Cold War Cambodia

[geovalin]

Charles Rollet

As official Khmer translator for the Soviet embassy in the twilight of the Cold War, Oleg Samorodni was privy to a lot of sensitive material. More than 30 years later, he remembers some parts of that tense time as if they were only yesterday

It was a hot day in Phnom Penh in the late 1980s when a football match was organised at the sprawling embassy of the Soviet Union. But the players were hardly run-of-the-mill. The captain of the away team, composed of senior Cambodian government officials, was Hun Sen – then, as now, prime minister – while his opponents were all Soviet embassy employees.

Oleg Samorodni, a writer and journalist now living in Estonia, remembers the friendly match well: as the chief interpreter of the embassy, he was picked as the referee. Not that one was necessary. To ensure warm relations between the USSR and the Vietnamese-backed regime known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the match was fixed.

“Before the match, the [soviet] embassy met … and we decided there would be a draw,” Samorodni remembered with a chuckle during one of his recent visits to the Kingdom.

Samorodni, whose three-year service sparked a passion for Cambodia, offers a unique window into the Soviet Union’s history here and its relations with the country’s ruling clique, which remains at the nation’s helm to this day.

Samorodni arrived in Cambodia in 1986, after studying Khmer intensively at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. At the time, Phnom Penh was a much quieter town. Still recovering from five years of forced abandonment during the Khmer Rouge, infrastructure was terrible, restaurants few and far between, and tourists close to zero.

The embassy was not considered a particularly strategic posting, and the Soviet Union was content to let Vietnam, a close ally, run Cambodia as it had since its toppling of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

Young and eager to use his fluent Khmer, Samorodni remembers coming up with various initiatives – such as analysing Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts – that were tolerated but hardly encouraged.

Nevertheless, Samorodni loved the “mysterious and interesting” city of Phnom Penh, driving his embassy car through deserted streets as late as possible before the nightly curfew began.

And as the official interpreter of the Soviet embassy, Samorodni often rubbed shoulders with Cambodia’s governing elite.

LONG ARTICLE TO BE READ HERE http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/cold-war-cambodia