p M. Ozerov

p October, No. 3, 1979

p The slender towers of the beautiful Angkor-Wat temple rise up like the buds of lotus blossoms in the middle of the jungle. These golden towers, considered one of the wonders of the world, are depicted on the red flag now flying over Pnom Penh, other towns and villages in Kampuchea.

p For more than four years Kampuchea was nothing but one huge prison, where people were killed for any reason at all, or simply at will.

p Now Kampuchea is a free state with all the power in the hands of the people themselves. The new government—the People’s Revolutionary Council—has declared the building of socialism as its goal. Its foreign policy supports peace with all countries, co-operation, neutrality and non-alignment, friendship with all its neighbours, and especially with fraternal socialist Vietnam.

p In his greetings to liberated Kampuchea, Leonid Brezhnev stressed that the people had risen against a regime that was hateful to them, against a tyranny imposed on them from outside.

p How did they triumph? How did they succeed in raising the flag of the People’s Revolutionary Council?

What I saw on the Vietnamese-Kampuchean border and heard from the Khmers themselves provides some of the answers. Yet, it is very important to find the answers and trace the course of events in Kampuchea in order to understand 48 what the previous rulers came to in their blind obedience to Peking and their desire to carry out Mao’s “cultural revolution" on Kampuchean soil.