Over the last decade the fate of Cambodia has come to symbolize some of the most extreme and controversial aspects of twentieth-century history: mass bombing, by the United States in 1973 especially; mass terror, as exercised by the Pol Pot regime from 1975 to 1979; neighbouring invasion, by the Vietnamese in January 1979, itself the culmination of the first full scale war between states describing themselves as socialist. Arguments over the last two developments have been of particular importance on the left, but have been relatively uninformed. Perhaps the issue which has caused sharpest dissent has been the Vietnamese intervention itself. The experience of central Europe, where unilateral Soviet invasions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia crushed popular movements towards a freer socialism, has led many to make by extension a blanket condemnation of the Vietnamese. Such a judgement confuses events of different orders: war being a two-sided conflict whereas the Russian invasions were unprovoked impositions. Equally important, the weight of evidence in Indochina points to the conclusion that the bulk of the Cambodian people welcomed the Vietnamese overthrow of Pol Pot. Whatever Hanoi’s responsibility for the debacle of 1975–1979, whatever its motives or the fate of the administration it has tried to established in Phnom Penh, to condemn the actual Vietnamese invasion of 1979 conflicts with what appears to be the reaction of most Cambodians themselves. One of the many merits of the text which follows is that, through its detailed report of living conditions in Cambodia today, it helps to illuminate why the late Pol Pot regime was so disliked.