Books blogTurkmenistan

A dictator's guide to the universe

What would aliens make of Turkmenistan if they discovered a copy of Saparmurat Niyazov's panoptical Ruhnama?

Two years ago in a McDonald's in Moscow I asked a man from Ashgabat about some of the bizarre stories circulating about his homeland:

"Is it true that gold teeth are banned in Turkmenistan?" "Complete bullshit." "I heard that beards are banned too..." "Don't believe what you read on the internet. Well, believe half of it, but as for the other half- forget it."

He had no love for Saparmurat Turkmenbashi, the "Father of All Turkmen", but articles in the foreign media that lazily repeated myths and rumours still angered him. He loved his country regardless of who was in charge. So what was the truth? I had heard a great deal about the Ruhnama, Turkmenbashi's legendary "book of the soul" (allegedly required reading if you were going to take a driving test, wear underpants etc), but I doubted any journalist had bothered to read a copy. I decided that I would, and quickly found an English translation on the handy website Ruhnama Online.

It started off well: page one revealed that the Turkmen nation was 5,000 years old and descended from Noah, though Turkmenbashi didn't reveal his sources. The rules of good manners followed, among which was:

Wear clean and decent clothes.

After the epic beginning this petty detail was jarring. Next he wrote about an encounter in Leningrad during his student years, with an old man who described his father's death (executed by Nazis during the war). His mother had also died when he was young, and driven to the edge of "madness" by feelings of abandonment, Turkmenbashi cried out:

I have powerful Turkmen thoroughbred, would you groom it Jygalybeg? I have also a broken and uneased heart, would you groom it, Jygalybeg?

And so on. On page 69 the book's purpose was finally explained in a blizzard of metaphors, though one would have sufficed: "If the spirit of the Turkmen is the universe ... then Ruhnama must be the centre of this universe."

Turkmenbashi was writing his nation, previously a scrap of desert colonized by foreign empires, into existence. The Ruhnama contained everything: moral teachings, history, folklore, discourses on politics, religious instruction, disquisitions on Turkmen character, praise for such potent national symbols as melons and rugs, excerpts from the constitution and more poetry. He was attempting to create a majestic national identity, inextricably identified with his own good self, of course.

By page 300, however, I was struggling. The book's division into five sections was misleading, as Turkmenbashi tended to ramble on about different topics as the mood took him. I don't blame him. Writing a book is laborious and time- consuming and his day job was running a country. He must have worked on the Ruhnama in snatches between sleep and being God. Still, it was disappointing. Tyrants are not necessarily bad writers - apparently Ivan the Terrible wrote some of the finest Russian prose of his day. The Ruhnama, however, was a shambles. I put it down.

And yet a year later, when I was in Turkmenistan, the first place I went was a bookshop. I bought a copy, pink and green, with RUKHNAMA written in big yellow letters on the cover. It looked like a children's storybook. There was also a sequel, Ruhnama 2. I asked a fan what was in it. He smiled sheepishly: "Er... the same."

In the Karakum desert I grappled with Ruhnama 1 again, until finally I accepted: yes, he really was making it up as he went along. He needed an editor, but who would dare order a rewrite from the Father of All Turkmen?

Then again, why bother? He had a (literally) captive readership: the book was everywhere, its title was written on mountains, and the TV "news" ended with readings from its pages. One programme consisted of passages being read aloud in multiple languages in a giant theatre, implying that the Ruhnama's readership was international. But all the readers were young Turkmen (the widely reported claim that foreign language education has been banned in Turkmenistan is false). I heard it referred to as The Holy Ruhnama, though Turkmenbashi denied his magnum opus was sacred. The sycophants in his administration clearly considered this a bluff.

Now Turkmenbashi is feeding the worms, and soon the Ruhnama will likely be as unread as the works of Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator also reported to have banned beards. In space, however, a copy will orbit Earth for a lonely 150 years, if we can believe one story in the papers. It would be nice if it broke free and drifted into the hands of aliens, who, after deciphering it, would base their conception of our planet entirely on the nocturnal musings of a certain Saparmurat Turkmenbashi Esq. (deceased). On that distant star they could keep alive the image and ideas of the strange dictator. Perhaps they'd erect a monument- and ban gold teeth and beards, too.

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