Cuba Journal

Pol Pot became a communist in Paris, where he studied on a scholarship from 1949 to 1953. There he joined a secret Marxist study circle of Khmer students (including future Khmer Rouge leaders like Ieng Sary) and the French Communist Party, then heavily Stalinist, absorbing its emphasis on secrecy, discipline, and purges. After returning to Cambodia he trained under Vietnamese communist cadres, and a 1965–66 visit to China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution added the Maoist model of radical peasant revolution that shaped his regime. He then returned to Cambodia and, after seizing power in 1975, became one of the world's most vicious mass murderers, presiding over a regime that killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people, roughly a quarter of the country's population, in under four years.