Turkmenistan: The Desert Under One Man

The most closed of the Central Asian states

Turkmenistan is a large, mostly desert country on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, with about 7 million people, four-fifths of the land covered by the Karakum ("black sand") desert. It sits on enormous natural-gas reserves, among the largest in the world. It is also one of the most isolated and tightly controlled countries anywhere — press-freedom rankings have placed it alongside North Korea and Eritrea among the most restricted in the world — and it has been governed since independence by a succession of leaders who built extravagant personality cults around themselves.

A short history

1. antiquity

   Silk Road cities

   Nisa (an early Parthian centre) and Merv become great oasis cities.

2. 11th century

   The Seljuks

   Oghuz Turkic tribes, ancestors of the Turkmen, move west from here.

3. 1221

   Mongol destruction

   Merv is sacked; the region's irrigation and cities collapse.

4. 15th–19th c.

   Turkmen tribes

   Nomadic and semi-nomadic confederations; no unified state.

5. 1881

   Geok Tepe

   Russia storms the Tekke fortress, killing thousands, and annexes the region.

6. 1924

   The Soviet republic

   Turkmenistan is created as a union republic of the USSR.

7. 1991

   Independence

   Turkmenistan becomes sovereign; Saparmurat Niyazov is president.

8. 1999

   President for life

   Niyazov ("Türkmenbaşy") is made permanent head of state.

9. 2006

   Succession

   Niyazov dies; Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow takes over.

10. 2022

    Dynastic handover

    Berdimuhamedow's son Serdar becomes president.

Merv and the Turkmen

The oases along the Murghab and Amu Darya rivers held some of the great cities of the ancient and medieval world: Nisa, reputedly a royal residence of the early Parthian kings, and above all Merv, which by the 12th century was one of the largest cities on Earth and a centre of Islamic scholarship — until the Mongols destroyed it in 1221 and massacred its population, a blow from which the region's urban civilisation never recovered. The Turkmen themselves descend from Oghuz Turkic nomads who moved into the area from around the 11th century; they organised into tribes (Tekke, Yomut, Ersari and others), herding, raiding caravans and Persian villages for captives to sell in the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara, and never formed a single state.

Russian conquest and Soviet rule

Russia absorbed most of Central Asia in the mid-19th century but the Turkmen tribes, with no cities to capture and a reputation as formidable fighters, held out longest. In January 1881 a Russian army under General Skobelev besieged and stormed the Tekke earthwork fortress of Geok Tepe, killing an estimated 15,000 or more Turkmen, many cut down as they fled; the date is now a national day of mourning. The region was made part of Russian Turkestan. After the revolution and the suppression of the Basmachi resistance, the Soviets in 1924 drew the borders of a Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, forcibly settled the nomads, imposed a cotton monoculture irrigated by the vast Karakum Canal, and promoted literacy and a standardised Turkmen language, while Moscow kept the republic under firm control from the 1930s. Turkmenistan remained one of the poorer and less industrialised Soviet republics.

Niyazov's state

Turkmenistan declared independence on 27 October 1991 with its Soviet-era leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, in charge, and he ruled unchallenged until his death in 2006. He built one of the most extreme personality cults of modern times: he took the title Türkmenbaşy ("leader of the Turkmen"), renamed the months and days of the week, naming January after himself and April after his mother, erected a giant gold statue of himself in Ashgabat that rotated to face the sun, made his book of moral and historical musings, the Ruhnama, compulsory in schools and driving tests, and in 2005 closed rural libraries and hospitals outside the capital. Dissent was crushed; the country was sealed to foreign journalists and largely to its own citizens. Gas exports, mainly to Russia and later China, funded the marble-clad rebuilding of Ashgabat and a thin welfare system of subsidised utilities.

After Niyazov

Niyazov's health minister, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, took power in 2006 in a managed succession, winning elections with implausible majorities. He softened some of Niyazov's odder decrees but kept the system intact and built his own cult — celebrated in state media as "Arkadag" ("the Protector"), shown on horseback and writing books, and honoured with his own gilded equestrian statue. In 2022 he stepped down and his son, Serdar Berdimuhamedow, was elected president in an early election — a father-to-son transfer of power. The father kept a powerful role: since 2023 he has chaired the People's Council (Halk Maslahaty), re-formed as the country's top leadership body, with the title "National Leader of the Turkmen People", and the two are widely described as ruling jointly. Turkmenistan proclaims a policy of "permanent neutrality", recognised by the UN in 1995, and stays out of military alliances. It faces a slow economic crisis: heavy dependence on gas sales to a single main customer, China; the end in 2019 of the free utilities that underpinned the social contract; and recurring shortages of subsidised food that human-rights groups say the government denies.

What Turkmenistan carries

Turkmenistan's deep history is the Silk Road — Merv, Nisa, the caravan routes — and its people's history is tribal and nomadic, never unified into a state until the Soviets drew one. Independence handed that state, and its gas wealth, to a single leader, and the country has been run ever since by one leader and now by a father and son, wrapped in monuments and marble, and closed off from the world to a degree matched by almost nowhere else.