Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Niyazov had recently built a vast space-age mosque and named it after himself, Saparmyrat Hajji Mosque, and encouraged his people to visit it annually, as a rewarding pilgrimage, a national haj. His portraits, some of them hundreds of square feet of his unappealing features, were everywhere. In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring; in others he was a nasty-faced CEO with a chilly smile, smug, truculent, defiant. One showed him as a precocious child of gold, seated in the lap of his bronze mother. The most common picture portrayed him, chin on hand, squinting in insincere bonhomie, like a lounge singer. Smiling was an important part of his political philosophy. He had Italianate features and was sometimes posed with a stack of books, like an insufferable author in a book-tour shot. He was sixty-five. He had declared himself "Leader for Life." It was the will of the people, he said. Everything associated with him told you he was out of his mind. He had banned beards, gold teeth, and ballet.

Absolute ruler and head of state, and with much of the gas revenue in his own pocket, Niyazov was crazy in his own twisted way, and Ashgabat was an example of what happened when political power and money and mental illness were combined in a single paranoiac.

"He renamed bread after his mother," someone had said to me before I went.

It was apparently true that he'd floated the idea, and he'd succeeded in something even nuttier. He renamed the twelve months of the year—January after himself, and some other months after members of his family. His mother's name, Gurbansultan-ezdhe, took the place of April. The days of the week were also new, his own innovation, and one was Mom's. In the purifying interests of nationalism, he abolished all non-Turkmen names and expressions, and decreed that the dictionary should be rewritten to reflect this.

One American I met there said, "If you took Las Vegas and Pyongyang and shook them up in a blender, you'd get Ashgabat."

"Like an underfunded Las Vegas," another American said. He meant the white marble towers, the gold statues, the floodlights, the fountains, the empty spaces, the dead trees. Neither of these quips was quite right, because the place was uniquely weird. I knew that something was amiss as soon as I arrived. The gold statues and dead trees were just the beginning and were hardly the worst of it.

Apart from its gas pipeline, it was a country without a link to the world: no international telephones, no Internet, no cell phones, no satellite hookups. Newspapers, radio, and television were controlled; no real news at all and no access to the outside. My BlackBerry, which had worked in Baku and Tbilisi, went dark. The dictator had decreed that the Internet was subversive—and he was probably right. It was almost impossible to enter the country, and it was very hard to leave. Internet cafés had been closed for more than three years. People tended to whisper, and no wonder. In a typical case, reported by outside sources, a fifty-eight-year-old journalist—a reporter for Radio Free Europe—Ogulsapar Muradova, a mother of two, had been arrested, convicted (without a lawyer) in a secret trial, and given six years on a trumped-up charge. In September 2006, a month after she was imprisoned in Ashgabat, Muradova was found dead in her cell (she appeared to have suffered "a head injury"), and her body was handed over to her daughters.

Turkmenistan's oddity was apparent from the outset, long before I saw the gold statues. Few planes ever landed at the casino-style airport, which was staffed by officials who had a very slim idea of how to do their jobs or make decisions—a characteristic of most dictatorships, in which fear of retribution created such rigidity that it bred incompetence. Men in handsome uniforms stood around, delaying the processing of passengers, most of them foreign workers—British, Malaysian, Filipino—in the gas industry. The officials grinned at each other, but when they met my gaze they glowered and looked fierce.

One of them, in a wide-crowned and shiny-visored cap, looked at me and sucked his teeth and said, "Prablyema"

"What's the problem?"

"Shto eta?" He tugged at the T-shirt in my bag that held the offending object.

"Eekon," I said. The silver icon I had bought at the sidewalk flea market in Tbilisi, with an oil portrait of Jesus staring from a lozenge at the center, wrapped up so that it wouldn't get scratched.

"Eta staroye" he said.

"No, it's new."

""Ochen dorogaya

"Not really. It was cheap."

"Antikvarnaya!"

"An antique?"

"Da. Prablyema!"

he said. He showed me the flat of his hand. "Zhdi zdyes"

I waited almost an hour. A team of men returned. One spoke English, while the rest of them clucked approvingly.

"Why you bring this eekon here?" he said slowly. "Why you not bring it khome?"

"I am bringing it home," I said.

He raised his hands. "This Ashgabat, not khome."