Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary, dictator, and politician who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. Ideologically a Marxist-Leninist and a Khmer nationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 until his death in 1998. His totalitarian government forced mass evacuations of cities, abolished money and private property, and orchestrated the Cambodian genocide. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the country's population, died from starvation, forced labor, and mass executions during his reign.