Word: niyazov
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...this would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkmenistan became one of the most closed-off places in the world under the helm of Saparmurat Niyazov, who christened himself Turkmenbashi, leader of all Turkmen, and fostered a bizarre personality cult in the country. During his 16-year reign, he renamed the months after himself and his mother, required that all children read his philosophical tome Ruhnama and filled the country with impressive golden statues of himself. Economically, mostly Muslim Turkmenistan remained heavily dependent on its gas sales to Russia, its main...
...Russia and Turkmenistan, but have been consistently rebuffed. The U.S. has only been given permission to fly humanitarian supplies through Turkmen airspace - but no military hardware. Earlier this year, Gen. David Petreaus, chief of the U.S. Central Command, met with Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who became Turkmenistan's new President when Niyazov died in 2006, but was unable to persuade him to open his country even a crack to the U.S. military...
...strange move in a part of the world where leaders are none too shy about developing cults of personality. The late ruler of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov - the self-titled Turkmenbashi, or Chief of all Turkmen - erected a golden statue of himself that rotated with the sun, and renamed days and months after family members. In Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev has had not one but two museums built in his honor. During his presidency, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was featured in children's books, his name was printed on women's underwear and portraits of him in various guises - as deep...
Sure, there are some true grotesqueries to be found in the book. There's a wittily observed chapter on the weirdness that is Turkmenistan, with statues and giant photographs of the late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov everywhere: "In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring." As someone who's been to most of the places Theroux describes, that's the kind of sentence I want to read; the kind that makes me think, "Exactly!" (and "I wish I'd written that...
...Will Niyazov's successor pursue reforms? Berdymukhammedov has hinted at greater openness, fighting drug trafficking from Afghanistan and restoring some educational facilities his predecessor closed. A failure to reform could leave Islamic extremists in charge of a gas-rich state in a volatile region...