Thriving Turkmenistan

Dictator Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov writes books on plants and has been setting a variety of world records. But most importantly, he has shaped his natural gas-rich country into a powerhouse of Central Asia.

As personality cults go, that of President Saparmyrat Niyazov (President of Turkmenistan from 1991 until his death in 2006) was a real belter. In the then impoverished nation’s capital, Ashgabat’s main square, Niyazov constructed a 12m sculpture of himself on a 75m high marble plinth; the gold-plated statue rotated to be in constant alignment with the sun. It was a fitting monument to a man who renamed himself Turkmenbashi (head of the nation).
Other megalomaniacal projects included Saparmyrat Turkmenbashi International Airport which was designed to cope with 17m passengers a year. In a dessert country of just 5.7m people, the project was preposterously ambitious. Even 27 years a ...