs 143 times in about fifty-nine thousand words; "Maoist" or "Maoism" occurs forty-nine times. A whole section of Part I is headed "Socialism. Peking Style". Brezhnev is quoted setting the thesis: Kampuchea was "ruled by a pro-Peking regime, modelled on the Chinese political system, and the mass extermination of people in Kampuchea is nothing but a Chinese-style 'cultural revolution' in action outside China". The closing essay states the conclusion plainly: "A powerful blow had been dealt at Maoism in Kampuchea."
That is the commission. Cambodia was the raw material; the target was Beijing. The book is a document of the Sino-Soviet split before it is a document about Cambodia, and it is worth reading first as evidence of how completely one atrocity could be metabolised into another quarrel.
On 25 December 1978 the Vietnamese army crossed the border in force. Phnom Penh fell on 7 January 1979. Vietnamese troops remained in the country for the next ten years.
None of that is what this book says. Search it for "invasion" and the word turns up three times. Twice it is in scare quotes, and both times it is being denied. Wilfred Burchett, in "Bloody Terror against the Vietnamese Community", writes: "The role of the Vietnamese in the Kampuchean events is sometimes called an 'invasion', if not a 'conquest'." He then argues it away — Hanoi never concealed its support for the KUFNS, and "irrespective of Vietnam's actions, the opposition movement would have emerged in Kampuchea, and done everything possible to overthrow the terrorist regime." M. Ozerov, in "They Know What Hell Means", is blunter: "Vietnam an invader? Wait a minute, gentlemen, surely all the indications are that it was the Khmers themselves, rather than anyone from outside, who rose against the Pol Pot regime." The third occurrence, "the Peking invaders", is about China's February 1979 attack on Vietnam. Invasion is a thing that happens to Vietnam, never a thing Vietnam does.
Burchett goes further, and it is the low point of the volume. Quoting a Pol Pot interview of 23 December 1978, he asks: "Is this not an admission that, in December 1978, there were no Vietnamese troops to be found on Kampuchean territory and that, on the contrary, it was the Pol Pot regime that was mounting 'preventive' attacks?" The Vietnamese general offensive began two days after the interview he is citing.
The book's own material dismantles the account. The KUFNS was founded, by the volume's reckoning, at a congress in early December 1978; Akahata dates the announcement to 2 December. Five weeks later this organisation had taken the capital of a country the size of Cambodia. In the interview with Kaarle Nordenstreng of the International Organisation of Journalists, printed in Part II, Hun Sen — then twenty-six, and later the country's ruler for nearly four decades — is asked where the liberated districts were. His answer: "Primarily in the northeast of Kampuchea", in "the areas bordering on Laos and Vietnam."
The honest version is not complicated, and it does not require any concession to Washington or Beijing. Vietnam invaded Cambodia, for reasons of its own security after a year of murderous Khmer Rouge border raids, and in doing so it ended the Cambodian genocide. Nobody else was going to. That is a defensible thing to have done and a defensible thing to say. This book cannot say it, because in the doctrine it is written to serve, socialist states do not invade, and so a real deliverance has to be dressed as a spontaneous national uprising — which reduces the actual Cambodian survivors to extras in someone else's script, and leaves the volume unable to explain the single most important fact about the country it is describing.
The second falsification is one the book commits by omission, and it can be read straight off the source lines under the article titles.
Set them out in order. The earliest item in the volume is Barron and Paul, Reader's Digest, March 1977. Then Time, 21 November 1977. Then Der Spiegel, 10 April 1978. The earliest Soviet item is Usvatov and Shmelyov in New Times, no. 37, 1978 — a weekly, so about September of that year. Then Literaturnaya Gazeta, no. 40, 1978. Then Pravda, 4 December 1978. Everything else in the book — and it is the great bulk of the book — is dated between January and March 1979.
So the volume's own apparatus records that the Soviet press began covering the destruction of Cambodian society in the autumn of 1978, roughly three and a half years after it started, some months after Hanoi and Phnom Penh had gone to open war, and about eighteen months after the story had been carried in an American mass-circulation monthly. The killing did not become reportable when it began. It became reportable when it became useful.
The book knows this and cannot say it. The nearest it comes is a phrase in the KUFNS delegation's statement after its visit to Moscow, in which Roh Samay expresses joy "that solidarity and friendship have been re-established between the USSR and Kampuchea for all time". Re-established. Something had lapsed. What Soviet policy toward Democratic Kampuchea actually was between April 1975 and late 1978, why Moscow's press was silent through those years, and what if anything was said to Beijing about a client conducting mass killing — on all of this a book-length anthology has not one sentence. The silence is the finding.
Which brings us to Barron and Paul. John Barron was a Reader's Digest editor whose other subject was the KGB; with Anthony Paul he wrote Murder of a Gentle Land (1977), from which the piece here, "Untold Sufferings of the People", is condensed. In 1977 the Digest was the most reliably anti-communist mass magazine in the United States. A Progress Publishers anthology reprinting it, without comment on what it is, is a very deliberate act.
It is not a lapse. It is the volume's core evidentiary tactic, and it is pursued at length. Part I also draws on Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and President Carter's statement of 21 April 1978. The argument being built is: do not take our word for it, take theirs. Moscow borrows the credibility of its enemies precisely because it has none of its own on this subject, having spent three years saying nothing.
And then — this is the sharp part, and it is the book's best argument — it turns the borrowed testimony around. The volume points out that having called the Pol Pot regime the worst human-rights violator in the world, "in the Security Council, Washington came to the defence of the regime, thereby demonstrating to the whole world the true worth of its hypocritical 'defence of human rights' campaign". Burchett makes the same point with a specific: Senator McGovern had publicly called for UN military action to remove Pol Pot, and "if McGovern's words had been heeded and if UN troops had ousted Pol Pot, the 'free world' would have claimed the credit for liberating Kampuchea."
On this the book was right, and history was crueller to its opponents than it could have known in 1979. Democratic Kampuchea kept Cambodia's United Nations seat after it had ceased to govern anything, and it and its successor coalition held it into 1990, with American and Chinese votes. Writing in International Viewpoint no. 183 (April 1990), a decade on, the Fourth International's press recorded what that meant materially: the Khmer Rouge rebuilt their army in Thai sanctuary and made "good use of the massive aid which they have received above all from China, but also from Bangkok, other countries of ASEAN, from the West and, via the refugee camps that they administer, from the UN." The same article notes, without ideological difficulty, that this history "explains why the Vietnamese army was welcomed by the population, with suspicion certainly, but also with relief, when it intervened in 1978". Note the verb. It is possible to say intervened and still be glad it happened. That was never available to Progress Publishers.
Three specific claims should be marked before a reader goes in.
The death toll. The book repeatedly gives "about three million", the figure adopted by the People's Republic of Kampuchea, and one contributor attributes to Pol Pot the statement that of eight million Cambodians "we only need one million". The toll is genuinely contested and the honest range in the scholarship is roughly 1.5 to 2 million dead from execution, starvation, overwork and disease — Ben Kiernan's much-cited estimate is around 1.7 million, from a population of perhaps 7.9 million. The three-million figure is an overstatement produced by a government that needed one. Saying so is not minimisation: a fifth of a nation is what the lower figure means.
The monocausal thesis. Everything in this book is explained by Maoism and Beijing. Chinese material and political support for Democratic Kampuchea was real and substantial, and the book is right to insist on it. But the Khmer Rouge's ultranationalism, its racial hatred of the Vietnamese, its French-educated leadership cadre, its cult of the pre-modern peasantry and its extraordinary internal purges were not Chinese imports, and the Cultural Revolution, whatever else it was, did not empty Beijing at gunpoint or abolish currency. The "Peking-style" formula explains the regime by naming Moscow's rival, which is not an explanation.
The provenance of the new government. The book prints, in the New Times biography "Heng Samrin Assumes Leadership", the following: "In 1976, he became political commissar and commander of the Fourth Division in Kampong Cham. After that he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Eastern Military Zone and a member of its Party Committee." Those are Democratic Kampuchea posts, held at the height of the killing, and the volume records them without a flicker. The Front that overthrew Pol Pot was built substantially out of Eastern Zone cadres who broke with him in 1977–78, as the book half-concedes when it describes the mutiny of the 280th and 290th divisions in May 1978. This is knowable from the text; it is simply never joined up.
What survives is considerable. The eyewitness reporting in Part I — Levin's "According to an Old Gestapo Recipe", Ilyinsky's "Total Genocide", the accounts of the Chup plantation and the Tuol Sleng courtyard — is the work of journalists who went and looked, and it holds. Burchett's own passage is the most honest thing in the book, because it is an admission: "Like most progressives who supported the Kampucheans in their struggle against American imperialism and the bloody Lon Nol regime, at first I couldn't believe the Kampuchean refugees' terrible accounts." It should be said too that Isao Takano, whose piece appears here, was killed at Lang Son in March 1979 while covering the Chinese attack on Vietnam; a Progress editor's footnote records it.
The anti-Stalinist left answered this material, and the record is not one anybody should present as a clean vindication.
In Inprecor no. 53 (10 June 1976), Pierre Rousset published "Questions on the Cambodian Revolution". It opens by describing the Western coverage as "an intense anticommunist slander campaign", correctly exposes two faked photographs in Paris-Match and Le Figaro, and treats refugee testimony from the Thai camps with heavy scepticism. It was too sceptical. The photographs were fakes; the substance was not.
By the following spring Rousset had reversed himself in public. In an article from Rouge of 22 April 1977, translated in Intercontinental Press of 6 June 1977 as "Cambodia—The Nationalist Relapse of a Communist Current", he asks directly whether the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh was necessary and answers: "The answer is no." He identifies the regime's autarky as a choice rather than a necessity, and writes that "the bureaucratism of Cambodia's political structure is unparalleled in other Asian revolutions." He still underestimated the executions. But this was published in June 1977 — fifteen months before the first Soviet article in this anthology — and it was published as a self-correction, under a signature, in the same press that had got it wrong.
That contrast is the point of reading this book. Both traditions were slow. One of them corrected itself in the open, while its subject was still alive to be argued about, and could therefore say a decade later that Vietnam intervened and that the intervention was a relief. The other waited until a state interest required speech, then produced, in a matter of months, a handsome anthology in which it had always known, the Vietnamese army was never there, and the whole catastrophe belonged to somebody else's ideology.
Read Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth for the reporting, which is real, and for the reckoning with the UN seat, which was justified. Read the datelines for everything else.