Note from the author: To the memory of my forefather, Onik Yanikyan, deported August 14, 1937, and Artashes Gevorgyan, executed on the same night.
My visit to Tuol Sleng: Reflections on Stalinism, the Cambodian genocide, and Evil
“My dear, don’t hope for help from my soul either.
Death will have already sent me
spinning to my destiny—to a place
beyond suffering, or maybe to Hell.
And finally, I beg you, don’t bring me
any offerings of food. It will only rot
and reek. The angels won’t touch it.
And the demons don’t deserve to feast.”
— Khun Srun’s The Request
Despite the pleasant urbanism of the French colonial city with its Edenic terrasses, Phnom Penh, and Cambodia in general, is a deeply troubled society. The Khmers don’t smile. They don’t even look you in the eye when they talk to you. Many say as little as possible, and when they do, it is with cutting conciseness to the point of rudeness. Others will try to confound the truth in a drawn-out explanation that puts War and Peace to shame. A street vendor once discreetly pulled me off a main roadway to save me from being robbed of my belongings. She was somewhat embarrassed by her attempt to help a stranger, as if it were a sort of transgression.
Cambodia is post-apocalyptic. Mass graves and UXOs litter the countryside. Pyramids of skulls and prison camps serve as morbid tourist attractions. And it’s in the center of the city that Security Prison 21 sits crowded in tuk-tuks. Reminiscent of a California high school with open-air hallways, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was used as an urban detention and torture center. Twenty thousand prisoners were ‘processed’ through the facility. There are only 12 known survivors.
Tuol Sleng can be a tough place to visit. It can take over an hour to go through every room and inspect the evidence of the crimes committed there. Most visitors move about with a shudder. Many confess to crying after the visit. Many are also haunted for days and weeks by the stories at Tuol Sleng.
I am haunted by them now. There are no words I can put on paper to describe the crimes committed there. I don’t have the stomach to inventory the supplices either—atrocity pornography is not my flavor. The only way I can convey the gravity of the things that transpired at Tuol Sleng is by inviting the reader to think of the most inhumane, bloodthirsty, savage act that could ever be inflicted upon a human body, and understand that it would fall creatively short of what happened at Tuol Sleng.
One of my favorite stories of Tuol Sleng (if such an expression may even be used) is that of Hồ Văn Tây, a combat photographer of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Văn Tây discovered the prison after following the stench that came from it during the siege of Phnom Penh. Having arrived at the crime scene, amidst the shock of the discovery, he immediately defaulted to the most innately human response to the perversity he had uncovered: he shouldered his lens and began shooting the truth of S21.
Văn Tây’s role in bringing to light the nature of the Khmer Rouge and capturing the faces and bodies of their victims—which later served as evidence in the trials of the perpetrators—was above ideology and personal commitments and beyond the responsibilities of a combat photographer. Hồ Văn Tây was a minor yet significant contributor to Vietnam’s role in ending the most reprehensible crime of the 20th c., an excellent service to humanity for which the world thanked the Vietnamese people by sanctioning them into oblivion and encouraging a punitive invasion by the Chinese PLA.
I always disliked reducing people to their tragedies, but certain events in people’s lives simply cannot be overcome. Certain regimes are more devastating than others, not by the size of the corpse-mounds, but by the evil that lingers long after their last statue is toppled. The Khmer Rouge still linger in the cities and the fields of Cambodia, and the people, who once might have been as jovial and unfazed as their Thai and Viet neighbors, bear the indelible, morbid mark of a society that disintegrated into orgiastic violence and from which they may never recover.
Little is known and little spoken of in the West about the Khmer people and their indelible mark. Conservative talking heads occasionally tout them, but only when the horrors of Pol Pot’s regime need to be brought out in some politically expedient jab at the threat of cultural Marxism and garden-variety campus socialism. The numbers and crimes are rolled out: a quarter of the Cambodian population utterly evaporated, mass tortures, mass rapes, mass famines, etc., but throughout this exercise, the Khmer people become nothing but a punching bag. It’s as if we assume that the Khmer, with their small dark limbs, were made to be brutalized.
The Soviets are treated as the Khmer, too: light-featured Asians who suffered under totalitarianism to show us the horrors of it. At least the Soviets had figures like Solzhenitsyn, who spoke directly to the West. Their people were brutalized, but they were also undeniably people. Unfortunately, the Khmer people didn’t have this privilege. Voices like Khun Srun never survived Pol Pot’s regime.
The bond between Solzhenitsyn, the great unbinder of the Soviet Union, and Khun Srun, the damned poet of a damned people, is undeniable. Both men share a great deal—their immense literary talent, their love for mathematics, and the early loss of their fathers. In other words, they were both compromised men. Solzhenitsyn, who had received a strictly Orthodox upbringing, rejected it and became an enthusiastic supporter of the regime. His passage at the State University of Rostov cemented his convictions. He volunteered for the Red Army in 1941 and was decorated for his service at the front. He was in many ways a perfect product of the new Soviet order—a collaborator.
So was Khun Srun. After his repeated imprisonments by the Lon Nol regime, he joined the Khmer Rouge guerrillas and became a cadre in Pol Pot’s regime. He was imprisoned in 1978 at Tuol Sleng along with his wife and executed a few days before the arrival of Vietnamese troops. The monstrous regime he helped to erect eventually ate him—an especially dour caprice of history, as ever in his writing, there is not the hint of any violence. His pen stroke is that of a profoundly gentle man: “I know it is dangerous to live among men. I have known it for more than twenty years”, he wrote in his The Accused right before joining the Khmer Rouge.
Much has been said about the lessons of the 20th century. We live in the midst of the ruins of totalitarian civilizations, yet we only ever read in them what is convenient for us. Even as the distance that separates us from that 20th century leaves little room for much else but imagination, I cannot help but think of it all not as a dour, one-dimensional melodrama, as we often like to think of it, but rather as pleasurable and indulgent. Can you find the sadistic prison guard within you?
These regimes fed on the deep faults that lie inside all of us. The chekists hardly had to lift a finger. Friends, colleagues, and neighbours denounced each other because they coveted their jobs, their homes, and their wives. The pleasure of petty malice was elevated to state policy. Kulaks were annihilated. Peasants bled their urbanite betters. Kum (head for an eye), the Khmer tradition of revenge, met revolutionary zeal. Personal resentments were amplified to orgiastic proportions. The triumphant feeling of punishing fellow citizens lay at the root of the Stalinist impulse. The repression was almost an afterthought to this pleasure: “How, otherwise, could we survive?”
These regimes were, in the truest sense, edifices of perversity. They relied on everyone compromising themselves. They relied on the repressed torturing the repressed in a hell of their own making. Norok lokiy (hell on earth) is a description that often returns in the accounts of survivors of the Cambodian genocide. That is why the ruins of these regimes are of a deafening silence. No one wishes to examine them too closely lest their own sins be brought to light.
In this sense, the opposition between democratic and totalitarian is misleading. The Stalinist regime requires not only that the mass of people wield and exercise power (over each other) but that they find adequate satiety for desires which any sane political order would curb. Stalinism as a political construction is the unfettered indulgence of the democratic appetite. It’s precisely for this reason that Stalinism, and the later, albeit much reduced, post-Stalinist regime, presented themselves as insurmountable political problems in their time. It wasn’t merely a question of toppling the man at the top. It was about toppling the man within.
Insurmountable political problems have spiritual solutions. This is the great singular insight of both Solzhenitsyn and Khun Srun, one that their admirers often miss. It would be essentially a mistake to read both Solzhenitsyn and Khun Srun as limp wristed moralists (Solzhenitsyn calls for murder at several places in his work). There is a gentle, barely perceptible martiality in their texts which opens itself to the careful reader.
What makes Solzhenitsyn’s work special is his staunch refusal to cast himself as a victim. He blames no one but himself for the totality of the crimes and calls on fellow Russians to come forward in repentance. By doing so, he uncovers a solution to an eminently and seemingly unsolvable political problem. Having suffered every imaginable hardship under the GULAG, with the unblemished right to blame and demand justice, Solzhenitsyn seeks no justice from the Soviet authorities. This repentance is uncompromisingly Russian Orthodox.
Despite being seen as the dissident par excellence in the West, Solzhenitsyn never saw himself as such. His political battles had higher aspirations, and the weapons he wielded in them are incomprehensible to the modern mind. To the turbulence of revolutionary fervor, the pure expression of the democratic appetite, Solzhenitsyn prescribed the murmur of the confessional:
But if millions of us pour out our repentance, our confessions, our contrite sorrow—not all of them perhaps publicly, but among friends and people who know us—what could all this together be called except “the repentance of the nation’?
Khun Srun’s The Accused is also a sort of confession. He retells the story of an interrogation under the Lon Nol regime in which he struggles with the conflict brewing inside him between renunciation, commitment to spiritual salvation, to silence and stillness, and the temptation of revolutionary action. Khun Srun is painfully aware of the spiritual solution in the face of the violence he is unable to grasp:
I have a hope (I clasp my hands and secretly pray)… There is a place, far from the road of honors and riches. A place for something else. A place for learning. A place to meditate. There is a voice. In the concerted, deafening sound of power. A voice to which no one, or almost no one, listens.
As a keen reader of Solzhenitsyn, Khun Srun never fails to bring me back to Matthew 5:3-12: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will inherit the Kingdom of God.” What exactly does it mean to be poor in spirit? It means to possess a soul full of Spartan simplicity and naked vigor. It implies a spirit that has flattened the bends, angles, and ornaments, providing fault lines where it can be shattered. How else can one wage war on the commissars with their messianic self-conceit, their gang signs, their regalia, and their accoutrêments of power? Exiled, famished, frostbitten, and sequestered behind barbed wire, Solzhenitsyn still struck existential terror into the hearts of the powers that be by simply breathing. Some wars can only be won with bottomless poverty.
These tragedies had already unfolded two millennia prior. What is Christ if not the figure who defeats that very democratic appetite that takes on a rapturous, totalitarian expression on the cross? What are the Pharisees, with their ideological purity tests, their cultivation of traitors, their kangaroo courts, and their self-interested mobilization of the democratic appetite, if not Stalinists before the hour? The last temptation of Christ in the desert is a rejection of the same democratic appetite to exercise power over others and an affirmation that legitimate authority can only grow out of a rightly ordered spirit—the divine right of kings.
When you leave S21, there is a visitor log book at the exit which contains messages from visitors from all over the world. I hesitated on whether I had anything to say. I just wrote “Je comprends”—I understand—and signed my name.
On the left, Artashes Gevorgyan and his wife, Kristalik, and on the right, his brother-in-law, Onik Yanikyan, his wife, Arpenik, and their young daughter, Lala. The photograph was taken a week before the execution of Artashes and the deportation of Onik. Artashes was rehabilitated in 1956 in Soviet Armenia for his role in the assassination of Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide. The little girl in the center is my great-grandmother.
Avetis Muradyan is a Chief Technology Officer and an emerging markets expert based in Vancouver. He is a graduate of the University of British Columbia in Computer Science and English Literature. He can be followed @AvetisMuradyan.
