Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

“No.”

  “Then don’t go to the desert. Go to school.”

  He shoved my passport at me and went back inside.

  When I got back to Ashgabat, I found a cheap hotel, took a long shower, and went to bed, exhausted, dirty, and frustrated. Unfortunately, that night in the hotel, I took only one lesson from my experience: next time, leave Ashgabat earlier in the day. It took me almost a year to learn the lessons I should have learned from that trip, but when I eventually did, my life got easier, my friends and acquaintances grew less frustrated, and things I tried to do actually started working.

  The next morning I went to Chuli, a resort area in the mountains outside Ashgabat where some Peace Corps Volunteers were running an English-language Model United Nations camp for several dozen teenagers. For three days I helped with Model UN debates, taught journalism, and led camp songs. I began to think my unauthorized trip to Darvaza had gone unnoticed. Then, on the fourth day, my friend Geldy showed up.

  I worked with Geldy at my real job – the job I did when it wasn’t summer and I wasn’t traveling around the country teaching at Peace Corps Volunteer-organized summer camps. He’d just found out his fiancée, Maral, was pregnant, despite the fact that she faithfully used her birth control every time they had sex (a half a tab of aspirin applied directly). His response had been to go out to a bar with his girlfriend Gözel. After some beer and vodka, they’d decided to take a taxi to Chuli to find me.

  “I miss you,” Geldy slurred in Russian, his arm slung around my shoulders for balance. “I haven’t seen you all summer. You’re my friend, right? We’re friends, right?”

  It was about 11 p.m. when they arrived. The kids were asleep in the broken-down little hotel where we were holding the camp. I took Geldy and Gözel, who were both in their early twenties, to the bar next door. We lounged on a raised, wooden platform covered with carpets and cushions – a tapjan – and drank big bottles of Baltika (Russian beer). Geldy filled me in on the news from home.

  The KNB had come to work looking for me three times in the past few days. My boss, Aman, had told them he didn’t know where I was or what I was doing and that he wasn’t responsible for whatever I had done wrong. A KNB man had also visited my host family’s apartment, questioned my host father, and ordered him to come to the KNB office once a week to report on me. Geldy assured me he had “taken care of it”— that he had smoothed everything over. I wondered, though, if he really had. Maybe I would get sent home after all, I thought, almost hopefully.

  After a few more beers, Gözel was drunk enough to stand up, pull her dress over her head, and jump into the swimming pool. She refused to get out, spinning slowly in neck-deep water with her arms outstretched, much to the amusement of the groups of Turkmen men lounging on tapjans nearby. Geldy wanted to leave her in the water and go to bed, but I climbed in, pulled her out, and put her dress back on her.

  I didn’t want to bring my two drunken friends into the hotel where the campers were sleeping, but it was midnight, and there was no way for them to get home. So we all stumbled over to the hotel. I left them in an upstairs hallway while I went to my room, changed into dry clothes, and scavenged for spare mattresses and sheets. When I got back, Gözel had passed out on the thin hotel-hallway carpet. Geldy and I stripped off her wet clothes, wrapped her in sheets, and settled down on our own mattresses to get some sleep.

  I lay there in the hotel hallway, a little drunk, staring at the ceiling and thinking about how strangely things had turned out. When I had signed up to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had been hoping to travel, learn a language, and do some good. I’d seen the photos on the Peace Corps web site of the fresh-faced female Volunteer walking down dusty village streets, mobbed by smiling black children; of the preppy young man standing at the chalkboard in front of rows of attentive brown students who were sitting cross-legged on the floor. I had not expected to be hounded by internal security police. I had not expected to spend my time fighting the local government to be allowed to do my job. I had expected I would make local friends, but not that they would be womanizers whose drunken, naked girlfriends I would have to help to put to bed on mattresses in the hallways of shabby hotels.

  2.

  From Palm Beach to Central Asia

  I joined the Peace Corps in the spring of 2004, while I was working as a newspaper reporter in South Florida. I was 27 years old, and the life I saw stretching out before me was one I didn’t want: daily commutes to work along I-95, congratulatory holiday form-emails from corporate headquarters, articles about condo association disputes. The most exciting part of each day would be choosing whether to get Thai food or Jamaican food for lunch. I would spend my life as a professional observer, standing aside and scribbling on my notepad while things happened in front of me. I wanted to get involved in the world, have some adventures, and try to be of use.

  When I applied for a two-year Peace Corps assignment, I wrote on one of the endless forms that I wanted to go to Latin America or the Middle East. Peace Corps offered me Central Asia. Although I had spent the previous four or five years working as a journalist, Peace Corps offered me an assignment as a health teacher. But Peace Corps told me Turkmenistan had asked the US government to send health teachers. I agreed to go. I figured it was less important to go where I wanted than to go where I was needed.

  When I took the assignment, I didn’t really know where Turkmenistan was – just that it was over near all the other “stans.” I did a little research on the Internet and started daydreaming. I would live with a Turkmen family in a yurt in the desert. They would be shepherds. I would work in a school, teaching important things to eager little kids. I sat in the newsroom in my button-down shirt and khakis, computer screens glowing on desks all around me, and told my co-workers that from then on the only commute I’d be making would be across sand dunes on a camel. I bought a guitar, planning to learn how to play it while leaning against my yurt in the evenings, after long, fulfilling days.

  After a short stay in a hotel in Washington, D.C. filling out forms and listening to speeches, I boarded a plane to Turkmenistan with four dozen other Peace Corps trainees. We stopped first in Germany and then in Azerbaijan, where almost all the passengers got off the airplane. The plane took off again, climbing out over the Caspian, over the oil rigs pumping black crude out from under the waves. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

  It was the middle of the night, and outside the airplane’s window everything was black except the light at the end of the wing. I stared into the darkness, exhausted from flying across the Atlantic Ocean and across Europe and now across the Caspian Sea and into Central Asia. Some trainees stood in the nearly empty plane’s aisles, talking. Others read, slept, or listened to their iPods. Below us the Caspian ended and Turkmenistan began.

  The plane landed in Ashgabat around midnight. We shuffled through the deserted airport half asleep, cleared customs under flickering fluorescent lights, and collected our bags. We climbed onto a shabby tour bus with soft, red seats. It rolled along the city’s wide, empty boulevards, past block after block of identical four-story, bare-concrete apartment buildings. A smooth, modern highway took us through a police checkpoint and out of the capital. The road got narrower, rougher, and twistier as we climbed into the mountains. The bus stopped about 3:30 a.m., and we piled out into a leafy valley sprinkled with broken-down cabins. I found a bed inside one, curled up under a blanket I’d taken from the airplane, and went to sleep.

  As I slept, Turkmenistan stretched out around me like an oversized Death Valley. About the size of California, it was almost completely covered in desert. There was cracked-mud desert, scrub desert, and sand-dune desert. It was all called the Karakum, and in the summer it was scorching hot, with temperatures that hovered around 115 degrees for weeks at a time. The country was sparsely populated; while nearly 34 million people lived in California, only about 5 million lived in Turkmenistan. Most of the population was concentrated in a few oases around the edges of the nearl
y empty Karakum.

  On Turkmenistan’s western border, the desert’s barren sands slipped under the Caspian Sea’s waves. To the south, the crumbly, nearly treeless Kopetdag Mountains rose up to divide Turkmenistan from Iran and Afghanistan. To the north and east, the Amudarya River valley marked the border with Uzbekistan.

  There was a time when the land that is now Turkmenistan was covered with evergreen forests and lush grasslands, but that was millions of years ago. When the glaciers of the last ice age started to melt and recede, it was already a giant sandbox; the rivers that poured in torrents from the melting ice swept out across a landscape nearly as barren as the one that exists today. Flowing across a flat plain, with no natural barriers to guide their paths, they shifted their routes from time to time, cutting new channels through the sand.

  The mountains – where temperatures were a little cooler – were forested with juniper, pistachio, and ash trees back then. But for millennia, people cut them to build fires and houses and, by the time I arrived, there were precious few left. As time passed, Turkmenistan dried up, its rivers receding, its natural oases shrinking. About 8,000 years ago, the area’s ancient inhabitants began building irrigation systems. Nearly everything that grows in Turkmenistan today (besides desert scrub) has been planted and watered by human hands.

  Although, these days, Turkmenistan is the middle of nowhere, it used to be the middle of the world. Missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and adventurers crisscrossed the Karakum on the Silk Road and other trade routes that connected Europe, Persia, India, and China. They rested in the great oasis cities of Merv and Konye-Urgench and died in the scorching desert sands. Massive armies swept through: Alexander the Great’s troops brought Greek language and culture to the region; Chinggis Khan’s army brought terror and destruction; Arab armies brought Islam; Turkic armies brought nomadic traditions from the northern steppe. The great empires of the Seljuks, the Parthians, and the Khoresmshahs bloomed and faded. Turkmenistan dropped off the map around the 16th Century, when travelers and conquerors began to make their journeys by ship, and the overland routes through the heart of Asia became obsolete.

  Once a great center of science and learning, from that point on, Central Asia began to fall behind the rest of the world. When tsarist Russian troops conquered and colonized Turkmenistan in the 1880s, they found Turkmen tribes living more or less as they had been since the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the first skyscraper was being built in the United States and the automobile was being invented in Germany. The Turkmen lived under Russian rule for more than a century (first tsarist and then Soviet). The Soviets ended the partially nomadic Turkmen way of life, dragging the tribes into modernity, for better or worse. They built cities, factories, and schools; they trained scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union crumbled, and the Turkmen were suddenly on their own.

  It was in this troubled, independent Turkmenistan that I found myself when I woke under my airline blanket inside my little cabin in the mountains. The wallpaper was peeling and yellowed and there was a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was early September. The temperature was in the low 90s. A soft breeze blew through the oasis valley, rustling the leaves of walnut, box elder, and Osage-orange trees (the same varieties common in southwestern Ohio, where I’d gone to college). A stream rushed through, feeding the irrigation ditches that kept the valley green. Through the leafy canopy I could see barren, taupe hills. I climbed out of the shade and onto the top of one of them. I could feel the desert sun bearing down on me, cooking my skin, sapping my energy. I looked out across the Kopetdag Mountains. Everything was dirt brown. There wasn’t a single tree anywhere except in the valley from which I’d come.

  The valley was called Chuli. It was a resort where people from Ashgabat liked to go on weekends to escape the city’s heat. They would picnic, drink vodka, and dance until the early hours. We stayed there for a few days, recovering from jet lag and getting oriented. Peace Corps staff took the time to review some rules: stay out of local politics; make sure Peace Corps knows where you are at all times; file your tri-annual activity reports on schedule. We had Turkmen and Russian language lessons. We learned that Turkmen sit cross-legged on the floor to eat, and that they sleep on dusheks, which are like futons. We had some practical lessons, getting tips on how to use pit latrines (“squatters”) and wash our clothes by hand. We had cultural sensitivity lessons, too: don’t ever set a loaf of bread upside down; don’t walk on carpets while wearing shoes; and don’t ask too many questions or you might get pegged as a spy and dogged by the KNB.

  * * *

  After a few days, we took a field trip into Ashgabat. We piled back onto the tour bus and rolled down the curvy mountain road, along the broad new highway and into the capital. I didn’t know what to expect. Relatively few Westerners have visited the city. In the 19th Century, most foreigners avoided Turkmen lands, afraid they would be either robbed and killed, or captured and sold into slavery.5 When Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union, access was tightly restricted, perhaps because it was an “underdeveloped” area, and Moscow wanted the outside world to see the USSR’s best side. One of the few outsiders to spend time in Ashgabat during the Soviet era was the American writer Langston Hughes.

  He arrived in the early 1930s, when the Soviet Union was doing its best to embarrass the United States for its racism. Moscow invited about 40 African American performers to the USSR to make a film called Black and White about racism in the US. Hughes went along to work on the script. After the Americans arrived, though, Washington-Moscow relations improved, and the Soviets dropped the project. The members of the movie crew were told they could go home, tour the USSR and then go home, or stay forever – their choice. Hughes decided he wanted to visit the parts of the USSR where “the majority of the colored citizens lived, namely Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia.” The Soviet government initially resisted, since Turkmenistan was closed to foreigners, but eventually relented, perhaps feeling guilty about inviting him to the USSR to make a movie and then abruptly canceling it.6

  Hughes took the train south from Moscow. “Suddenly, almost without warning, the train came to a stop in the middle of a sandy plain, and there on a sign above a little wooden station was the word: Ashkhabad [sic],” he wrote later. He checked into a hotel meant for traveling Soviet government officials; there were, of course, no facilities for tourists. He was in his room one night, playing jazz records on a portable phonograph he’d brought with him, when there was a knock at the door. Thinking it was the man the government had assigned to keep an eye on him, he yelled for the visitor to come in. The door opened and “an intense-looking young white man, in European clothing, with a sharp face and rather oily dark hair stepped in.”

  It was the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, who at the time was a Communist but would later become disillusioned and write Darkness at Noon, a haunting condemnation of the Soviet system. He was writing about traveling to the USSR’s northernmost and southernmost points – Turkmenistan being the southernmost. They introduced themselves. Koestler, who had read and admired Hughes’s work, was dumbfounded. “It was difficult not to say ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume,’” he recalled. Hughes didn’t know Koestler’s work, but was glad to invite him in to listen to records, eat camel sausage, drink vodka, and talk about Koestler’s recent trip to the North Pole in a zeppelin. After this chance meeting, the two writers spent weeks exploring Central Asia together. Hughes was especially amused to snap photos of Koestler picking cotton.

  Back in 1933, Koestler noted that Ashgabat, like most Turkmen cities, was grim and completely lacking in local color and architecture. Most Turkmen preferred to live in the countryside – they generally didn’t build cities. So southern Turkmenistan’s cities (including Ashgabat) mostly began their lives as severe and utilitarian Russian garrison towns. When the Soviets took over the Russian Empire, they made things even worse. They built row upon row of soul-crushing, bare-concrete, multi-story dominoes. “The nativ
es were drawn into the towns, educated, Russified and Stalinised by the pressure-cooker method … All national tradition, folklore, arts and crafts, were eradicated by force and by propaganda,” Koestler wrote.7

  Turkmenistan’s gloomy totalitarian cities didn’t begin to change until after independence. Niyazov wanted to turn his Ashgabat into a model city, a source of national pride. He ordered huge swaths of the old Soviet buildings torn down. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he replaced them with parks, monuments, banks, theaters, museums, apartment towers, government offices, and a presidential palace. He also built an elaborate theater for puppet shows and a skating rink called the “ice palace,” which drew amused articles from the international press, which apparently assumed it was an actual palace made of ice. He also commissioned some even more eccentric projects, such as a 25-foot-tall Rukhnama, which opened on special occasions to show episodes from Turkmen history on its oversized, movie-screen pages. It was this new, hybrid Tsarist-Soviet-Niyazovite capital that I explored on my first trip out of Chuli.

  All of Niyazov’s new buildings shared a similar architectural style, which might be described as Walmart-meets-desert-emirate. They were boxy, white marble constructions with vast, gleaming, reflective windows, topped by shallow, turquoise-tiled or golden domes. They looked impressive: spectacular and lavish. They were not made from solid white marble, though. The builders had simply glued white marble tiles to concrete buildings and the tiles soon began to fall off. Some of the new apartment towers were built on soft foundations and began to lean. Others stood mostly empty because few Turkmen could afford to live there.

  An army of women with short-handled brooms made from bunches of brush kept Ashgabat’s wide boulevards immaculate. Soldiers and policemen stood on street corners, watching over the city’s 700,000 or so residents. Concrete irrigation ditches ran between the streets and the sidewalks, carrying water to rows of trees and lush rose gardens. Boxy old Soviet Ladas and brand-new Toyota sedans vied for space on the roads. Unlike most cities in the world, there were few signs of American influence: no McDonald’s, no Pizza Hut, and no posters for Hollywood movies. In most of the city, the only shops were dreary, state-run food-marts and an occasional tailor or shoe repair stall. There was only one Western-style grocery store in the entire city, which had been built by a Turkish company and boasted what was perhaps the country’s only escalator.