Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The cruelty of Niyazov's policies was obvious in this tableau of toy huts, which was a visible plea—not to Turkmenbashi but to Allah—for housing. Houseless people abounded in this fabulously wealthy country. In his role as city planner, Niyazov had ordered that houses be bulldozed, compounds flattened, neighborhoods of Ashgabat dispersed, but he had not rehoused the people he'd displaced. They lived precariously in temporary huts on Ashgabat's outskirts. And where their houses had stood were gold statues, fountains, oversized white marble buildings, and white marble apartment blocks of ludicrous aspect, risen like pillars of salt, with gold trim, all of them empty because they were, in their deluxe absurdity, unaffordable.

Islam was not one immutable thing but was subject to variations. In what anthropologists call syncretism—local customs or adaptations added to an imported belief system—Islam here took on a colorful form, like Catholicism in Sicily or the Congo. Here were the national saints and martyrs who might intercede, and also the fetishes. The toys and small-scale models and symbols set up in a beseeching way were an innovation. The symbolic naming was a way of gaining power over destiny. Appeals to spirits—not Allah. This sort of Turkmen-style praying, intending to control fate, was unusual among Muslims.

In the next few days, I reached the conclusion that Turkmenistan, perhaps because of its tyrannous history, was one of the most superstition-prone cultures I'd ever seen.

Because they were gilded and solemn, the statues in the Turkmen capital had an ecclesiastical aura. A leader on horseback, or one cast in bronze or carved in stone, was not quite the same as a leader shaped in gold. In all these statues Niyazov was El Dorado, the Man of Gold—all-powerful, all-knowing. You were not meant to gape at them but rather to venerate them. One statue, depicting Niyazov with his arm raised, rotated, turning to face the sun, seeming to guide it across the sky from dawn to dusk. Another, the Arch of Neutrality, stood atop a gigantic marble apparatus that looked like, and was locally known as, the Toilet Bowl Plunger. Some gold statues showed Turkmenbashi sitting, others striding, waving, saluting, and of course smiling a 24-karat smile. Many showed him as a precocious golden child.

He once said to a journalist, "I admit it, there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments [of me]. I don't find any pleasure in it, but the people demand it because of their mentality."

All of these statues and pictures were, of course, destined for destruction; their doom was spelled out in the gold lettering, in the gold gesturing. They were such hubristic conceptions, it was only a matter of time before they were pulled down. A statue of Lenin in Neutrality Square in Ashgabat was bronze and life size, its mosaic imitating the pattern of a Turkmen carpet, and its message, in Russian and Turkmen, read: LENINISM IS THE WAY FOR FREEING THE PEOPLES OF THE EAST. This was, by contrast, modest and charming, a far cry from the gold three-times-life-size Niyazov statues, which looked like commands to submit to his insanities, and by implication would challenge future Turkmen to knock them down.

Although the city was made of white marble and gold, statues and tower blocks and ministries and amphitheaters, the whole of Ashgabat had the pompous and vulnerable look of a place defying the fates. If an earthquake didn't topple it, a coup d'état would, and all of it would be smashed to bits by the indignant citizens this spendthrift had cheated.

The irony of Ashgabat was that nowhere, among the gold statues and the white marble plazas with their fountains and the triumphal archways, was there a place to sit down. It was a city without benches, the subtle message being: Keep walking.

"I will build a forest in the desert," Niyazov had promised. Turkmen said that he had loved the pine forests of Russia. He had been inspired by them; he missed them here among the stones and the dunes. Turkmenistan—its wind-scoured plains and ravines of sun-scorched rock—deserved a forest.

He had ordered the planting of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young trees; and although they were two or three feet high—the planting was still going on when I was in Ashgabat—the forestation plan was not a success.