Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  * * *

  I was content in Nurana, happy. The village was beautiful, my friends and host family were kind, and my English classes kept me busy. I had to return to the Ashgabat area twice during the spring, though, and each time I was reminded why I’d been so frustrated and angry for my first year and a half in Turkmenistan. There were the checkpoints clogging the roads on the way to the capital, staffed by surly guards and stuffed with impatient travelers. And there were Ashgabat’s golden statues and stupid slogans: “The 21st Century is Turkmenistan’s Golden Age,” “People, Nation, Turkmenbashy.” Within hours of leaving Nurana, I was wound up, pissed off, and full of despair for the future of the country.

  The first time I returned to Ashgabat, it was for the debate tournament I’d begun planning with Mehri so many months earlier. The tournament itself went fine. Mehri and Phoebe had arranged travel and lodging for the nine debate teams that slipped quietly into Ashgabat from across Turkmenistan. The debaters met at the Peace Corps office for a series of 44-minute debates on whether it was better to deal with drug addicts through law enforcement (throw them in prison) or harm reduction (give them clean needles, put them in rehab). Each team debated four times, starting with prepared statements and working through a series of cross-examinations and rebuttals. Panels of Peace Corps Volunteers served as judges.

  The kids were terrified at first, but their coaches had prepared them well, and after the second round their stage fright wore off and they dug in for battle. They’d spent weeks doing research and came armed with statistics on things like how much it cost to imprison a drug addict versus how much it cost to put him in rehab. In the final round, a team from Mary and a team from Turkmenbashy faced off in front a panel of seven judges and an audience of about 40. After it was all over, we talked to the debaters about how to start debate clubs, sent them home with debate coach handbooks, and went to the bar to celebrate.

  The depressing part of the trip came after the tournament was over, when I took a marshrutka to Abadan to visit Ana and Sesili. The hot weather had ruined their business; their Korean salads had started spoiling before they could sell them. Then Ana’s brother Andrei had gotten sick. Helping to pay his hospital bills and support his family while he was out of work had wiped out Ana and Sesili’s savings. They were scraping by on the money that Sesili brought home from selling cabbages at the bazaar for 1,500 manat a piece (about 6 cents). They were so broke they couldn’t even offer me dinner. We drank tea together for a while and then I excused myself. I left a roll of cash on the bathroom sink with a note that said: “Don’t argue with me, just take it.” On my way out, I stopped to check on my garden. Nothing had sprouted.

  The second time I returned to Ashgabat was to speak at a conference on tourism in Turkmenistan organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was held at the glitzy new President Hotel.95 Most of the 50 or so conference participants were employees of either government ministries or state-run tourism agencies. They spent a lot of time congratulating each other on what a good job they were all doing. A couple European tourism experts gave speeches on how to make budding tourism industries like Turkmenistan’s flourish. When it was my turn, I gave a slide show of some of the tourist attractions I’d visited in Turkmenistan: Merv, Margush, Dekhistan, and Yekedeshik. Turkmenistan had a fascinating history that tourists would pay to come see, I told the audience.

  "The problem,” I said, “is that you make it so hard for tourists to come here and see all these wonderful things. I visited Thailand recently. At the airport, a customs official checked my passport, issued me a visa, and wished me well. It took about five minutes. Then I was free to go anywhere and see anything.”

  If an American tourist wants to come to Turkmenistan, he needs a Turkmen organization to apply to the Turkmen government for a letter of invitation, which takes weeks. After he gets the letter, he has to apply to the Turkmen embassy in Washington for a visa. Then, once he arrives in the country, in most cases, he can travel only to certain places and only under the supervision of a ‘guide’ provided by one of the state tourism agencies.”

  As I spoke, the audience began to shift in their chairs, shuffle papers, and harrumph. When I was done, a middle-aged suit raised his hand and told me I was wrong – that it was easy for foreigners to visit Turkmenistan. Perhaps he meant it was easier than it had been in the Soviet era. After my talk, there was a break before the next session. I went to the hotel bar for a cup of coffee. I wanted a minute to unwind; I’m uncomfortable speaking in public.

  A suave young man from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs drifted over to where I was sitting. He spoke good English and had a warm, easy manner. He wore a suit with a shiny gold pin on his lapel that depicted Niyazov’s head. His black hair was cut short and his face was clean shaven, all in accordance with Niyazov’s decree that Turkmen men should not wear long hair or beards.96

  “Now why did you have to say that?” he asked me, smiling. “You offended people.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” I said. “But somebody needed to say it.”

  After the conference was over, I packed my bags and headed back to Nurana. I stopped by the Peace Corps office on the way out of town to check my mailbox. In the hallway, I ran into Sachly, my supervisor.

  “Sam, have you been traveling a lot?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because I hear they’re asking a lot of questions about you in Mary. I don’t know why, but I thought it might be because you were traveling a lot.”

  In the taxi home, I seethed. Once again, I’d run head on into the Turkmen government’s refusal to acknowledge reality. There was no hope that things would improve as long the government continued to insist that everything was already perfect, that the country was already in a “Golden Age.” And the police or the KNB was on my case again.

  As I waited through checkpoint after checkpoint, I was sorry I’d left Nurana and visited the other part of Turkmenistan – the ugly, absurd, fucked up, government-controlled part. I was pissed off for days. It took a long, sunny afternoon of sitting under a mulberry tree playing my guitar and teaching Döwlet a Woody Guthrie song while Kümüsh and Altyn gathered sun-warmed apricots and plums nearby, the smell of simmering plov drifting over from the kitchen, to remind me why I’d come to love Turkmenistan.

  30.

  Boating the Karakum

  With only about a month left, I decided to check another item off my list of places to see before leaving Turkmenistan. I still hadn’t figured out which permits I needed to legally go see the dinosaur footprints in Kugitang Nature Reserve – much less how to get them. Instead of wading through bureaucratic nonsense for weeks to figure it out, though, I decided to outsmart the system. After all, I’d managed to visit Yekedeshik without any permits.

  The normal way to get from Murgab to Kugitang would have been to bump north for three hours along the black highway through Mary to Turkmenabat and then hang a right and follow the Amudarya southeast for about five hours to the reserve. That route was choked with checkpoints – impossible without permits. Lying on the living room floor one afternoon, studying a map, though, I noticed that there was another route. A thin red line on the map ran east from Mary through the desert to Kugitang. It was so small and remote that surely no one would be guarding it, I thought.

  I convinced my friends Kelly and Alei to join me in my ill-advised, permit-less attempt to reach Kugitang. We took the main highway north from Mary, as if we were going to follow the standard route. But we got out of our taxi at Ravnina, a black blip on the map at the beginning of the red line that led through the desert to Kugitang. I’d expected a town, or maybe a village. Ravnina turned out to be a few houses sprinkled over some drifting sand dunes. The sun beat down on us and a constant wind spread sand and dust over everything. There was an ancient two-ton truck parked near the spot next to the highway where our taxi had left us. We walked over and asked its driver to take us
to Kugitang. He looked at us like we were crazy.

  “It’s too far,” he said. “And the road’s terrible. It’s just sand.”

  “Take us part way. Take us to Nichka. We’ll find someone there to take us the rest of the way,” I said.

  “Just come in and have lunch with me and then go home,” he said.

  “You’d rather sit here all day and do nothing than take us to Nichka and make some money?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Defeated, we walked over to a chaikhana (teahouse), near the road. It was the only business in Ravnina as far as I could tell. We were its only customers. We sat outside on a shaded tapjan and ordered manty with sour cream. We told the owner we were looking for a ride to Nichka. She sent a little boy running off across the sand to look for someone willing to take us. We sat and ate the lamb-and-onion filled dumplings with our hands and watched the sand blow, the sun burn, and the cars roll by on the highway. We sweated.

  After a half-hour, the boy hadn’t returned, so Kelly and I took a walk through the village to find another truck and try to convince its owner to take us to Nichka – or even to Kugitang. Alei stayed on the tapjan with the leftover manty and a big, Russian-style 3.5-ounce shot of vodka. There was another truck parked outside a sun-bleached brick house, but we couldn’t find its owner. A group of older men squatted on their heels nearby, smoking and talking. When I joined them, they told me that the owner of the truck was out of town and said I would have better luck finding a ride from a nearby town called Zakhmet. It wasn’t at the beginning of the road I wanted to travel on, but at least it was a decent sized town, with more than two trucks.

  Kelly and I walked back to the chaikhana, wilting under the angry sun, and woke Alei from his nap. We paid our bill, walked to the highway, and – after a few attempts – managed to flag down a marshrutka to Zakhmet, which turned out to be a proper town of pleasant one-story homes with sunflowers growing in their yards. I asked the first person I saw where I could hire a truck to take me to Nichka. He leaned out the window of his beat up white Lada.

  “A truck? You should take the boat,” he said.

  At first, I thought he was mocking me. We were standing in the middle of a desert. But he didn’t look like he was kidding. It dawned on me that we were close to the massive Karakum Canal, a Soviet-era irrigation canal that was longer than Europe’s longest river, the Rhine. It hadn’t occurred to me that boats might travel along the canal, though I knew it was plenty big enough – 800 feet wide in some places.97 I consulted my map. The canal appeared to run straight to Kugitang. I pictured myself bouncing along a sandy road in the sweltering cab of a 20-year-old truck. Then I pictured myself lounging on the deck of a ferry, the cool wind blowing off the canal, the miles drifting by.

  “Where can I catch the boat?” I asked. “See those cranes? That’s the port.”

  We started walking. The roads were dirt and the houses were surrounded by fences made from scraps of lumber so sun-bleached that they looked like driftwood. The sunflowers towered over us. Their drooping heads, too heavy to face the sun, looked disapprovingly down at us. Camels munched on thorns and shrubs in front yards, but we were the only people outside. It was mid-day. No one else was foolish enough to take a beating from the sun.

  The port was a ramshackle, rusted, Soviet relic. Towering over it were two massive cranes, which must have been 100 feet tall and were encased in rust. Three boats were tied up at the edge of the canal. It was unclear which of them had been junked (maybe all of them) and which of them were still in use (maybe all of them). At the base of the cranes, a couple of dockworkers were frying potatoes and mutton in a cast-iron cauldron over a wood fire. They told us that one of the boats was due to leave for Nichka that evening and its captain, Berdy, might agree to take us along.

  I set off across town, following the dockworkers’ directions to Berdy’s house, while Kelly and Alei waited in the shade of the cranes. After a half an hour of searching, though, I gave up. No one seemed to know – or be willing to tell me – which house was Berdy’s. And I couldn’t take the sun anymore. It was boring into my head, cooking my brain. I was starting to feel woozy. I took off my button-down shirt and covered my head with it as I walked back to the port.

  Kelly and Alei had disappeared from their spot under the cranes. When I asked where they’d gone, the dockworkers, eating their potatoes and mutton, pointed toward a wooden shack. Inside the shack, there were two rooms. I poked my head in the first one and found a gray-haired man in raggedy clothes sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. He was the port’s watchman; the shack was his home. Drawing on his cigarette, he inclined his head toward the other room. I followed his cue and found Kelly and Alei sitting in rickety metal chairs against the wall of the second room while a fat policeman wearing his open uniform jacket over a dirty white undershirt examined their passports.

  I introduced myself, handed the policeman my passport, and sat down next to my friends. The policeman had heard about our arrival and had come to find out who we were and what we were doing in his town. At first, he found it hard to believe that we were teachers from America who wanted to take the boat to Nichka for fun. He sweated. He paged through our passports again and again. After a few minutes, though, he returned our documents to us, wished us luck, and left.

  Once the policeman was gone, I rifled through my backpack to find a bottle of water. As I poured as much of it as I could down my throat, the watchman appeared in the doorway. He offered us hot tea, which I accepted, and invited us to stay and rest for a while. When the sun had fallen a little and the temperature had dropped below 110 degrees, the watchman took us across town to Berdy’s house. He banged on the door and Berdy appeared, a fit and serious man of about 40, with heavy, black eyebrows. He’d been sleeping when we knocked and was still pulling on his t-shirt (backwards) as he invited us in. We sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of his living room and drank tea while we talked. After two cups, he’d agreed to take us to Nichka and we’d settled on a price. He told us to meet him at the port in two hours. We would motor upstream all night and arrive in the morning.

  We left Berdy to get his t-shirt on forwards and pack his things. On the way back to the port, we ducked into a tiny store and bought vodka, pickles, bread, cheese, and dried sausage from its half-empty shelves. Berdy appeared at the port exactly on time. He climbed onto his boat, started the engines, cast off, and motioned for us to hop aboard. The boat, which was painted blue and white, was about 25 feet long. It had a pilothouse amidships and a tapjan on the bow, shaded by an awning made from reed mats. Below deck there was a cabin with four saggy bunks. The boat hummed and vibrated under my feet. It smelled like diesel. Kelly, Alei, and I climbed onto the tapjan, dropped our backpacks and plastic shopping bags of food, and settled in for the long trip.

  The boat chugged upstream, parting the massive canal’s muddy waters with its bow, leaving a trail of bubbles behind. We passed under a highway bridge and waved to some boys swimming near the shore. Then we left the houses and sunflowers of Zakhmet behind and entered the open desert. By boat. It was a strange feeling. I sat on the bow, my feet hanging over the side, the bow wave frothing below me, watching the sand-dune-and-scrub desert roll by. Kelly listened to her iPod nearby and Alei napped on the tapjan. Berdy stood in the pilothouse, hands on the wheel, eyes on the canal.

  * * *

  When the Russians conquered Turkmenistan, they thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a cotton colony, but found that although it had good soil and plenty of sunshine, it didn’t have enough water. So they decided to build a canal for irrigation. They couldn’t find investors for the project, though. When the Soviets took control, they had the same idea, but they were delayed for a while by the civil war, collectivization, and World War II. It wasn’t until after the war that they started construction.98 The Soviets, of course, didn’t need to look for investors.

  The canal began near Turkmenistan’s southeast corner, branching off the
Amudarya and following the bed of the long-dead Kelif Uzboi River.99 It stretched west through the Karakum, along the base of the Kopetdag Mountains, passing through Mary and Ashgabat. The further it got from the Amudarya, the narrower it became until it eventually got small enough to fit into a pipe. The pipe reached the Caspian shore at Krasnovodsk in 1986. The completed canal was 851 miles long, making it the longest irrigation canal in the world. It can take 30 days for water to travel from one end to the other.100

  The Karakum Canal siphons vast amounts of water out of the Amudarya to quench the thirst of Turkmenistan’s cotton and wheat fields. By the 1970s, Soviet scientists had realized that the canal, combined with all the other irrigation projects in the Amudarya basin, would eventually kill the Aral Sea. After all, the sea, which straddled the Uzbek-Kazakh border and was roughly the size of West Virginia at the time, got 75 percent of its water from the Amudarya. If the river’s water fed cotton fields instead of replenishing the sea, the sea would evaporate like a puddle in a summer parking lot. They proposed saving the sea by diverting a few Siberian rivers to fill it back up again,101 but they never got around to it.

  By 2007, the Aral Sea had lost three-quarters of its volume and more than half its surface area. It had split into three puddles. (Two continued to dry up. One was dammed off and began slowly to refill.) As the sea withered away, it left behind 5,000 square miles of salty wasteland – an area almost as big as Connecticut. “The shriveling sea bequeathed poisonous sandstorms, chronic health problems, dead fishing grounds and unemployment” to the areas in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that surrounded it. The slow death of the Aral Sea has been called one of the worst ecological disasters of the 20th Century.102

  As I floated through the Karakum Desert on water that should have been filling the faraway Aral Sea, I passed several rusty old barges, which looked like they were held together with old twists of wire and bits of welded tin cans. They were dredging barges, sucking sand off the bottom of the canal, and spitting it out onto the shore, to keep the canal deep and straight. In the Soviet days, a staff of 1,700 had tended the canal, which was crucial to producing food for local consumption and cotton for export. By 1996, the Soviet Union had fallen and there were only 640 workers still on the job.