The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was founded after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge government. Brought about by an invasion from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which routed the Khmer Rouge armies, it had Vietnam and the Soviet Union as its main allies.
Although it enjoyed very limited international recognition and failed to secure United Nations endorsement due to the diplomatic intervention of China, the United Kingdom, and the United States (among a host of other countries in their wake) on behalf of the ousted Pol Pot regime, the PRK was the de facto government of Cambodia between 1979 and 1993.
The People's Republic of Kampuchea was renamed as State of Cambodia (SOC), État du Cambodge, Roet Kampuchea in Khmer, during the last four years of its existence in an attempt to attract international sympathy. It retained, however, most of its leadership and single-party structure, while undergoing a transition and eventually giving way to the restoration of the Kingdom of Cambodia. The PRK/SOC existed as a communist state from 1979 until 1991, the year in which the ruling single party abandoned its Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The PRK was established in the wake of the total destruction of the country's institutions, infrastructure and intelligentsia wreaked by Khmer Rouge rule. Despite its inherent weaknesses and the odds stacked against it, which included being dismissed as a "puppet state" of Vietnam and being imposed grievous economic sanctions, as well as a debilitating Civil War, the PRK/SOC remained stronger than its enemies and was able to achieve the reconstruction of Cambodia as a nation. Some authors have compared the PRK/SOC period to the Thermidorian Reaction, the 1794 revolt in the French Revolution against the excesses of the Reign of Terror.