Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  * * *

  Almost every morning for the first 10 weeks, I had language classes at Dom Pionerov with the other trainees who lived in Abadan. We had been assigned to live in cities where there were lots of Russian speakers, so we were learning Russian. All the other Peace Corps trainees were learning Turkmen. The schoolhouse and everything in it had been designed for children; for class, we squeezed into miniature chairs, around a miniature table. Flies buzzed in and out of the open windows. We struggled to conjugate verbs and memorize vocabulary, sweating in the late-summer heat.

  Sitting around the table were Matt, a metro-sexual from New Hampshire who had just graduated from law school; Allen, a distracted Korean American guy fresh out of Yale who rarely talked; Laura, a kindhearted woman from suburban Miami who looked a little like Sandra Bullock and had a good story about an NBA player grabbing her ass; and Kellie, a good Christian girl from Washington state who often looked like she was about to burst into tears and occasionally did. Our teacher, Tanya, had worked for Peace Corps for nearly a decade. She was patient and good at her job. We learned fast.

  Every day after class, our little group would walk from Dom Pionerov through the dust and glaring late-summer heat to Aunt Olga’s apartment for lunch. A full, gray-haired woman of about 65, she would kiss our cheeks, tell us what good boys and girls we were, pile our plates with stuffed peppers and push us to eat more and more because we were “too skinny.”

  After lunch, we’d trudge out the door, down the grimy stairwell, and back out into the heat, trying to avoid the emaciated, mangy cat that was dying in the stairwell, day-by-day. One afternoon, just outside the building, I found a boy and a girl – they looked like they were three or four years old – playing in a mud puddle. They were sucking up the stagnant water with dirty plastic syringes and squirting it at each other, giggling. At a loss, I checked to make sure there were no needles attached to the syringes, returned them to the kids, and went on my way.

  At first I was assigned to spend several hours a week at a clinic – a standard training assignment for health teachers. Soon, though, I got permission to skip my clinic time, since I wouldn’t be working at a clinic after training, anyway. Instead, I was to spend a few hours a week at the local branch of the Red Crescent (the Red Cross of the Islamic world).

  This turned out to be difficult to arrange, since I couldn’t find the Red Crescent office. I couldn’t look up its location on the Web, since Internet access was not available in Abadan. I couldn’t look it up in the Abadan telephone book, because there didn’t seem to be one. Besides, even if I had been able to find Red Crescent’s address somehow, it wouldn’t have helped because there were few street signs or numbers in Abadan. People in Turkmenistan don’t move around much—in part because they aren’t allowed to – so almost everyone in Abadan is from Abadan. They don’t need yellow pages or street signs to find their ways around. They just know.

  With Tanya’s help, I asked around for a few days and eventually learned Red Crescent’s location: “In the building across from city hall, where the old pelmini shop used to be. Everyone knows that.” The office was on the first floor of an apartment building. I knocked, but there was no answer. I pushed open the green metal door and found myself in a dark, musty dining hall, about 30 feet square. A few plastic tables and chairs stood on the tile floor and a portrait of Niyazov hung on the wall. I didn’t see anyone around, so I crossed the room and ducked through a curtain into a short hallway. On my right, a door opened into a kitchen where a skeleton-skinny 21-year-old was standing by the window smoking a cigarette – one of those slim menthol ones marketed to women – and drinking instant coffee. His name was Geldy. He grinned at me.

  Geldy was my official “counterpart,” which meant he was supposed to be my guide, interpreter, and primary contact at work. When he was younger he had been a Red Crescent youth volunteer in Ashgabat, teaching health lessons in schools, putting on New Year’s shows at orphanages, and going on camping trips in the mountains. He stuck around for so long that they hired him to coordinate the Abadan youth volunteer group. He lived with his parents in Ashgabat and took the bus to Abadan every morning. He led me across the hall and into the main office to introduce me to Aman, our boss.

  Aman turned out to be a fat, greasy looking man with a comb-over, sitting behind an empty desk. A portrait of Niyazov hung on the wall behind him. He put down his newspaper and gave me a fake smile. I introduced myself and he welcomed me and said some things in Russian that I didn’t understand. Geldy, who was supposed to be my interpreter, stood next to him to facilitate the exchange. It turned out, though, that he only knew a few words of English.

  “He bitch,” Geldy told me, straight-faced. “He big fat bitch.”

  Aman spoke again.

  “He stupid gravedigger,” Geldy explained, helpfully.

  Aman concluded his remarks.

  “He bad man,” Geldy said.

  I told Aman I was pleased to meet him and followed Geldy back across the hall to the kitchen, where we both burst out laughing. We spent the next few hours talking, with lots of help from my little yellow dictionary, and drinking coffee. He told me Aman was a greedy, corrupt ex-dentist and asked me a million questions about myself. He turned out to be sharp, funny, and well-read, full of sayings like: “Never be afraid to try new things. Remember, Noah was an amateur and the guys who built the Titanic were professionals.” He had a black, cynical sense of humor, which I found hilarious. I didn’t realize yet how deep his cynicism ran, though; I thought he was joking when he called himself “the Turkmen Machiavelli.” When it was time for me to go, I used my dictionary to try to tell him I had class until noon the next day but would come by after I’d finished. He burst out laughing.

  “After you’ve finished?” he asked, giggling.

  “Yes,” I said, showing him the word in the dictionary. “After I’ve finished.”

  Don’t use that word,” he said, laughing so hard he had to put his coffee on the counter so he wouldn’t spill it. “We use that word for when a man finishes having sex.”

  4.

  Life in the Gulag

  Lying diagonally to fit my six-foot-plus body between the headboard and footboard of my little bed, I would watch the sky lighten through my window each morning. A grape vine as thick as my arm grew up the side of the apartment building. As summer wore into autumn, the leaves browned and fell. I would note the changes as I lay in bed, adjusting to the waking world, listening to Olya clattering around the kitchen, putting together a breakfast of tea and cookies and sometimes – on special days – Russian crepes called blini.

  After breakfast, I would iron my button-down shirt and slacks, shine my shoes and walk to work. If I wanted to be respected, I’d been told, I had to look good. Turkmen men were obsessive about their shoes, carrying handkerchiefs so they could stop from time to time to wipe the dust off them. Most Turkmen could not understand the American jeans-and-t-shirt aesthetic. I once overheard a teenager who had visited the United States telling a friend in an amused tone that, “in America, even the rich people dress like they’re poor.”

  I would leave my building and cross a ruined playground, a desolate dirt lot with a busted merry-go-round and a swing set with only one swing left. I would turn right onto the main road to the bazaar, which was wide, paved, and flanked by concrete sidewalks. On my right were rows of apartment buildings. On my left was a neighborhood of brick and stucco family compounds. They were walled-in clusters of one-story houses built around central courtyards, which sheltered gardens, livestock, and tapjans. I would often pass a child driving his family’s sheep, goats, cows, or camels to the fields to graze. I would follow the road south, up a slight incline, toward the Kopetdag range, which rose up off the flat desert plain like a wall, its highest peaks topping 10,000 feet. Denis, my host-brother, had told me that the tallest mountains, furthest in the distance, were in Iran.

  When I reached the war memorial, I would cross the street and turn left onto th
e tree-lined road that led to Dom Pionerov. The memorial, an eternal flame surrounded by 15-foot-high concrete fins meant to evoke more flames, honored the soldiers from Abadan who had died in what Americans call World War II and Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. There were similar monuments in nearly every town, village, and hamlet in Turkmenistan. The Soviet Union lost some 23 million souls in the war, more than 13 percent of its population (the United States lost about 418,500 citizens, still a staggering loss, but less than half a percent of its population). The city government had extinguished this particular eternal flame because neighborhood kids kept catching themselves on fire while playing in it.

  Some days I would stop at a corner store and buy cookies to eat during the mid-morning break from Russian class. During those early days, I practically lived on the crispy, rectangular, chocolate-covered cookies that were for sale in bulk in every store and at the bazaar. I think my body was craving junk. My diet at the Plotnikovs’ apartment was just too plain and wholesome compared to American food. Olga made it all from scratch, with no preservatives and few spices.

  Most days, though, I wasn’t responsible for the cookies and I would go straight to the schoolhouse, drop my notebook on the table and squeeze into a miniature chair. Sweating in the classroom one morning, flies buzzing around the outside of my head and verb conjugations rattling around the inside, I noticed something had changed. After weeks of mind-numbing Russian classes, I had memorized every object in the room and there hadn’t been a two-foot-tall carpet loom leaning in that dusty corner before. I was thrilled to see it. I had wanted to learn to weave Turkmen carpets but I hadn’t known how or where. Here was my answer.

  Turkmen carpets had been famous for centuries. Long known as “Bukhara” rugs because they were sold at the bazaars in that city, they were lauded by Marco Polo as “the finest carpets in the world, and the most beautiful.”14 The classic Turkmen rug had a burgundy red background. In the center there was a field of repeating medallions called güls – different tribes used different güls – surrounded by a wide, geometric border. When the Soviets took control of Turkmenistan, they quickly saw the value of the local carpets, organized weavers into cooperatives, and started marketing the rugs abroad. They even sent one to the 1937 Paris World Fair, where it won a prize.15

  After independence, the carpets became national symbols. The Turkmen flag features a gül from each of the country’s five welayats (states). Niyazov had weavers make the world’s biggest carpet, which is housed in a museum in the capital, with a plaque from the Guinness Book of World Records. The Turkmen government considers antique carpets national treasures and protects them with export restrictions. Though the rugs are cheap by Western standards, few Turkmen families can afford them. Most cover their floors with poor-quality, factory made knock-offs.

  It took me a week to gather my courage, practice my vocabulary, and ask Dom Pionerov’s carpet weaving teacher, Mayhm, to teach me her craft. She was a handsome middle-aged Turkmen woman with streaks of gray in her braided black hair and the smell of sweat, mutton grease, and onions hanging about her clothes. I couldn’t understand her reply in Russian, but her gold-toothed smile told me yes. Every day after lunch, I would walk back to Dom Pionerov for carpet weaving class, where I would spend two or three hours squatting on my heels over a little loom, tying knot after tiny knot.

  I stood out among the other students in the class. They were all 8-to 10-year-old girls. Sometimes people would stop by to watch “the American” weave a Turkmen carpet. They were all surprised to see a man weaving a carpet. Turkmenistan is the kind of place where women weave the carpets and men just sit on them and ask when their dinners will be ready. I always worked close enough to the window to catch some light; every second or third day the power would go out, despite the fact that we were a half-mile from a power station.

  Some days, after working on my carpet, I would go to Red Crescent. Aman and Geldy mostly couldn’t figure out what to do with me, so I loafed in the kitchen, drinking coffee and joking with Geldy. As the days passed, I began to suspect that he’d requested a Peace Corps Volunteer because he was bored and wanted a friend, not because he thought I could help with any of Red Crescent’s work. Occasionally, I taught lessons about hand washing and nutrition at nearby School No. 8. I taught Geldy’s youth volunteers English. I acted as the token American at the Thanksgiving and Halloween parties organized by the English teachers at School No. 8, a quartet of Russian women – Catherine (nèe Yekaterina), Rumia, Natalya, and Natasha – who had been working together for more than two decades.

  In those early days, I also spent a lot of time just sitting around and talking to people. They were curious about me and I was curious about them. At first, the conversations didn’t go much further than family and work. People in Turkmenistan were careful about what they said and to whom; a few wrong words to the wrong person could mean prison. After a several weeks, though, people got more comfortable with me and started talking politics.

  It made me nervous. Peace Corps had warned me again and again to avoid local politics. So I tried to either change the subject or give neutral responses. One day an acquaintance took me out to lunch and, while we were in his car, safe from eavesdroppers, launched into a rant against the government.

  “This is a rich country,” he said. “There’s enough gas and oil money that Niyazov could be paying each and every person $25 a day. Where’s all the money going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Look, one thing you need to understand about Turkmenistan is that our ‘president,’ Niyazov, is a dictator like Saddam Hussein. He’s as bad as Saddam Hussein.”

  “Really?” I said.

  We went on like that for 20 minutes or so, but I refused to engage, to commit – I was afraid it was a trick. Eventually he gave up on me. We never became friends.

  Nearly everyone had something bad to say about Niyazov, though few were bold enough tell a near-stranger that he was as bad as Saddam Hussein. Perhaps the only person I knew who was a consistent Niyazov supporter was Geldy. He was a member of Niyazov’s political party (the only one in the country). He understood Turkmenistan’s problems, but he maintained that Niyazov was doing as good a job as anyone could. He knew the government had made some terrible policies and was absurdly corrupt, but he blamed all that on Niyazov’s underlings. He reminded me of the Russians I’d met – including Misha – who maintained that Stalin was a good man surrounded by vicious, greedy incompetents.

  After spending my days teaching a little and talking a lot, I would go home and sit at the kitchen table with Denis and Olya while Misha lay on the floor, clicking his false teeth, chain-smoking, and watching TV. Sasha was almost always outside avoiding his homework – throwing firecrackers into apartment building stairwells or playing a game with sheep knuckles and rules similar to marbles. Sometimes I would study my Russian flashcards. Other times Denis, who spoke good English, would serve as translator so we could all chat. They had endless questions about the prices of things in America: clothes, cars, food, toothbrushes, train tickets. I had endless questions about their lives in Turkmenistan, and before that, in the Soviet Union. I was fascinated – everything I knew about the USSR I had learned from Red Dawn and Rocky IV.

  Olya, it turned out, was from Siberia. She didn’t bother to tell me which city because it wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway. While she, Misha, and Denis knew American geography in great detail, I knew embarrassingly little about the former Soviet Union. When Olya was in her 20s, a girl she knew moved to Turkmenistan for work and then invited her to visit. She did, and liked it so much she decided to stay. The bazaars were full, the winters were mild – it was “paradise,” she told me. She soon met and married Misha, who was an officer in the Soviet air force, posted at a base just outside Abadan.

  The base was still there, home to fighter jets and helicopters, its hangars covered with dirt and disguised as hills. Misha had long since retired from the military and become a fre
elance carpenter. He didn’t seem to work much, though. Every morning when Olya went to work and Sasha went to school, Misha and Denis would also leave, supposedly to spend all day building cabinets, chairs, doors, and shelves. Every once in a while, though, I would forget something and return home later in the morning. I would invariably find Misha sleeping or lounging in front of the television. And that was when he wasn’t away on his frequent two-and three-day fishing trips. (He would return with a couple dozen hand-sized fish, which he would salt and hang on a clothesline near the window in my room to dry. This meant my room always smelled like old fish. It also meant, however, that we always had something to snack on while we played cards).

  The Plotnikovs might have lived for decades in Turkmenistan, but they still considered themselves Russians. Denis, who had been born in Abadan and had spent his entire life there, spoke only the most basic Turkmen. Olya and Misha didn’t speak any. This resistance to assimilation wasn’t unique to Russians. While many Americans assume that anyone who immigrates to the US can become an American, too, the attitude is different in Turkmenistan. There, nationality is about blood, about history. It doesn’t change. Turkmen passports recorded their holders’ nationalities and casual descriptions of people invariably included nationalities. The Plotnikovs were friendly with a few Turkmen, but spent their time mostly with other Russians.