All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is deemed largely irrelevant, as it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. In Democratic Kampuchea, so-called New People-teachers, artists, and intellectuals-were especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero. The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. “The term Year Zero (Khmer: ឆ្នាំសូន្យ chhnam saun), applied to the takeover of Cambodia in April 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, is an analogy to the Year One of the French Revolutionary Calendar.” In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge began what was arguably the most ambitious effort up until then: the Year Zero project. The fall of Stalin did not bring an end to such efforts. “Here, there was no common rest.” Without it, it was easier for Soviet powers to divide and conquer. In the absence of technology, Zerubavel says, temporal symmetry-“that your schedule and my schedule are in sync, that we are at work at the same time and off at the same time”-is the glue that holds society together. Making family units less integrated may even have been a conscious part of the agenda. It’s quite possible, argues Eviatar Zerubavel, sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week, that the calendar reform tied into a traditional Marxist aversion toward the family. Each worker was assigned a color or number to identify his or her day of rest.” The entire scheme had the effect of preventing members of the family, even husband and wife, from being at home at the same time. “The change was advantageous to the anti-religious movement, as Sundays and religious holidays became working days… Each day of the five-day week was labeled by either one of five colors or a Roman numeral from I to V. This was shift work, on the most enormous scale in human history.” These circles indicated when you worked and when you rested. Calendars from the time show the days marked out in colored circles like beads on a string: yellow, peach, red, purple, green. Instead, each of the five new days was marked by a symbolic, politically appropriate item: wheatsheaf red star hammer and sickle book and, finally, budenovka, or woolen military cap. The days of the week, as familiar as family members, would gradually be stripped of meaning. The population would be carved up into as many groups, each with its own rest day. The revolutionary system was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and was part of a larger attempt at decimalization in France (which also included decimal time of day, decimalisation of currency, and metrication).įor 11 years in the 20th century, the Soviet Union had no weekends: “Unlike the ordinary seven-day week, the continuous week began as a five-day cycle, with each day color-coded and marked with a symbol. The French Republican calendar (French: calendrier républicain français), also commonly called the French Revolutionary calendar (calendrier révolutionnaire français), was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871.