It seems like things were way more decentralized

Can I ask what you mean by this and where you read it? I would agree that perhaps, to an extent, Pol Pot is overemphasised in relation to a classic 'dictatorship'. However, while policies and direction of the CPK was decided upon through a collective decision making process, this was carried out by a very small group of people - a group in which Pol Pot made the final decision. However, I would certainly not excuse these other members of the regime from responsibility, it is going too far to simply blame Pol Pot, but also too far to claim that he was not at the helm.

As Dr Craig Etcheson, an academic as well as a lead investigator for the Office of the Co-Prosecutors at the ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal) put it in his report on the hierarchy of Democratic Kampuchea ‘the statutes of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) outline the structure of the Party. They describe the Central Committee of the CPK as the highest organ of the Party, and hence of the state of Democratic Kampuchea. However, the Central Committee rarely convened and, in practice, an executive committee of the Central Committee called the Standing Committee functioned as the most powerful organ of the Party and the state of Democratic Kampuchea’.

The Standing Committee’s command structure in this report is represented as a flow chart, Pol Pot is at the top as Secretary, underneath him is Nuon Chea as Deputy Secretary, and then five Members and two ‘Alternate Members’ are beneath them on a line that would indicate their equality in this committee. Some of these were executed during the regime’s time in power, like Vorn Vet and Ros Nhim, whilst Son Sen was executed by remnants of the regime some twenty years later.

Now, in what you’ve outlined as part of the question there are three or four really interesting but unfortunately hard to answer smaller questions, but I will do my best with what evidence remains and what the general consensus between historians is.

Firstly, the idea of ‘revolution by committee’. Lenin introduced the idea of ‘Democratic Centralism’ into his party apparatus in the 1920s. Generally speaking this was a way of expediating the decision making process in their party, we have a discussion, we make a decision, the decision is final and further questioning of the decision will not be tolerated. The statutes of the CPK also state that they were guided by a system of ‘collective leadership’ based on the principle of ‘democratic centralism’. This meant, in theory, that individual members could not make decisions by themselves, but only in concert with other members.

However, as Etcheson emphasised in the report I quoted at the top, the Central Committee rarely actually got together and most of the decisions that were made were done so by that smaller Standing Committee. The decisions of that organ were heavily weighted on what Pol Pot and to a lesser extent Nuon Chea wanted to do. The discussion could be had, but they had the last say. If that makes sense. Speaking of the committee itself and questions of the ‘power’ that Pol Pot held in it, we could perhaps reiterate that members of this committee were purged – usually on the order of Pol Pot, even twenty years later in the case of Son Sen. So he was certainly the most powerful member within this organ of the party that made the decisions.

This central body was to implement the policies of the party and to instruct the zone and sectors beneath them on how to govern and arrange everything. Some members of the Party have argued that there were powerful factions within the country that were opposed to Pol Pot, and this necessitated their purge. Some historians have also taken this thread seriously. I am more inclined to agree with a historian like Etcheson who said that “I do not believe there was any inherent factional conflict within the Party. It was a disciplined and united Party, and the senior cadres were all loyal to the Party Centre.” The 'centralisation' of power can also be seen here, with the state's security apparatus' apex being S21, a central node in which important party members or prisoners could be sent from every corner of the country. It also points at where power was concentrated, if Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were able to order the purge of thousands of East Zone cadre, this points to a) centralisation of power and b) the power of Pol Pot in DK.

The reason I bring this up is that it gets at, slightly, the question you raise about responsibility, or indeed whether the leader of the Central Committee, Pol Pot, is somehow scapegoated by a reliance on using his name as if it were the same as a Hitler or a Stalin, in relation to government sponsored mass killings. This is complicated, particularly the question of national healing in an event that involved many thousands of perpetrators. I would contend that in the period immediately following the defeat of the regime by the Vietnamese and the installation of a new government known as the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea, that there were attempts to really close a tight noose around very senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge in order to remove many of those who had been part of the movement but had subsequently defected to the Vietnamese. This was a way of absolving the vast majority whilst still portraying the leadership as evil, genocidal maniacs that were necessarily vanquished by the Vietnamese. This went under the banner of the ‘Pol Pot Ieng Sary Genocidal Clique’, they were tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

Simply blaming Pol Pot does in some way miss the point that you brought up, that over the roughly four years that the CPK controlled Cambodia, many thousands of their supporters took it upon themselves to perpetrate the mass murder of their fellow Cambodians. In this regard there does need to be an accountability for those lower rungs of cadre that instigated or committed these, in some cases, mass murders. Particularly a zone leader and standing committee member like Ta Mok.

However, this gets to your question of architect versus overseer.

The CPK, as we’ve seen, was structured in a deliberate way. It gave a select few individuals an extremely large amount of power to guide the country's operation. Although there was a token amount of ‘decision making’ that was done via committee or at lower levels, Pol Pot was unequivocally the highest authority in the CPK. Speaking about decisions taken at lower levels, these still reflected the 'Party Line' which was decided upon above them. Khieu Samphan once said that ‘when we talk to Pol Pot it was the same as talking to the party because he was the party secretary’. He further said, ‘all decisions were circulated to the level of the standing committee so that they could be implemented at the local level’. From this we can highlight a system that allowed for crimes against humanity to be committed by those on the ground, but still blame those in charge of creating the conditions that facilitated this period of mass death.

This can be noticed when we look at some of the decisions that this highest organ of the CPK made, like the 30th March 1976 decision on ‘smashing within and outside the ranks’. Essentially this directive provided subordinate levels of the party, the zones, districts and co-operatives, to be able to take decisions to ‘smash’ komteik (utterly destroy, reduce to rubble) enemies within and outside of the party. This coincided with directives that encouraged ‘heightened revolutionary vigilance’.

In an environment where obligations to the Party and portraying loyalty to the movement was highly ‘performative’, to the extent that ‘revolutionary vigilance’ could be demonstrated by the ‘weeding out’ of enemies, it is hard to portray any act of mass violence or killings as completely separate to the CPK as a whole and therefore the ‘architecture’ as well as ‘oversight’ of the upper echelons, meaning essentially… Pol Pot.