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The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...
The USSR was no less anti intellectual in other fields like biology:
According to this study [0] the gulag deaths were approximately 830,000 from 1934 to 1953. It is important to know however that 70% of the deaths occurred between 1941 and 1944 (included) so they can kinda be attributed to difficulties from War Period. Also, it's important to note that antibiotics didn't become available until after WW2.
To put things into perspective, I have an interesting comparison for you. Using the same source as above for the USSR, and this report [1] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics we can say that Mortality in the gulag in 1953 (236 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) was lower than mortality in US prisons today, both in state prisons (303 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) and federal prisons (252 deaths per 100,000 prisoners).
Hope it's useful.
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597?read-now=1&refreqid=exc...
- Cancer (1,128)
- Heart Disease (1,025)
- All Other Illnesses (525)
- Liver Disease (260)
Healthcare in prisons is terrible: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-prison-was-built-to-h...
Taken as categories, 44% of people in prison die as a result of illness, 31% as a result of suicide. (both sourced from BJS still) Both avoidable with the right funding, and yes, atrocities. If we're going to have a justice system that lives up to what it claims, a side effect of a prison sentence shouldn't be death.
Some of the large construction projects, were built with slave labor. Not all of course, but many where. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps. "The Road of Bones" is famous as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
And while science and engineering was promoted later, during Stalin's time, a lot of intellectuals were purged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
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In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938.
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Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[1][92] in addition to 136,520 deaths in the Gulag;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million
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True anti-intellectualism is when you don't allow intellectual debate. It doesn't require emptying the universities entirely. It is sufficient to empty them of anyone who doesn't sufficiently support the mandated opinions. You can then define those politically pure supporters as the "intellectuals" and anyone who doesn't go along with them as, by definition, "anti-intellectual". You then have an anti-intellectual system where intellectual debate has been silenced, but the universities remain open and anyone who disputes their pronouncements is on the outside and is called "anti-intellectual".