Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age Read online

  Daily Life in Turkmenbashy’s Golden Age:

  A Methodologically Unsound Study of Interactions Between the Tribal Peoples of America and Turkmenistan

  By

  Sam Tranum

  The names and identifying details of many of the people in this book have been changed to protect them from their government.

  Part I: From Palm Beach to Central Asia

  1.

  The Pit of Fire

  The sun was low in the sky by the time I found a taxi to take me to the pit of fire. A creaky, old, olive-drab minivan with a jacked-up suspension meant for off-road travel, it was parked outside the bazaar. Its owner, Murat, was planning to leave Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital city, drive across the Karakum Desert during the cool of the night, and arrive in the morning at an oasis town on the other side. He agreed to drop me off halfway – at Darvaza, a village among the sand dunes that I’d been told was near the pit. I squeezed into Murat’s minivan with ten other passengers, my rolled-up carpet and plastic grocery bag of belongings jammed between my knees. It was August and my white, button-down shirt was soaked with sweat.

  I knew I shouldn’t have gone. Turkmenistan hadn’t changed much since its days as part of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The government did not allow people to come and go as they pleased. The roads were clogged with checkpoints where men in uniforms asked questions, demanded passports, and searched trunks. Huge swaths of the country were “restricted zones,” which meant that only people with special permits were allowed to visit. Foreigners faced particularly tight restrictions, since the government assumed they were all spies. Most tourists were required to travel with “guides” from state-run tourist agencies. Hopping into a minivan one afternoon for a jaunt into the desert to track down a mysterious burning crater was just not allowed. I didn’t care. I was fed up with following all the rules.

  I’d arrived in Turkmenistan nearly a year earlier to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer, assigned to teach health classes. I had expected the typical live-in-a-mud-hut, walk-three-miles-for-water Peace Corps challenges. I had not expected to find myself living in a place so repressive that the Economist magazine predicted it would be the worst country in the world to live in during 2004 – the year I’d arrived. To keep himself in power, Turkmen president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov used the internal security police (the KNB) to restrict Turkmen citizens’ rights to speak, publish, assemble, participate in politics, associate with whom they wished, and worship as they pleased. The KNB used “torture and psychotropic drugs on its prisoners, and stage[d] show trials in which the perceived enemies of the state confess[ed] and beg[ged] forgiveness from the great leader,” according to the Economist.1

  A high-school dropout with a longstanding problem with authority, I didn’t adjust well to life under this totalitarian regime. After 27 years in the United States, it was just hard to get used to not having any rights. It was hard to get used to the idea that I couldn’t criticize the president in public or go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I’d done a poor job following the rules, and in return, the KNB had watched me, harassed me, and interfered with my work. I was frustrated and bitter. I wasn’t ready to walk into the Peace Corps office in Ashgabat and ask for an airplane ticket home, but the prospect of being sent home was no longer an effective deterrent to keep me from breaking misguided Peace Corps rules and absurd Turkmen laws. I began taking more risks. Maybe I was even half-hoping I’d get caught and deported. I was being stupid. At the time, I didn’t understand the country well enough to realize what the consequences would be.

  My minivan fought its way north through Ashgabat’s rush-hour traffic, toward the desert. It was still 95 degrees outside, even though it was 4:30 p.m., and the real heat of the day had passed. Inside, we sweated, squashed together so tightly that we could doze off without slumping over. There was a man with a melon and a mouth full of gold teeth. A woman in a long dress, her head covered with a colorful scarf, sat in the back with her one-year-old daughter on her lap. Every square inch was packed with bags of clothing and produce. The minivan – called a marshrutka – rolled past row after row of nearly identical Soviet-era concrete apartment buildings, built from unpainted concrete.

  At the edge of the city, we spent a half-hour waiting at a checkpoint while three sulky teenagers in uniforms wrote information from our passports into their logbooks. Then we were on the open highway, rumbling off into the desert at the marshrutka’s top speed – about 45 miles an hour. The capital’s apartment towers receded behind us. The radio blared Russian pop music. A hot breeze tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to squeeze in through the window. Flat, scrub-covered desert stretched to the horizon in every direction.

  After an hour we stopped at another checkpoint. The driver collected our passports and trudged across the road to a concrete-block house, where three soldiers lounged in the shade. I dozed off, sleepy from the heat. The driver reappeared at the marshrutka’s door. With a concerned look, he told me someone wanted to talk to me and motioned for me to follow him. The other passengers stared. I left my carpet and my bag on my seat and crossed the road, squinting against the blowing sand. A tall, blond man in a polo shirt and jeans was waiting for me outside the building, leafing through my passport.

  “Hello,” I said in my stilted Russian. “How are you? My name is Sam, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer …”

  “Yes, yes, and you live in Abadan with the Plotnikov family,” he interrupted in Russian. “You teach at School No. 8. I know who you are.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know who he was.

  “How camp Charjou?” he asked me, switching to broken English to inquire about the English immersion camp where I’d been teaching until the day before.

  “It was great,” I replied, trying to act unconcerned that this stranger in the middle of the desert seemed to know everything about me. “We’re having another camp – in Chuli – starting the day after tomorrow. You should come down, practice your English.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said in Russian, laughing. “So where are you going?”

  “To Darvaza, to see the eternal flame,” I told him in Russian, using vocabulary I’d learned to describe the war memorial near my apartment.

  “To see the eternal flame?” he asked skeptically. When he said it, it sounded ridiculous.

  “Yes, yes. The place where the gas comes from under the ground,” I said, grinning stupidly. “Fire.”

  He looked at me for a long moment. He paged through my passport. The wind blew a dead thorn bush across the highway. The man with the melon and the gold teeth watched me through the minivan’s window. I scuffed my feet on the pavement, looked up the highway into the wind, and tried to seem harmless.

  “Okay,” he said and handed my passport back.

  Two hours later a village appeared from around a bend in the road, and I thought we had arrived at Darvaza – after all, the driver had said the trip would take three hours. Several dozen concrete-block houses and round felt tents (yurts) were sprinkled among the dunes. Next to almost every structure were a few camels or sheep, milling about in corrals that looked like they’d been pieced together from driftwood.

  “Is this Darvaza?” I asked.

  “No,” the driver said and climbed out to negotiate with the boys selling gasoline from dirty plastic jugs on the side of the road.

  No one else got out. The mother in the colorful scarf passed her daughter forward, hand-to-hand. A woman sitting near the marshrutka’s door opened it, pulled down the little girl’s pants, held her out the door, and waited while she peed into the sand. Then she pulled the girl’s pants back up and passed her back to her mother. The driver, meanwhile, had fou
nd an urchin offering a good price. We rumbled off again.

  As the sun fell, the world outside the marshrutka got smaller and smaller until all I could see were the two strips of pavement lit by the van’s headlights. In the dark, my plan no longer seemed like such a good one. I had no place to stay in Darvaza and no way to get back to Ashgabat. All I had in my bag was a packet of peanuts and raisins, a small bottle of water, a sweater, and a book. The driver had turned off the music. The further we got from the capital, the worse the road got. He needed to concentrate so he could dodge the wandering sand dunes that crept across the road and the ubiquitous, wheel-eating potholes. I dozed off, leaning on my sweaty seatmates.

  It was almost midnight when the marshrutka pulled off the highway and the driver told me quietly that we had reached Darvaza. The three-hour trip had taken more than seven hours. Groggy with sleep, I gathered my belongings and pushed my way out the door. The minivan struggled back onto the road and I watched as its headlights disappeared into the distance. The “village,” it turned out, consisted of two yurts and one brick hut. A man named Nurmurat, who did not seem to have shaved or bathed in three or four days, owned all three structures. He ran a sort of truck stop, offering travelers a place to stop for a few minutes for a bite to eat and a bathroom break. His brightly lit compound was like a lone ship on the dark sea of sand dunes; no other sign of human habitation was visible in any direction.

  I sat cross-legged on a carpet outside one of the yurts with Nurmurat, his wife, and his son. They were watching a Russian movie on TV with the volume turned way up so they could hear it over the chugging of the generator (the satellite dish was hidden behind one of the yurts). Two Russian soldiers were guiding an injured American soldier to safety through rugged, forested mountains. They kept making him drink his own urine for some reason. Nurmurat loved this. He couldn’t stop laughing. His wife went to the kitchen and returned with a beer for me. She also brought a plate of fried, salted mutton chunks and a loaf of bread, which we all shared. We sat for a long time, watching TV, eating with our hands. Every once in while, a black beetle as big as a golf ball would crawl onto the carpet and one of us would bat it away, back into the sand.

  “Will you take me to see the eternal flame?” I asked after I had finished eating and paid for my share.

  “It’s midnight,” Nurmurat said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Only fifteen kilometers.”

  “Let’s go tonight. I want to see it at night. I can pay.”

  “It’s midnight. You can stay in one of the yurts. Two dollars.”

  Nurmurat stood up, turned off the TV, and went to bed. It wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. I had assumed I was doing him a favor by offering him work and that, regardless of the hour, he’d be glad to take me for the right price. After all, he lived in a yurt in the middle of a desert in a developing country. I’d offered to do him a favor and he’d turned me down flat. Not only that, I’d come a long way and now I’d have to just turn around and go home without seeing the pit of fire since I couldn’t go see the pit the next day – I had to get back to the Ashgabat area in time for the English camp in Chuli. Annoyed, I finished my beer, grabbed my carpet and my grocery bag, and stalked out past the yurts into the darkness. I stumbled through the bushes and up a 50-foot-tall sand dune, wishing I’d brought a flashlight.

  On top of the dune, I spread out my carpet and lay down. To my left were the lights of Nurmurat’s compound. To my right, there was an orange glow on the horizon, which I assumed was from the pit of fire. The crater, which was big enough to hide a three-bedroom house, had been gouged from the desert by a Soviet natural gas-drilling explosion in the 1970s. It had been burning ever since. By 2005, the firestorm had died down, leaving only a sprinkling of flames – some a few inches high, some a few feet high – sprouting from the pit’s floor and walls. It looked as if, a few hours earlier, a meteor had crashed into the earth and exploded.2 But I couldn’t see any of that from where I lay.

  In the sky above my dune, there were so, so many stars. Not just the few scattered pinpricks I was used to seeing in the US. In the middle of this Central Asian desert, seven hours from the nearest city, the sky was a blackboard sprinkled with glitter and split by the wide, chalky smudge of the Milky Way. I was dazzled. I finally understood why, for all those millennia before the glare of electric lights began to hide the stars, people had made such a big deal about the night sky. This was why people had written poems about the stars, had cobbled them together into constellations and created legends about them.

  If I had stretched out on that sand dune a few weeks later, I could have spent my evening searching among all those stars for Niyazov’s book, the Rukhnama. The “sacred” pink and green text contained Niyazov’s history of the Turkmen people, his spiritual guidance for Turkmen citizens, and his ramblings. In places, it read like a pep talk for the Turkmen nation, acknowledging that things hadn’t gone well for a few centuries, but asserting that, nevertheless, Turkmenistan was one of the greatest nations on earth.3 It was required reading for all Turkmen – all 400 pages of it. Children studied it in school. Young adults studied it in universities. Most government buildings and schools had special “Rukhnama rooms” where copies of the book were displayed next to golden busts of Niyazov. In one of his many moments of bizarre inspiration, Niyazov paid the Russian Space Agency to launch a copy into orbit. “The book that conquered the hearts of millions on Earth is now conquering space,” a state-run Turkmen newspaper announced.4 That wouldn’t happen until late August, though. Since I was a few weeks too early to search for the president’s orbiting book, I had to content myself with gazing at the real stars. I soon dozed off, wrapped in my carpet for warmth.

  I woke before dawn. I watched as the stars and crescent moon faded away and the earth appeared around me. Apart from the highway and Nurmurat’s place, there was nothing but desert as far as I could see in every direction. The dunes were like massive ocean swells, sprinkled with thorn bushes, clumps of dried grasses, and scrubby saksaul trees. I could still see the pit’s orange glow on the horizon. It might be 15 kilometers away along the winding road, but it was probably only two or three kilometers away directly through the desert, I thought. The locals probably only took the long way around by jeep because they were lazy – but I could walk. I checked my water bottle (half full) and set off, leaving my carpet spread out on the dune. After all, who was going to take it?

  It did occur to me that wandering off into the Karakum Desert alone with half a bottle of water, some peanuts and raisins, no map, and no compass was a bad idea. My business-style loafers left a clear trail in the sand, though, and there was no wind to wipe it away. So off I went, climbing the fronts of dunes and sliding down the backs, investigating trails of tiny footprints, taking photographs. The sun began to rise, bloated and orange over the dunes. Soon the sky was bright blue and cloudless and the orange glow was gone. The sun had bleached it from the sky. I’d lost my beacon. I couldn’t continue the way I’d been going, because I had to climb over and around sand dunes and I would inevitably lose track of which way I’d been going. I realized I wasn’t going to see the pit of fire.

  I was disappointed, but wasn’t surprised. Most things I’d tried in Turkmenistan had ended in failure. There was a pattern: I would come up with an idea without consulting any of my local friends or colleagues and attempt to put it into action. Locals would warn me that my plan wouldn’t work and I’d ignore them, assuming that their can’t-do attitude was rooted in laziness or apathy. Then, as I’d been warned, I’d run into obstacles and, instead of adjusting my plan to reality, I’d tried to bull my way through, assuming energy, persistence, creativity, and a can-do attitude was all it would take. In the end, I would accomplish nothing; I would have just worn myself out, puzzled the locals, and pissed off the government.

  Frustrated, I turned back. The temperature began to rise. I started to sweat, and the blowing sand stuck to my face. I trudged
through the sand toward the highway. I collected my carpet, slid down the giant sand dune where I had slept, passed Nurmurat’s yurts, and crossed the highway. I sat on my rolled-up carpet on the shoulder and waited. The sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperature continued to rise. Every 15 or 20 minutes, I would hear a car in the distance, watch as it grew larger and larger, and curse as it passed. Bored, I took photos of myself next to the highway with my thumb out, hitchhiking in the desert. I counted how many seconds it took from the time I heard each car until it appeared. I drank the last of my water. Finally, an ancient truck pulled over and the two guys in the cab motioned for me to climb in. We rattled along the highway in the burning heat, the world outside the windshield almost too bright to look at. I chatted with the truckers a little but the heat made me sleepy – the temperature was well over 100 degrees – and I dozed off, bathed in sweat.

  The truck was even slower than the marshrutka had been. It took eight or nine hours to reach the checkpoint where I had met the blond man the previous day. He was gone. In his place was a man in a khaki uniform with a belly that spilled over his belt. He was standing outside the concrete-block building, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into the sand. I handed him my passport. He took it inside and made a phone call. When he returned, he looked angry.

  “Where did you go?” he asked me, in Russian.

  “To Darvaza. To see the eternal flame. Fire where gas comes out of the ground.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see the eternal flame. I wanted to see the desert, too. It’s interesting to me. Where I am from, we don’t have desert like this.”

  “You are a teacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have students in the desert?”