Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  A few days later, I went to the weekly meeting of Abadan English teachers that Ovez had given me permission to attend. It was just the Quartet and me. We sat in a cold classroom at School No. 8, drinking tea, and talking in English. The subject, of course, was the school-heating debacle. Their general attitude was: well, what did you expect? Still, they had no intention of giving up – or letting me give up. They were not intimidated by either the KNB or city hall. After all, they had been teaching for nearly 25 years and remembered all the scowling men in dark suits that were causing us such trouble as bratty little kids; they knew their mothers.

  Rumia, the most jaded, cynical member of the Quartet, retold the story – which I had heard countless times – of how she had engineered a short, all-expenses paid trip to America for a group of her students and just hours before their flight was to leave Ashgabat, the government had decreed that they couldn’t go. After that, she’d given up on ambitious projects. She just taught her classes and kept her head down.

  “When I thought this was going to work, it made me believe it might still be possible to do good things here,” she said.

  I decided to stick with the school-heating project until the bitter end. There wasn’t much more I could do, though. The mayor had bowed to reality and admitted the school was cold – an important step – but he still refused to give me official permission to fix it. He told me to write the grant, get the money, and do the work, but he would not provide me with the all-important signed, stamped letter of permission. So Counterpart (wisely) would not accept my grant proposal. Without the letter of permission from the city, I could have ended up winning the grant, buying $10,000 worth of pipes and radiators, and being refused permission to install them.

  I spent several days shuttling from Ovez’s office to School No. 8 to Counterpart’s office to the Peace Corps office to city hall, trying to find a way to convince the mayor to pull his stamp out of his desk drawer and apply it to my proposal. At home, I’d wait until Olya and Denis got home from the paint factory – Denis was helping his mother out, since her secretary had disappeared – and then fill them in on the day’s absurdities.

  “Are they kidding?” I would rant. “They must be fucking kidding. This whole country must be fucking kidding. The fucking secret police shut down my PTA meetings. I spend my days pleading with city officials to let me give them $10,000 to make their children’s school warm. This must be a joke.”

  Misha would just lie in front of the TV, clicking his dentures.

  “What did you think would happen?” Denis would ask, laughing.

  “If they don’t want your help, don’t help them,” Olya would say.

  But I was so convinced that what I was doing was right that I should help Abadan heat its school, whether it wanted my help or not – and that if I just stuck with it and bulled my way through, I could get it done, that I didn’t even consider following her advice.

  After a frustrating week, I went back to the English teachers’ meeting. We sat around a table in Catherine’s classroom, drinking tea and eating hard candies. I told them I’d made no progress. They discussed the problem. Rumia’s former student, Kolya, worked at city hall. The Quartet agreed that he was our last hope. The next day, I called his office and asked for a meeting. He didn’t call me back so Rumia went over his head – she called his mother. Within an hour, he had agreed to meet us at Red Crescent.

  When Kolya arrived, he greeted Rumia coldly. He was a 30-something Russian man in a black suit with floppy blond hair that spilled over his ears. He wore a golden Niyazov face on his lapel. He told us there was nothing he could do to help us. All the top city officials were scared to approve the project, he explained. Accepting aid from international organizations was hazardous; it could lead to arrest and imprisonment. Two years earlier, he had narrowly escaped going to jail for trying to get a grant from Counterpart to rebuild a playground in town, he said. It could also mean getting fired. Unemployment was at least 60 percent and the government controlled most full-time jobs.38 That meant that the threat of being blackballed from government work was a powerful tool for social control, since it was really the threat of a lifetime of struggle and poverty.39

  “This is Turkmenistan’s ‘Golden Age,’” Kolya said sarcastically, referring to one of Niyazov’s slogans. “We don’t need help from foreigners. All our schools are already warm. All our playgrounds are already perfect.”

  And that ended my school-heating project. It also made me question whether Turkmenistan needed me to teach children how to wash their hands and avoid getting AIDS, to try to heat its schools, or to give its children English lessons. After all, how much of a difference could I make when its oil-rich government was closing hospitals, denying the existence of AIDS, letting its schools rot, and leaving teachers’ salaries unpaid for months? Maybe what Turkmenistan needed was a new government, I thought.

  12.

  The Internet Center

  All this time, Aman had been getting angrier and angrier at me. It began when Niyazov released the sequel to the Rukhnama and everyone in the Red Crescent office was required to buy a copy and sign a statement swearing they’d read it and loved it, but I refused. I pointed out that the book was only available in Turkmen so I couldn’t read it. But Aman didn’t see that as a valid excuse because, of course, no one else had read it, either. My efforts to heat School No. 8 had made things even worse.

  Why are you spending your time trying to heat that school, when our office is still cold and I still need a new computer and a new Xerox machine?” he asked me one morning from behind his newspaper. “Do that first and then you can go out and start heating schools.”

  From then on, he rejected all my requests. Could I go teach a class on tuberculosis at School No. 8? No. Could I take a vacation? No. Could I go home to use my phone to call Counterpart? No. As I sat at Red Crescent, I got madder and madder. My boss was blackmailing me. He was punishing me for trying to heat a school where 1,200 people spent their days instead of trying to heat an office where four people worked. There wasn’t much I could do, though, so I swallowed my pride and settled on what I thought was a pretty good compromise.

  I wrote a proposal to open an Internet center at Red Crescent. It would be the only one in Abadan. My plan was to renovate an unused room, install two computers with Internet service, and run free classes for the community. The grant would cover the center’s operating costs for six months. After that, once people in Abadan knew what the Internet was good for, the center would start charging users to cover its operating costs. It would mean Aman’s organization would get two new computers and, after six months, a small business that Aman, I was sure, would find a way make a little money from.

  It was an edgy project. Internet access in Turkmenistan was restricted. There was only one service provider – the government phone company Turkmen Telekom– and probably fewer than 10 public Internet centers in the country. A few organizations, including the Red Crescent chapter in Ashgabat, had Internet access, but the government monitored and censored it.

  The government restricted Internet access because it hoped to cling to power by stifling political dissent, and isolating Turkmen from each other and from the world. That was the same reason the government controlled all the newspapers and TV channels in the country and ensured that the only “news” they provided was about all the wonderful things “Turkmenbashy the Great” was doing for the people of “independent, neutral, democratic Turkmenistan” in the “Golden Age.” It was also the same reason that travel, which could spread uncensored information, was restricted. In 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists, an American NGO, named Turkmenistan the third most-censored country in the world, after only North Korea and Burma.40 The same year, the French NGO Reporters sans Frontiers put Turkmenistan third on a list of top violators of press freedom in the world, after North Korea and Eritrea.41

  The government controlled nearly all information within Turkmenistan’s borders. The schools and universi
ties taught students the official party line. The country had a few libraries,42 but their collections were censored. When I visited the national library in Ashgabat, I found that its massive galleries had been mostly emptied of their contents. Their entrances were blocked with glass cases filled with copies of the Rukhnama and Niyazov’s other books. I found one gallery with a small clutch of bookshelves that were open to the public. In the back, in an area that was off limits, I could see a messy heap of books that reached almost to the ceiling. A friend of a friend worked at the library and claimed he was allowed to bring home armloads of them to use as toilet paper.

  The only gap in the government’s control of information was satellite TV. For some reason – whether it was incompetence, inability, or intention – the government allowed nearly everyone in Turkmenistan to own a satellite dish. They could watch everything from BBC news to The Jerry Springer Show, Steven Seagal movies to MTV. Still, precious little independent domestic news was available. Even if the foreign press was interested in covering events inside Turkmenistan, government interference, intimidation, and obfuscation made it difficult to produce anything worthwhile or accurate. As far as I could tell, there was only one independent source of information about what was going on inside Turkmenistan that was widely available to Turkmen: a half-hour program called Azatlyk Radio (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) that was available via satellite TV. It was a Turkmen language broadcast and almost everyone I knew listened to it.

  The fact that the government had near-complete control over all information available in Turkmenistan and used this control to provide the people with lies and half-truths, created an interesting situation. No source of information was definitive. Books, magazines, newspapers, radio shows, television news, and government officials were all likely to provide bad information. So people were more likely to believe what they heard from neighbors, family members, and acquaintances. Conspiracy theories and rumors were treated as if they were just as valid as government statements and news reports (which may well have been the case). Foreign information sources were also assumed to be unreliable. People figured that if domestic news reports were filled with lies, then foreign news reports must be, too. The result: Aynabat was just as likely to believe her neighbor’s assertion that dog meat had cured her mother’s tuberculosis, as a report from the World Health Organization that found that dog meat would not cure tuberculosis.

  My Internet center project was meant, in some small way, to improve this situation. On the Internet, at least, people have some control over the information they consume. They can choose sources they find trustworthy, and they can check one source against another. Despite government restrictions on Internet use, I thought there was a good possibility I would be able to open an Internet center at the Red Crescent office in Abadan for two reasons: the Red Crescent office in Ashgabat had Internet access; and the telephone company, when I had asked, said they’d be glad to provide me with Internet service.

  I got Geldy to help me write the proposal for the Internet center. (As part of his new job in Ashgabat, he visited Abadan once or twice a week, so it had turned out, despite my fears, that he hadn’t abandoned me entirely). When I handed Aman the finished proposal, he skipped to the last page – the budget. After shopping around in Ashgabat, I had decided I needed $600 for computers. That amount, I had found, would get me two new desktops that would be fast enough for my purposes. Aman didn’t even know how to use the computer he had in his office. To him, computers were just status symbols, and he wanted as many as possible.

  “You need to double the amount you have budgeted for computers,” he told me. “You can’t get a decent computer for $300. I won’t approve this.”

  After listening to Aman call me lazy for months, after having him harass me for trying to fix School No. 8’s heating system, after having him blackmail me for office equipment, I was fed up. I had tried to compromise, to get along. I had given him an inch and he was trying to take a mile. I grabbed the proposal from Aman’s hands, crumpled it up, and threw it into the trash.

  “I’m not writing any more grants for Red Crescent,” I told him, and stalked out of his office and across the hall to the kitchen. Geldy, who was visiting from Ashgabat, was drinking tea with Vera. I was furious, pacing back and forth in the kitchen.

  “I’m quitting,” I told them. “I can’t work for that fat, greedy man anymore. I’m going to ask Peace Corps to move me to a new job.”

  Vera got up, walked down the hallway to her office, and shut the door. She didn’t want to get involved. Geldy lit a slim cigarette and put the teapot on to boil.

  “Why do you take everything so seriously?” he asked me, smiling. “Don’t let the undertaker make you so angry.”

  He made me a cup of coffee and convinced me to call my supervisor at Peace Corps and ask her for help with Aman, instead of asking for a new job. My supervisor was a Turkmen woman named Sachly. She was about 30, elegant, and unflappable. I walked home (since Aman still wouldn’t let me use the office phone – “his” phone), called her, and told her what was going on. She agreed to come out the next day and try to smooth things over. I got back to Red Crescent just in time to catch Aman on his way out of the building, holding his car keys in his right hand. I told him to expect a visit from Sachly the next day. His face turned red and he stepped close to me, so that we were almost chest-to-chest.

  “What did you tell her?” he asked.

  “That you’re a bad boss,” I said looking down at him. I was easily a head taller.

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Because you are,” I told him. “You’re a bad boss and you’re greedy.”

  He pushed past me, got into his car, slammed the door, and roared away. I went inside, packed up my things, and walked back to my apartment.

  ***

  The winter had been cold, dark, and hard. I felt like I hadn’t seen the sunshine for months. There were dead fish hanging in my bedroom. I’d been thrown out of carpet weaving class and accused of stealing a national secret. I’d spent weeks begging the government to let me heat School No. 8. My boss was trying to blackmail me by refusing to let me do any work unless I bought him office equipment. Why should I keep trying to help these people? I thought. It was their own damn country. Let them rot in it. I stalked home, looking at the ground, ignoring the kids yelling “hello! hello! hello!” at me, considering the pros and cons of taking a marshrutka to Ashgabat and getting on the next plane back to the United States.

  My mood soon changed, though. When Olya and Denis came home from the bazaar, arms full of groceries, I told them what had happened with Aman. Olya poured some tea and put a plate of cookies on the table. Denis dealt us each six cards. As we sipped and munched and played, I griped. Olya sympathized, Denis laughed at the absurdity of it all and mocked me for thinking things would turn out differently. Soon, I was laughing, too.

  Sachly arrived at Red Crescent at 9 a.m. the next day: slim and attractive, with long black hair and endless patience. Aman welcomed her with a greasy grin and motioned for her to sit down across from him. They talked for a half-hour in Turkmen, which I didn’t understand. Aman would go into long explanations, pointing at me, and raising his voice. Sachly, unmoved, would reply to him soothingly, quietly. In the end, Aman agreed to approve my Internet center proposal (with its original budget) and also a proposal I’d written to paint an anti-smoking mural at the town’s main bus stop. It was as if Sachly had hypnotized him. She declined his offer of a cup of tea, thanked him, got into her spotless white Peace Corps SUV, and disappeared down the road to Ashgabat.

  13.

  Doubt

  Soon, the winter ended and the weather began to warm. Blades of grass – pale and fragile – sprouted from cotton fields and empty lots and blanketed the craggy Kopetdag. Then came the poppies, like scraps of red crepe paper waving over fields of green. Wild pink tulips pushed up out of the mountainsides. Delicate leaves sprouted from the grape vine outside my bedroom window. Tracto
rs grumbled along the roads on their ways to plow fields, to prepare them for planting. The bazaars began to fill with fresh fruits and vegetables. Winter jackets gave way to sweaters.

  After Sachly’s visit, since I was no longer grounded by Aman, I went back to work. Although the school-heating project had stalled out, I still had permission from Ovez to teach in the Abadan schools. I gave English classes twice a week at School No. 1. I met with the Quartet weekly at School No. 8. I taught health classes wherever I could. It was good to be busy, to be around kids, who were not yet cynical, corrupt, and broken.

  Although my day-to-day work was going well, my bigger projects were going nowhere. I had turned my two Russian language project proposals into English language grant proposals and dropped them off at the American and British embassies. But the American Embassy kept demanding rewrites of my Internet center grant designed to make it as politically inoffensive as possible. And the British Embassy had not made a decision on my health mural project and wasn’t returning my calls.

  To take my mind off my frustrations, I organized another mini-camp (a “seminar”) at School No. 8. That, at least, was something I could accomplish. Geldy offered to get money from Red Crescent to help fund the camp. He also promised to teach a health class. When we gathered all 50 kids at the school and began, though, Geldy found an empty classroom, locked himself in it with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and refused to do anything. I banged on the door and swore at him for a while, but I didn’t have time to deal with him. Besides, moody, selfish, erratic behavior was nothing new for Geldy. I was used to it. I gave up and found someone else to teach his class.