Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Later in the Rukhnama (oh, and 2005 was the Year of Rukhnama

), he waxes emotional about his mother, and mothers in general. This turns into a program to venerate motherhood. "The mother is a sacred being ... One can understand the value of sacred things only after one has lost them." He goes on to explain that a father provides material support, but the mother supplies love. He recalls a Turkmen saying: "Fatherless, I am orphan; motherless, I am captive," and concludes, "Fate decreed two pains for me. I was both an orphan and a captive."

A lost childhood seems essential in a dictator's biography, an irregular upbringing being a determiner of a person's becoming a political tyrant. Niyazov's making a meal of his early suffering, and the existence of the Palace of Orphans in Ashgabat—there were similar institutions in other big cities—were evidence that one of his priorities was to make special provisions for abandoned or parentless children. Having no clan, no real family, though, was a unique political asset to him in this clan-dominated society. "He has a feeling for orphans," a Turkmen told me. This concern was as obvious on the ground as it was in the pages of the Rukhnama, where Niyazov describes how he lost his parents, how he was alone and destined to struggle.

In terms of abandonment complaints, the book sounds (sometimes word for word) like the upward climb of the Austrian paperhanger in part one of Mein Kampf,

who wrote: "In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father," and "When my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its decisions ... The three-year-old child had become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority." But the orphaning is sentimentalized in the Rukhnama, and there is much more—history, old saws, the promise of greater glory, the list of obligations and duties, of which the not exactly Hitlerian "Maintain a smiling face" is one.

"Smile!" was an important Turkmenbashi command. He was as emphatic about Turkmen smiling as he was about work and worship. He wrote, "As the old saying goes, 'There will never be any wrinkles on a smiling face.'" And he reminisced: "I often remember my mother. Her smile still appears before my very eyes ... The smile is visible to me in the dark of night, even if I have my eyes shut."

A smile was powerful: "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy. When death stares you in the face, smile at it and it may leave you untouched." Even nature smiled: "Spring is the smile of the earth." Smiling could be a form of conversation: "Smile at each other ... Talk to each other with smiles."

Pages and pages of this, most of it self-reverential. To his smile Niyazov owed much of his success as a national leader. "That smile I inherited from my mother is my treasure." This was perhaps why most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile—and this may be true of all political leaders—was his most sinister feature.

At Niyazov's command, his book was studied in every school in Turkmenistan; a thorough knowledge of it was an entry requirement for all the colleges and universities in the nation and for advancement in the civil service. Those immigration officials who gave me a hard time had little idea of how to handle a simple customs matter but probably could have quoted "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy"—though none of them smiled at me.

What Niyazov did not say in the Rukhnama was that after his education in Russia (he had studied electrical engineering), he had become a party hack. This was in the 1970s and '80s—Soviet times, when he rose through the ranks of the Politburo to become general secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan. He was one of the educated provincials the Soviets (in this case Gorbachev, who had picked him, not knowing he was a flake) extolled as converts to Marxism and examples of the effectiveness of the system, and hoped might serve as agents of reform. Not mentioned in the Rukhnama is that he spent a great deal of time in Leningrad and Moscow; that he was married to a Russian—interestingly enough, a Jew—who chose to live apart from him, in Moscow; that he had two children, one of whom, Murat, hoped to succeed him.