Democracy Faces Barriers in Turkmenistan : Soviet Asia: The remote republic’s history of dictatorship works against the president.

A line of brides, grooms, teen-agers and tourists formed in the downtown park called Lenin’s Garden to wait for Viktor, the official state photographer who works at the base of the main Lenin statue here in the capital of Turkmenistan, the most remote southern outpost of the crumbling Soviet empire.

“Mostly, they all want their pictures taken with Lenin,” Viktor explained. “Here, you see, everybody still respects Lenin. Well, almost everybody, I guess.”

The scene in Lenin’s Gardens provided clear evidence of the most powerful, potentially disastrous reality facing Turkmenistan and its authoritarian president, Saparmurad Niyazov, as he tries to chart a course toward independence and democracy through a minefield of lingering communism and dictatorship. In the delicate balancing act that is Soviet Central Asia today, Niyazov knows all too well not to meddle in Lenin’s Gardens just yet.

“You can wipe out monuments,” he said in ruling out the dismantling of Lenin but announcing a new commission that will determine which of Ashkhabad’s political monuments should come down. “But you cannot wipe out history.”

It was the very act of tearing down the main Lenin statue in the neighboring republic of Tadzhikistan last month that triggered the Communist backlash in the Tadzhik capital of Dushanbe. The city remains in turmoil after the republic’s Communists overthrew their more progressive president in a bloodless coup. With more than 10,000 protesters still gathered on the main square of Dushanbe, the overwhelmingly Communist Tadzhik Parliament is debating how to resolve the political impasse.

Dushanbe’s coup represented the first reversal--and the setback there may prove only temporary--of the democratic sweep unleashed by last month’s failed attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. It has enormous implications for all the breakaway Soviet republics, particularly Turkmenistan and the other “new nations” of Soviet Central Asia, which have no democratic traditions to guide them.

“You ask me what I think of democracy, and I tell you, ‘I am afraid for democracy, afraid for my country, afraid for my life,’ ” said Natasha, a middle-aged Russian office manager who has lived her entire life as a minority among the republic’s overwhelmingly Turkmenian population.

Valeria, 21, a Russian art expert at Ashkhabad’s main museum who also asked that her last name not be used, added: “Will I go to jail if I answer your questions? Yes, we live in fear. And its not just political fear. It’s physical fear.

“Five times I was assaulted on the streets here in Ashkhabad. Once, a gang of Turkmenian boys grabbed me and sliced off my necklace with a knife. I fear that all non-Turkmenian people will have to leave Central Asia soon. I fear there is no place for us, non-Turkmen, to go from here. And, of course, there is no democracy here like in the rest of the Soviet Union. So there is that to fear, as well.”

Democracy inspires dread, as well, among the intelligentsia of the Turkmenian community, which represents 68% of the republic’s 3.6 million people.

“Of course we are afraid,” said Turdymurat Khodja Mukhammedov, Ashkhabad’s leading pro-democracy activist who has been arrested several times in the past month. Protest rallies and hunger strikes remain illegal under Niyazov’s rigid regime.

“As a leader, as a politician, I think Niyazov is a dead man. He won’t last long,” said Mukhammedov, a Communist Party member for 20 years before he resigned to launch the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan last January. “The people already are bored with him. And I think Niyazov is aware that he is temporary. So he is just trying to outmaneuver everyone as best he can and stay as long as he can.”

As far as Niyazov’s daily Communist Party newspaper is concerned, the coup in neighboring Tadzhikistan never happened. And no independent media outlets are allowed to function here.

Yet it is clear that most of the people of Niyazov’s republic understand all too well the tightrope their president is attempting to walk during what Natasha, the office manager, called “these most difficult and darkest of times.”

“OK, so we have no democracy,” she said. “What we have is still better than Dushanbe. They went too fast there. Look where it got them. We only hope and we pray our president is more clever.”

To understand the magnitude of those fears is to understand a bit about Ashkhabad’s history, a checkerboard of disaster, death, war and suffering. The city, now a semi-modern oasis bordering Iran in the desert that straddles the two nations, lost tens of thousands of lives during the decades of invasions that led to its conquest, first by the Russian czar and then by the Red Army.

Then came World War II, and thousands more Turkmen who had been drafted into dictator Josef V. Stalin’s army died on the battlefield. Just three years after the war, a powerful earthquake stunned a tattered, starving Ashkhabad, wiping out 70% of its population. The city was rebuilt in the image of Stalinist Russia, with concrete Karl Marx libraries and squares, dozens of Lenin statues and streets named Communism Road and Lenin Avenue.

It is against that backdrop that Niyazov is struggling for the survival not only of his regime but also of the peace during his promised transition of power in the emerging new nation.

He has followed a plodding and careful course, mixing the rhetoric of reform and Turkmenian nationalism with Draconian decrees that ban protests and preserve the power of the Communist Party.

Niyazov promised in an address to his people last week that Turkmenistan will finally declare its independence Oct. 27, which is already celebrated as the day Turkmenistan officially joined the Soviet Union seven decades ago. Tass reported Tuesday that a referendum on independence will be conducted Oct. 26.

Niyazov has banned activities by all political parties in the Communist-dominated army, police and civilian institutions. He announced that his Turkmenistan Communist Party is breaking from the Soviet central party and plans to form a new political organization. He set up a battery of new commissions to decide not only the “ideological monuments” to be torn down but also the national flag, symbol and anthem for an independent Turkmenistan.

His leadership sharply condemned the attempted coup in Moscow, calling it an “anti-constitutional, anti-people, anti-democratic overthrow of the state by reactionary forces.” But the condemnation came well after the Moscow coup had failed.

For fiercely nationalist dissidents such as Mukhammedov, who redesigned the Turkmenistan flag, staged three hunger strikes and sacrificed his state job as a geology professor in the last month, Niyazov’s balancing act is little more than a charade. “As a political man, he has proved he has no character,” Mukhammedov said. “He just blows with the wind. His policy is for sale. He has no substance, no principles, no character.”

But for others in the republic, such as Oraz Oveza, who describes himself as “a common person with no time for politics,” Niyazov is still seen as a protector from a great, unknown evil. “I have a good feeling about him,” said Oveza, an ambulance driver. “I think he is trying his best to create a new Turkmenian nation, while keeping the peace at the same time.

“This is what is important to all common people,” he said. “Peace. No one wants to fight. I think it is the same all over the world. Everybody wants only his own home, some food on the table and peace. Policy is for the rulers.”

After a few glasses of vodka, it was clear that Oveza had a keener sense of politics than even he suspected. “Niyazov knows that many people believe in him because of his background,” he said. “He grew up in an orphanage after his parents were killed in the great earthquake of 1948. He is Turkmenian. He is one of us, and he has suffered with the rest of us. This is more important than politics or party.

“What is communism, anyway? What is the Communist Party? . . . OK, so our president is a Communist. If tomorrow he refuses to be a member of the Communist Party, still he is a human being. Still he can lead, we hope.

“The character and views of a man don’t change with his party membership. I like him, that’s all. And, after all, what is the alternative? Dushanbe?”