by Sam Tranum
I’d usually sit around the living room talking to my host family until the sun began to set and the air cooled off a little. Then I would go for a run. No matter how hot it was I always wore pants. Only young boys wear shorts in Turkmenistan. Some days I would just jog along the streets, passing burning garbage, grazing sheep, women pushing babies in strollers, and men squatting on their haunches in doorways and on curbs, talking in low voices. Other days, I would run on the track at the town’s sport center, the “FOK.” It was a strange building, a two-story, angular tin turtle. The weight room was stocked with iron bars to which someone had welded paired chunks of scrap metal of various sizes. Outside was a half-kilometer track wrapped around a dirt soccer field. As I ran around and around, children would often chase me, grabbing my clothes, trying to slow me down, giggling. Sometimes I would pick them up and carry them with me for a half-lap, others I would convince them to race me.
While I walked home from the sport center, sweating and trying to catch my breath, the children from the neighborhood would call out to me:
“Hello, hello.”
“Hello,” I would say.
“HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!” they would chant.
“One hello is enough,” I would tell them in Russian. Most of them spoke only Turkmen.
“HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!” they would respond.
I could still hear them long after I was upstairs in the apartment, lying on the floor, sweating, and chugging water.
A few nights a week, I would go to Tanya’s apartment for Russian lessons. She and I would sit at her living room table, drinking tea and eating cookies. She gave me some grammar, vocabulary, and reading assignments, but mostly we just talked. She believed in God, feng shui, and horoscopes. I didn’t. We spent hours arguing over whether putting fake gold coins under her refrigerator would make her rich. I was so desperate to win the arguments that I studied hard and strained to make myself understood. Tanya was excellent at baiting me; my Russian improved fast.
5.
Marching for One Man
After about two months of studying, teaching, weaving, card playing, and running, Independence Day arrived – October 27. Someone from the KNB called Tanya and demanded to know where “her Americans” would be during the holiday. We asked what our options were and Tanya laid them out for us. That’s how I learned there was a celebration planned in Ashgabat. I was eager for a break from my routine so I arranged to go. Denis, Allen, and I took a marshrutka into Ashgabat and joined a river of people flowing through the streets into the new, optimistically named, Olympic Stadium. As the light faded from the sky, we packed into the stands with thousands of other people and waited for the show to begin. Every seat was filled.
Schoolchildren across Turkmenistan had been training for months – they’d often been excused from classes – to dance during the Independence Day celebration. Dressed in color-coordinated outfits, thousands of them filled the field in the center of the stadium. They moved in waves and spirals, spinning and dipping in synchronized dances for hours. It reminded me of videos I’d seen of North Korea’s “mass games.” The president watched from a skybox. Soldiers patrolled the stands, passing out Turkmen flags and telling spectators to waive them and cheer. A couple hours into the show, two middle-aged women sitting near me tried to leave. A soldier blocked their way, handed them two miniature flags and told them to sit back down and cheer until the performance was over. They obeyed.
Although American independence day celebrations often feature symbols of the American struggle for independence, Turkmenistan’s celebration did not dwell on history. That’s probably because the reality of the country’s history did not fit well with the nationalist narrative that Niyazov was trying to build. Turkmenistan had never existed before the Soviets created it.
When tsarist Russian troops conquered the area in the 1880s, they found it occupied by a mix of sedentary, semi-nomadic, and nomadic tribes – Yomuts, Choudirs, Goklengs, Tekes, Salirs, Sariks, and Ersaris, among others – which claimed a common ancestry but had little else in common. Some were sheep herders, some fished the Caspian, and others were farmers. The tribes spoke different dialects and were often at war with each other. They had no aristocracy and little government. “We are a nation without a head and we do not need any chiefs. We are all equal, among us each is his own tsar,” they said of themselves, according to one report.16 This “near-anarchic” state of affairs may have been the result of more than three centuries of severe hardship caused by wars and environmental changes. Whatever the cause, the tsarist government did little to alter the situation during its brief period of control of the area.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks took over the Russian empire in and began transforming it into the Soviet Union. Seeing that they could not suppress the desires of different nationalities to have their own homelands, they decided that the best way to hold their multi-ethnic state together was to promote carefully controlled, state-sponsored nationalism. In Tribal Nation, Adrienne Lynn Edgar described how, in the 1920s, the Soviets sent ethnographers to map Central Asia’s ethnic geography based on factors like language, lineage, dress, and way of life.
In 1924, they drew the borders of a Turkmen homeland. It was meant to be as homogenously Turkmen as possible, but ended up including a large Uzbek minority. Since Turkmen preferred to live in rural areas, they had built few towns. So the Soviets gave them the heavily Uzbek cities of Dashagouz and Charjou. Once the borders were drawn, the Soviets started creating a uniform Turkmen language, a Turkmen school system, and a Turkmen government.17 The Turkmen began to come together as a nation, though tribal divisions were not forgotten. But they still didn’t have an independent state.
Moscow ran the Turkmen government and economy through shell institutions in Ashgabat. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was among the most underdeveloped and conservative parts of the Soviet Union – like the rural South in the US. While elites in some of the other 14 republics that comprised the Soviet Union pushed Moscow for radical changes during the 1980s, elites in the Turkmen SSR did not call for the breakup of the Union or welcome it when it arrived. In fact, 97 percent of Turkmen voted in a March 1991 referendum to preserve the Union. As the Soviet Union’s disintegration continued, though, the Turkmen held another referendum later that year. They did an about-face. More than 94 percent voted for independence. The Ashgabat government declared independence October 27, 1991.18 The Turkmen had an independent state, whether they were sure they wanted it or not.
Not much changed after independence. The Communist Party renamed itself the Democratic Party. Elections were held and Saparmurat Niyazov, the leader of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan since 1985 (and the only candidate for president) was elected with 99.95 percent of the vote. A legislature with almost no powers was created. In 1999, the parliament extended Niyazov’s term indefinitely; he became president for life. There was much talk about a transition to capitalism – and there were a few economic reforms – but the economy remained essentially state-directed. By 2004, the private sector accounted for only 25 percent of Turkmenistan’s GDP.19 A 2008 assessment by the Heritage Foundation ranked Turkmenistan’s economy as one of the least free in the world – 152nd of 157 – and noted that the government provided most of the jobs in the country.20
Niyazov was willing to create enough of the institutions of modern statehood to be accepted by the international community but he was never willing to give any of those institutions autonomous authority or power. They serve[d] his interests and whims, reflecting neither themselves as institutions, nor the people they theoretically represent[ed],” one scholar explained.21
None of this, of course, was mentioned at the celebration in the stadium on Independence Day, which focused on Turkmenistan’s 14 years of independence, its glorious democracy, its United Nations-recognized neutrality, and Niyazov’s benevolence and wisdom.
It wasn’t mentioned at the parade the next day, either. Tanks, missiles, soldiers, floats, and dancers lan
guished in unmoving queues along Ashgabat’s wide boulevards, among the white marble and gleaming glass of the new ministry buildings and presidential palace. They assembled and marched for only one block – the block in front of Niyazov’s glassed-in, gold-domed reviewing stand. I stood in a crowd around the corner and we all strained to see the parade as it marched for the president.
6.
A Massacre, a Plague of Locusts, and an Earthquake
Living with the Plotnikovs was chaotic. They seemed never to sleep. They were awake when I went to bed at night and they were awake when I woke in the morning. The only access to the apartment’s tiny enclosed balcony, which the family used for storage, was through my room. I would often wake at 3 a.m. to find Misha rummaging around on the balcony, searching for fishing tackle, or Olya rifling through the spare, dorm-sized refrigerator, collecting ingredients for soup. The TV blared day and night, playing Russian movies and variety shows.
It was a good life. It was comfortable. I didn’t mind the salted fish drying in my room. I didn’t mind that everything I owned smelled like stale cigarettes. I didn’t mind being woken up at 3 a.m. sometimes. I loved being part of a family, no matter how messy. Olya would put extra blankets on my bed on cold nights. Denis was always ready to play cards or help me with my Russian. We all suffered Sasha’s hyperactivity and pestering together and conspired to make him do his homework.
I had not been part of that sort of crowded, boisterous family life growing up in eastern Massachusetts. My parents divorced when I was a child and I lived with my mother and older brother for most of my school years. We had a big house in the suburbs with plenty of space to live separate lives. We did not eat breakfast and dinner together every day, the way I did with the Plotnikovs. We did not spend each evening talking over the day’s events, strategizing about how to get through the next day’s challenges. When I was 16, I left home and my life tangled up in my family ended. I moved to Seattle and lived with a cousin, hoping high school would be less miserable there than it had been in Massachusetts. A few months later, I dropped out and left Seattle. I was more or less on my own from then on.
My adoptive Russian family found it hilarious and bizarre that I spent my afternoons learning to weave carpets. To them, not only was that women’s work, even worse, it was Turkmen women’s work. By November I had learned the basics and was helping Mahym teach my young classmates. I finished with my magazine-sized training rug and began planning my next project. Mahym knelt on an ancient-looking carpet scrap while she was working at her loom. It was worn thin, but its geometric pattern and its deep reds and earth tones were still vibrant. She told me it had lain on the floor of the fortress where the Turkmen made their final stand against the tsarist army in 1881.
That battle marked the beginning of 110 years of Russian domination of Turkmen lands and played a prominent role in the nationalist version of Turkmen history promoted by the Niyazov regime. In the early 1800s, Russian forces had started pushing southeast, conquering Central Asia bit by bit. Great Britain, worried the tsar might be planning to march right through Central Asia and into British India, slipped spies into the region to watch the Russians. By 1879, the two empires were deeply tangled in this so-called “Great Game,” and Russia made its next move, sending its soldiers to subdue the Turkmen tribes.
They laid siege to the Akhal Teke tribe’s stronghold, a mud-brick fortress in Geokdepe. “Used to fighting rabble armies and ill-led and untrained tribesmen,” the Russians underestimated their opponents, Peter Hopkirk recounted in The Great Game. The Akhal Tekes bested them and sent them scrambling back to their fort at Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian coast. The Russians regrouped and marched on Geokdepe again in 1881, bombarding the fortress with artillery and rockets while tens of thousands of Akhal Teke troops and civilians sheltered inside.
The Akhal Tekes managed to hold out until the Russians tunneled underneath one of the fortress’s walls and blew a massive hole in it. Then the carnage began. The Russians reportedly killed some 14,500 Akhal Tekes, bayoneting babies, slaughtering old men, and raping women. Mikhail Skobelev, the Russian general who led the attack, justified the atrocities by saying, “The harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.”22 The tsar’s troops conquered the rest of the Turkmen lands with little difficulty.
I had friends who lived in Geokdepe. I’d seen the remains of the fortress. As I sat by the window in Dom Pioneerov, copying the pattern from Mahym’s carpet scrap, history felt very close. I could almost smell it as I counted the tiny knots with a needle and marked their colors on a piece of graph paper. It took me two afternoons to finish copying the pattern and reproduce the missing bits beyond the scrap’s ragged edges.
Then I got started on my next task: finding a loom. Dom Pionerov had two large looms, but I couldn’t commandeer one. The kids needed them for their classes. So I asked Denis and Misha whether they would help me build a loom in Misha’s workshop. They seemed agreeable but kept putting me off. I didn’t want to be too pushy, so I let it drop, thinking they would eventually get around to it.
While I waited for the loom, I went shopping for yarn. I woke early on a Sunday – my only day off, since Turkmenistan had a six-day work week – and rode an ancient, crank-started bus to the Tolkuchka Bazaar, a sprawling jumble of booths and stands, tin and canvas, on a patch of scrub-desert outside Ashgabat. Everything was for sale there, from jeans and CD players to antique Soviet rubles and ancient pottery, from bicycles to books, from wrenches to frying pans. I crossed the parking lot, which was just a patch of empty sand, and followed the crowd through a maze of fruit and vegetable sellers who were squatting in front of piles of tomatoes, cucumbers, pomegranates, kiwis, and basil, laid out on mats on the ground.
Under the tall brick arch that marked the entrance, a chorus of babushkas called out: “Change money? Change money?” On my right was a pile of brooms as big as a sleeping elephant, on my left, a woman was telling fortunes with a handful of stones. The air smelled like grilled meat, dust, and garbage. I wandered until I found a woman sitting among stacks of gorgeous Turkmen carpets next to a colorful pile of yarn.
Operating from a shopping list Mahym had written for me, I bought skeins of red, orange, black, brown, white, and blue yarn, priced by the kilogram. Back home, I found I’d been cheated. The insides of all the skeins were wet, which made them heavier – and thus, more expensive. For days, I spent my evenings winding the yarn into balls in front of the television while Olya held the skeins between her arms to keep them from tangling.
* * *
I had been living in Turkmenistan for nearly two months but I had seen only Ashgabat, Abadan, and Chuli. I was getting restless and curious. I wanted to explore the country. So Allen and I decided to take a trip to an ancient mosque in Anew, on the other side of the capital. We woke early on a Sunday and rode marshrutkas and buses for an hour and a half to the bazaar in Anew. I bought some water and some potato-filled pastries called piroshkis, and we asked around for directions to the “very, very old mosque.” The answer was always a vague gesture toward the east edge of town.
We set off on foot. Although it was November already, the summer heat had barely faded. The sky was clear and the sun beat down on us. At first we followed a two-lane road lined with box elder, locust and Osage orange trees. After a half-hour, we left the road and started hiking through a field of cotton. The waist-high plants had been picked over and were starting to dry out and lose their leaves. The sounds of town faded and soon all I could hear was the wind, an occasional songbird, and my feet crunching in the crumbly soil. Clouds began to gather and the temperature dropped.
In the fields, we came upon a young couple with two little daughters who were gathering leftover cotton – a few stray puffs of pure white from each bush – into canvas bags that hung around their waists. We asked for directions to the mosque and they said we were headed the right way. We walked on. In the distance, between us and the mountains, there were two dirt mounds as big as baseball stadium
s and about 50 feet high. To me, they seemed completely out of place on the flat desert plain.
The Russian General A.V. Komarov, the man placed in charge of the newly conquered Turkmen lands after the battle of Geokdepe, thought the same thing. An amateur archaeologist, he figured they were man-made and thought he might find treasure inside them. In 1886, he had his men carve a trench into one. He didn’t find gold, but he found evidence of an ancient civilization, which he later published.23 In 1904, an American geologist/ archaeologist arrived to explore the mounds more carefully.
Already in his late 60s, Raphael Pumpelly had a bushy white beard that made him look a little like Charles Darwin. His excavations uncovered evidence of human habitation stretching back 7,000 years.24 During that time, Anew had developed from a small rural settlement into an urban center. From roughly the second through the fifteenth centuries A.D., it had served as a stop for Silk Road caravans traveling between China and India in the east, and Mediterranean ports in the west.25
One day while Pumpelly’s men were digging, locusts began crawling out of the ground: first a scattered few, then thousands. “The whole surface of the oasis became at once covered with an endless insect army, always twenty or more per square foot …At last, when they accumulated in our excavation pits faster than men could shovel them out …we had to stop work and flee,” he recalled.26 As the archaeologists retreated, the locusts gorged themselves on the surrounding wheat fields, creating a regional famine.
