Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and one of the most murderous tyrants of the twentieth century, the architect of a radical revolution that killed roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population in less than four years. Born Saloth Sar to a prosperous farming family, he studied in the capital and then in Paris, where he absorbed extreme revolutionary ideas before returning home to join the communist underground.
Rising in secret to lead the Cambodian communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot exploited the chaos of the Vietnam War and the American bombing of Cambodia to build a peasant guerrilla army. In April 1975 his forces captured the capital, Phnom Penh, and he set about creating a totalitarian agrarian utopia of horrifying brutality.
Renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea and declaring it "Year Zero," the regime emptied the cities at gunpoint, abolished money, religion, and private property, and drove the entire population into forced rural labor. Through execution, starvation, overwork, and disease, between one and two million Cambodians perished in the "killing fields."
In 1979 a Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power, and Pol Pot retreated to the jungle, where his shattered movement waged a guerrilla war for years. He was never brought before an international court; placed under house arrest by his own former comrades, he died in 1998 in the remote borderlands, having never answered for his crimes.