Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  Most of Ashgabat’s commerce took place in open-air markets. The central (“Russian”) bazaar was the first place I visited. It was as big as a football field and was covered by a roof some 30 feet above the ground. Its rows of concrete tables were piled with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, carrots, squash, potatoes, scallions, radishes, dill, basil, parsley, pomegranates, apples, oranges, pears, bananas, dried apricots, raisins, walnuts, spices, teas, cookies and candies. There were dried meats, smoked fish, imported sausages, freshly butchered lamb, cheeses, sour cream, and ice cream. There were piles of fresh, flat Turkmen bread called chorek wrapped in cloths to keep them warm. Around the bazaar’s edges there were long buildings filled with stores offering meat pastries, shawarma, furniture, toys, rugs, alarm clocks, bootleg CDs, clothing, and computers. I bought a pastry filled with mutton, fat, gravy, and onions – a somsa – and headed for the exit.

  As I left, three women with shopping bags of cash called to me: “Change dollar? Change dollar?” The local currency was the manat, which was nearly worthless. Officially, at the bank, one manat was worth about 1/5,000 of a dollar. But no one changed money at the bank. At the bazaar, one manat was worth about 1/25,000 of a dollar. Turkmen often took their manat to the bazaar and bought dollars to save in closets or under carpets – or to use for big purchases. It was just more practical. The biggest manat denomination was 10,000, which was worth about 40 cents. Buying a $2,000 car or an $8,000 apartment would require bags full of 10,000-manat bills. The economy was essentially all-cash; credit cards and checks weren’t options.

  Munching on my somsa and enjoying the sunshine, I left the bazaar and walked across the street to a two-story, white marble mall with towering, reflective glass windows. On its roof there was a giant globe featuring a Turkmenistan that spread across most of the eastern hemisphere. Inside I found a Turkmen version of the Gap with American-style clothes, tiled floors, bright lights, and carefully designed floor displays. Among the giddy, skimpily dressed teenaged girls browsing for jeans and t-shirts was a traditionally dressed older couple. The woman wore a handmade, brightly embroidered dress that fell to her ankles and a scarf covering her hair. The man wore a lightweight, shin-length, olive-drab coat, a long white beard, high rubber boots, and a poofy wool hat. His hands were gnarled and weathered and scarred and used. The couple looked lost. The teenagers didn’t seem to even notice them.

  Ashgabat was not what I had expected. I had pictured something dirtier and poorer. What I found was a nice surprise, and I enjoyed my chance to explore the city after being sequestered for days in Chuli. As I wandered, though, I began to get a little worried. Everywhere I went there were signs glorifying Niyazov, who called himself Turkmenbashy, which means, roughly, “father of all Turkmen.” Many said “Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashy” (“people, nation, Turkmenbashy”), which echoed Hitler’s “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” (“one people, one state, one leader”). Niyazov’s portrait hung on the wall of nearly every store and office. There were golden statues of him in parks and in front of government ministries. Atop a 165-foot-tall tower presiding over the city center, a gilded statue of him stood, arms raised, on a platform that rotated so that it would always face the sun.

  I knew a little about Niyazov and his personality cult. I’d read several newspaper stories about him before leaving the US. I had read that getting a driver’s license in Turkmenistan required taking a test on the Rukhnama. I had read that he had renamed January, April, and September after himself, his mother, and the Rukhnama. I had read that when he dyed his gray hair black, it caused a small national crisis because everyone had to replace their old, gray-haired portraits of him with new, younger-looking portraits. He’d even commissioned “Turkmebashi” merchandise: cologne, vodka, and watches. Before arriving, though, I had been more focused on my yurt, my camel, and escaping my prematurely middle-aged life in South Florida. I had taken the whole crazy dictator thing as a joke – something that would add some humor to my letters home.

  During my first trip to Ashgabat, though, I began to realize it was serious. Human Rights Watch began its 2004 report on Turkmenistan this way: “The regime of president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov is one of the most repressive in the world. It crushes independent thought, controls virtually all aspects of civic life, and actively isolates the country from the outside world… Turkmen law bans criticism of any policies initiated by President Niyazov and equates it with treason.” The consequences for stepping out of line? According to a 2004 US State Department report on human rights in Turkmenistan, “there were credible reports that security officials tortured, routinely beat, and used excessive force against criminal suspects, prisoners, and individuals critical of the Government.” Only a few months earlier, the United Nations Human Rights Commission had adopted a resolution expressing concern about the human rights situation in Turkmenistan.

  Still, in those early days, I didn’t see how any of that could possibly affect me.

  3.

  Welcome to the Gulag

  I was assigned to live in Abadan, an industrial city about a half-hour outside Ashgabat, in an apartment in one of the ubiquitous Soviet four-story concrete dominoes. There would be no yurt, no desert, no shepherds, and no camel. For the first 10 weeks (the “training” period), four other Peace Corps trainees would live in Abadan, too. Then they would move to far-flung corners of the country and I would be stuck, safe and sound, near the capital. I was in a bad mood on the morning our little group piled into a marshrutka in Chuli and headed for Abadan. I kept telling myself I had come to Turkmenistan to do what was needed, not what I wanted to do. It didn’t help. I was still disappointed.

  We rode the marshrutka down from the mountains and along the main highway toward Ashgabat. When we reached a massive electrical plant flanked by two red-and white-striped smokestacks and surrounded by a tangle of high-tension wires, we turned onto what at first seemed to be its access road. We passed the plant’s gate and there, in the shadow of the smokestacks, was my new neighborhood. In contrast to shiny, clean Ashgabat, Abadan looked gritty and bombed-out. Between the drab, gray apartment buildings, there were empty lots heaped with rubble and trash.

  Abadan had once been a little Turkmen village named Bizmein. Residents grew grapes and cotton, lived in one-story family compounds, and shopped at a sleepy bazaar. Then, during World War II, a bureaucrat in an office in Moscow made a decision and everything changed. At the time, the Soviet government was moving industrial plants and workers to Central Asia, which was far from the front lines.8 Officials ordered the electric plant built in Bizmein, along with factories to produce concrete, carpets, wine, and other goods. Thousands of workers streamed into the city from Russia, the Caucasus, and other parts of Turkmenistan. Dozens of apartment buildings sprouted overnight to house the newcomers. The population reached 35,000, a cosmopolitan mix of Turkmen, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Kurds, Chechens, Ossetians, Koreans, and others.

  At the time, Turkmenistan was one of the Soviet Union’s far, exotic edges. Young people from Russia moved there to seek their fortunes, in sort of the same way that young East Coast Americans once moved West to see what they could make of themselves. Many of the people who moved to Bizmein were of this type – full of ambition and hope. But not all of them arrived voluntarily. Some of them, prisoners in the Soviet gulag system, were sent to Bizmein as punishment. In the 1970s there was a “strict-regime” camp in Bizmein where some 2,000 prisoners lived while they worked at the local factories.9

  Bizmein’s boom days were long gone by the time I arrived. Since then, the Soviet Union had fallen, most of the factories had closed, unemployment had soared, heroin use had exploded, paint had peeled, many of the non-Turkmen had moved away, and Niyazov had renamed the city Abadan, which meant “prosperous.”

  Our minivan stopped at a low, four-room schoolhouse on a street lined with Osage orange trees. We got out and walked through a gate and into the dirt schoolyard. About 30 people were waiting for us – elem
entary school-aged children and a few adults. I stood there in my tie in that schoolyard, sweating in the morning heat, nervous and overwhelmed, a big smile plastered on my face, just trying not to do or say anything too stupid. I was sure I was going to offend someone by stepping on a carpet in my shoes or turning the bread the wrong way up. The adults made speeches and the children – wearing shiny yellow, green, purple, and blue costumes – demonstrated traditional Turkmen dances. A woman offered us a disc of golden-brown chorek and we each broke off a piece.

  The crowd led us into the schoolhouse, which was called Dom Pionerov. Decades of children’s footsteps had worn the paint from its floorboards. A hot breeze drifted through the windows. I sat at a desk built for an eight-year-old, next to a gaunt Russian woman with tired eyes. It took me a few minutes to understand that she was my host mother. I’d been assigned to live with her and her family. I’d missed her name. She gave me a kind smile, flashing a gold tooth, and passed me a sprig of green grapes. She didn’t speak English and I knew only a few words of Russian.

  Local dignitaries in dark suits made speeches. I watched their mouths move, not understanding a word, and ate grapes. After they finished, a small group of teenaged students stood up, looking only slightly less nervous than I felt, and recited a Langston Hughes poem. Then, clapping their hands and stomping their feet, they launched into Queen’s “Vee Vill Rock You.” After that, they sang along to a staticky recording of the John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The room erupted in applause after each number. Some of the teens wore modest, ankle-length Turkmen dresses with brightly embroidered necklines – koyneks. One girl, who looked about 12 and was dressed in a tiny t-shirt and skin-tight jeans, lip-synched and writhed her way through a Shakira song. When the kids were done, the other trainees and I took turns introducing ourselves in a mix of English and halting Russian – whatever we could manage. “Hello. My name is Sam. I am 27. I am from America,” I told the crowd in Russian (I think).

  When the program ended, my host mother took my arm and guided me across the room to one of Abadan’s English teachers. Still holding my elbow, she looked at me, smiling, and said something in Russian to the teacher. “She says you are a good boy,” the teacher translated. “She says she can tell. She has a …. a special sense for these things.”

  My new home was only a few blocks from Dom Pionerov. I hauled my bags up to the second floor of a dirty gray apartment building. The stairwell had no lights, no paint, and no glass in its windows. My host mother opened a steel door and motioned for me to enter. I found myself in a normal, Western-style apartment. I was surprised. There were beds to sleep on, there was a table to eat at, and there was a television with hundreds of channels beamed in via satellite to watch. I stashed my bags in my room and then joined my host family – Olya, her husband Misha, their 17-year- old son Denis, and their 10-year-old grandson, Sasha – at the kitchen table for tea. We shared family photographs. Then I gave them some little gifts that, on the instructions of Peace Corps staff, I had randomly selected from a hotel gift shop in Washington, D.C., for this occasion.

  I gave Olya a key chain decorated with the seal of the President of the United States. For Misha, I had chosen a frosted shot glass emblazoned with the same design. He was about 5-foot-9, slight and worn. His face was wrinkled, his shoulders slumped, his pale blond hair gone except for a fringe above his ears. He said he was a carpenter, but he spent most of his time lying on the living room floor shirtless, chain-smoking and watching Russian World War II movies on satellite TV. Olya brought in most of the family’s income with her job as a bookkeeper at a paint factory. I thought a shot glass would be a good choice for a Russian man; I’d learned everything I knew about Russians from the movies. Misha took the glass, thanked me, and gave it to Olya, who put it away in a cupboard with a tight smile.

  For Denis, I had picked out some pencils decorated with an American flag pattern. From the photo of the family I had seen while I was at Chuli, I had thought he would be a child. In fact, he had already graduated from high school and was biding his time until spring, when he would start his two years of mandatory military service. Blond with a crew cut and acne, he was built like a bear. He looked at me like I was an idiot and thanked me for the pencils. I had nothing for Sasha, since I hadn’t known he would even be there. He’d come from Russia only a few weeks earlier. His mother was trying to get an accounting degree there and had asked her parents, Olya and Misha, to look after him for a year so she could focus on school. Blond and hyperactive, he was just as confused by Turkmenistan as I was. I dug through my backpack and found a deck of cards to give him.

  It was still morning, but I was exhausted and overwhelmed so I went to my room, lay down, and fell asleep. When I woke up an hour later, I wandered into the kitchen and sat down across from Olya at the table, which was covered with a purple-and white-checked tablecloth. She had a lump of dough and a bowl of seasoned, ground meat and she was making Russian tortellini – pelmini – one by one. Wordlessly, she showed me how. We sat in silence, folding pasta, and sweating. It was well over 90 degrees outside, and the apartment’s un-insulated concrete walls radiated heat. Misha lay on the floor shirtless, watching TV and smoking. I was relieved that no one was trying to talk to me. My brain hurt from trying all morning to speak and understand a language I had been studying for only a few days. Olya boiled a few handfuls of pelmini in a pot on the stove and served them in bowls with sour cream, salt, and pepper. It was delicious. I had seconds.

  That evening, Sasha knocked on the door to my room and asked if I wanted to "goolyat" with him and Olya. I didn’t understand, so while he stood there in the doorway impatiently, I paged through my yellow Russian-English dictionary. It took me a while to find the word, since I barely knew the Russian alphabet. It turned out he was asking if I wanted to go out for a walk. I put on a long-sleeved shirt, sat on the floor, and pulled on my shoes. Outside, night was falling but it was still about 85 degrees. People escaping their stifling apartments for the cool of the evening filled the streets. Women walked in groups, little children tugging at their skirts. Men squatted in rows on curbs, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the husks into the gutters. Smoke from burning trash piles drifted among the buildings.

  We walked toward the mountains, passing among row upon row of concrete apartment buildings just like ours. Satellite dishes sprouted from nearly every window, all facing the same direction, like rows of giant, gray sunflowers. Each first-floor apartment had its own garden. I peeked over hedges and through fences at them as we passed. In the gardens, men lounged under grape arbors drinking tea on tapjans. Women baked chorek in clay ovens and fried somsas in cast-iron cauldrons over wood fires. We passed a man butchering a sheep that was hanging by its back legs from the side of a concrete telephone pole.

  Six blocks or so from our apartment, we came to the town’s main bazaar. Roofed with a patchwork of canvas and plastic, its tables were laden with pyramids of fruits and vegetables. The street in front of the bazaar was crowded. Turkmen women with long black braids and koyneks walked with Russian bottle-blonds in mini-skirts and high heels. Most men – Turkmen and Russian alike – wore black pants and white, button-down shirts. In the buildings around the bazaar, there were convenience stores, a dressmaker’s shop, and a barber’s shop the size of a phone booth. We passed an arcade where a crowd of kids clamored to rent time on two Sony PlayStations. When it got dark, families hauled beds from their apartments onto the sidewalks so they could sleep outside where it was cool. Olya, Sasha, and I headed home. Back at the apartment, I read for a few minutes and then fell asleep, exhausted.

  I had expected Turkmenistan to be extremely poor. After exploring Ashgabat and now Abadan, though, I was beginning to realize that it was not as underdeveloped as places I’d visited in Latin America and Africa. On international scales of development, Turkmenistan ranked somewhere in the middle (although that still meant that 58 percent of Turkmen lived in poverty and 60 percent were unemployed).10 The frustrating thing w
as that it should have ranked much higher. It had a small population, some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, and small but significant oil reserves.11

  After independence, Niyazov promised that this fortuitous combination would turn the country into the “Kuwait of Central Asia” and “promised every family free bread and a new Mercedes.”12 But a combination of factors kept the people of Turkmenistan relatively poor.

  Bad government was certainly part of the problem. The nongovernmental organization Transparency International ranked Turkmenistan among the ten most corrupt countries in the world in 2005, worse than Nigeria and on par with Haiti. Turkmenistan made about $2 billion a year off of its natural gas, according to one estimate. But “…Niyazov [kept] most of the gas revenues under his effective control in overseas and off-budget funds…no money from the sale of Turkmen gas even [made] it into the national budget.”13 He spent tens of millions on prestige projects like the reconstruction of downtown Ashgabat, which didn’t do much to improve life for the Turkmen people or strengthen the country’s economy. It’s not clear where the rest went.

  Bad government wasn’t the only factor keeping Turkmenistan poor, though. Pipeline politics also played a role. During the Soviet days, Turkmenistan’s gas flowed north, through Soviet pipelines. It was provided at artificially low prices to other Soviet republics. While the other republics got cheap gas, Turkmenistan stayed poor. After independence, not much changed: most of Turkmenistan’s gas continued to flow through the same pipelines. Russia used the leverage that arrangement provided – it could close its pipelines, virtually shutting down the country’s ability to export gas – to buy Turkmen gas for artificially low prices. Turkmenistan remained relatively poor. Niyazov had looked for ways to break Russia’s stranglehold on Turkmenistan’s ability to export its gas, investigating the possibility of building pipelines across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, across the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to Turkey, and across Kazakhstan to China, but he had not managed to solve the problem.