Saparmurat Niyazov, 1940-2006
What with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islam, there's been a huge proliferation of Stans in the news. There's Tajiks and Uzbeks, a Nuristan and a Nurestan, there's a Baluchistan and a Balochistan and probably a Biloxistan, there are Kremlin-pressured Stans (Bashkortistan) and vowel-challenged Stans (Kyrgyzstan) and Stans that sound vaguely like some big Corporate-Mergerstan (Karakalpakstan). There's Waziristan, where Osama bin Laden is said to be holed up like a Muslim Pimpernel: they seek him in Waziristan, they seek him in Overtheristan.
So, in a world of Stans, with every Nickelandimistan clamoring for attention, how do you make yours Stan out from the crowd? This was the challenge faced by an obscure Communist apparatchik called Saparmurat Niyazov in 1991 when his Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic suddenly found itself pushed out onto the world stage as the newly independent nation of Turkmenistan. In Soviet Central Asia, Turkmenistan was pretty much the end of the line Stan-wise. You flew in from Baku across the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan, the Stan that thinks it's a Jan. And you pretty much had to fly back, there being nothing to fly on to apart from remote northern Iran and its crazy mullahs and rubble-strewn Afghanistan and its even crazier ones. So President Niyazov had a problem: How to put Turkmenistan on the map?
He could have used the world's fourth largest natural gas reserves to transform his nation into an economic powerhouse with an educated population and a vibrant cultural scene. But that would have been too obvious. Instead, he determined that his was going to be the nuttiest Stan, a by no means uncompetitive field to those for whom the suffix conjures large numbers of excitable chaps in beards jumping up and down shouting "Death to the Great Satan". In fact, Niyazov banned young men from sporting facial hair: under his leadership, Turkmenistan was the most pogonophobic Stan in the world. He didn't really require excitable men, hirsute or otherwise. His was a one-man Stan, a cult of personality under which airports, major cities and a passing meteorite were named after the great leader. A short man with the worst dye job in Central Asia, he loomed large and gilded in public. Statues abounded, including a glittering behemoth on the tallest edifice in the capital that supposedly rotates to ensure his features are always bathed in sunlight, though it has a tendency to break down and jerks into action as erratically as he did. There are multiple statues of him as a baby, in one sprawled across the globe, in another lofted up by his mother atop a raging bull. If he never quite succeeded in sprawling across the global scene, he certainly rode high on his bull. He produced five volumes of poetry, read nightly on TV, one remorseless Turkmenistanza after another. He banned news anchors from wearing make-up because he found it hard to tell the men from the women and had no desire to see the country degenerate into a sad eastern imitation of the decadent Ratherstan and Couricistan. In 2005, he banned lip-synching because he was tired of seeing elderly singers mouthing to their old hits and reducing Turkmen culture to just another Millivanillistan. He banned ballet because ...well, it just wasn't his bag. Either a misunderstanding led him to believe the lip-synching was so incompetent he couldn't hear a word they were saying, or accompanying too many visiting Politburo bigshots from Moscow to one-nighters by the Bolshoi had taken their toll. "How can the Turkmen people be encouraged to love ballet if there is no ballet in their blood?" he asked. "I do not understand ballet. What use is it then to me?"
But melons he did understand: they were in his blood and they were a lot of use to him. He declared a national holiday in honor of melons, and urged his people to "let the life of every Turkmen be as beautiful as our melons." He deployed them in folksy aphorisms: as he sagely observed, "You can't catch two melons in one hand."
That was Turkmenistan's problem. Juggling the twin melons of societal progress and self-glorification, their leader chose to let the first one drop. He preferred to be known as Turkmenbashi, which I believe means Basher of the Turkmen – no, wait, Father of the Turkmen. It was an Ataturk-like touch which led a lot of commentators who should have known better to try and pass him off as Turkmenistan's Kemal, a modernizing reformer. He was a repressive dictator increasingly prone to show trials and torture and Stalinist purges, but the world will cut you a lot of slack if you're a kook: to modify the old actor's line, killing is easy, comedy is hard. And, in an age of grey thugs, Turkmenbashi was every tabloid's favorite totalitarian nutjob. His finest hour was his redesignation of the days of the week and months of the year under a new law passed in 2002. "January" he renamed for himself: it's now the month of "Turkmenbashi"; "April" he'd proposed to call "Mother" in honor of mothers in general but he was prevailed upon to rename it "Gurbansoltan" in honor of one mom in particular – his own. Gurbansoltan had saved her infant child and then perished, along with all his siblings and the rest of his family, in the 1948 earthquake that leveled the capital city Ashgabat.
The eight-year-old Saparmurat had been sent to an orphanage and later went on to study engineering. Working at the Bezmeinskaya Power Station, he became active in the local Communist Party. He married a Russian. In 1985, when Moscow needed a new First Secretary for the Turkmen party, Niyazov's non-Turkmen wife, his Little Orphan Annie childhood and the loss of every close relative in the earthquake were seen as signs that he'd be less prone to the stand-by-your-clan corruption that had plagued Ashgabat politics. It seemed a reasonable enough assumption. Niyazov was a loyal Communist hardliner longer than necessary: he approved of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev and opposed Turkmen independence. But, after the Soviet Union liquidated itself, he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter and embraced Turkmen nationalism as best he could. In 1992, he was elected President with 99.5% of the vote. Two years after that squeaker, 99.9% of the electorate voted to extend his five-year term to ten years, and in 1999 he "reluctantly" acceded to the wishes of his "People's Council" to become President-for-Life. The lifelong Communist with the Russian bride dedicated himself to root-and-branch Turkmenization. Cleansing his country of Soviet influence meant little more than replacing it with a sickly suffocating cult of personality, but in dictatorships the line between necessary political hygiene and nauseating self-promotion is often a fine one, and especially so in a land where the leading soap powder is called "Barf". Like a Central Asian Vegas, the skyline of his desert kingdom began sprouting ever more startling attractions – man-made lakes and cypress forests and ice palaces and the world's largest handmade carpet (his mother had been a rug maker), a three-thousand square foot celebration of "the Epoch of the Great Saparmurat Niyazov" that tended to confirm the impression that the entire nation was his oversized doormat.
But, of course, not everything could be swept under the carpet. He might reasonably have expected that his term as President-for-Life would continue awhile yet. Unfortunately, he had a history of heart trouble. He'd closed every hospital in the country outside Ashbagat on the grounds that they were "not needed", replaced the Hippocratic Oath with a personal pledge of allegiance to himself, fired the remaining doctors and hired new medical staff more or less straight off the farm. While everything from anemia to bubonic plague took hold in Turkmen villages, Turkmenbashi flew in five German specialists for his own health needs. Yet it seems likely that his unexpected death derives at least in part from the prevailing ethos in what was left of his country's medical system.
His legacy is the "Ruhnama", the alleged spiritual tract he published in 2001. Its prose was barely workmanlike and barely Turkmenlike: it's what the Little Red Book would have been had Mao spent too much time with Deepak Chopra and Dr Phil. But it was raised immediately to equal status with the Bible and the Koran. It was hailed as "The Answer To All Questions", including those for the driver's test. Ninety per cent of the population is Muslim, yet Turkmenbashi promoted himself to Prophet, and demanded the Ruhnama be displayed in every house of worship and kissed by all who enter therein. When the chief imam, Nasurallah Ibadullah, objected to what he regarded reasonably enough as an act of idolatry, he was arrested (along with other dissenting imams) and sentenced to 23 years in gaol.
Yet Turkmenbashi got away with it, as he did with naming the biggest mosque in the country after himself. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Iran has exported huge sums of money and thousands of imams to Central Asia to transform hitherto relatively relaxed Muslim populations. It's worked everywhere except Turkmenistan where the President's subjects have proved all but immune to the blandishments from the mullahs or, indeed, their other neighbor the Taliban. At a time of rapid radicalization of Muslim communities from Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh to Britain, Belgium and Scandinavia, it's instructive to find a lonely example of a successful counter-strategy. As Stans go, his model was Stan Laurel: This is another fine mess you've got me into. Turkmenistan was a fine mess its leader got himself into: 60% unemployment, 60% poverty, massive health crises. Yet no jihadists. If he dropped the democracy melon, he nevertheless booted the Islamist one over the wall. No doubt, in the wake of his death, prancing ballerinas, pancaked news anchors, bearded lip-synchers who use the Roman calendar and many more unsavory types are emerging from under their rocks. But it will be interesting to see what other pathologies take hold.
from The Atlantic Monthly