POLITICS : Soviet Style Persists in Turkmenistan

The dissident groaned as yet another group of smiling girls posed in front of V. I. Lenin’s statue in this unchanging capital of an exception among the unstable republics of the former Soviet Union.

“They are happy, completely apolitical--they don’t understand how much trouble Lenin made,” said Akmohamed Belsatarov.

It was an almost impossible task, Belsatarov acknowledged, for Turkmenistan’s small group of democratic dissidents to overturn the former Communist government of this oil-rich Central Asian state, locked in a time warp barely touched by the heresy of perestroika.

“The Turkmen just lived with Marxist Communist ideology,” said Abdi Kuliev, the Turkmenian foreign minister. “They were not happy when it came, nor were they happy when it left. Maybe they were tired of all kinds of politics.”

Little has changed yet in this two-thirds desert country of 4 million people. Most here seem to accept that the price of stability is an omnipresent secret police, a state-dominated economy and a president in the old Soviet style, who has arranged a single-candidate election Sunday to vote himself back into office.

A personality cult is even under way, with newspapers hailing President Saparmurad Niyazov, 50, as Turkmenbash, a title meaning “Great Leader of the Turkmen Tribe.”

“He is as brave and clever as Franklin Roosevelt, only his work is harder,” wrote one daily newspaper in Ashgabat, where there is no free press, local KGB men quietly ask foreign reporters not to interview local people and opposition newspapers have been seized.

The press condemns as “terrorists” the nationalist movements in neighboring Muslim republics like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. It says leaders of the two tiny Turkmenian democratic dissident movements are traitors who should be condemned to death.

Police have beaten up group leaders, but there are no known political prisoners. The opposition has not organized a demonstration for more than five months and failed to register candidates to run against Niyazov on Sunday.

Political Islam is not a powerful force among this nomadic Turkic people, despite worries about the long border with Islamic Iran. A bigger potential threat to stability appears to be the several Turkmenian tribes.

Stocky, white-haired, pro-Russian Niyazov has ruled Turkmenistan since October, 1990, first resisting independence but gradually adopting former opposition demands for national sovereignty and official status for the Turkmenian language. He is helped above all by a still-disciplined system and a lack of obvious alternatives.

“People didn’t like Niyazov two years ago, but they do now,” said a mechanic named Juma. “He’s the only really strong leader, and he makes his ministers work. We are a young country and shouldn’t change leaders in this troubled time.”

Juma hoped to be able to buy his garage under small-scale privatization measures announced by Niyazov as part of a package of new constitutional reforms and economic and investment laws brought in over the last month. The measures are apparently democratic and liberal, but they nevertheless leave most of the economy still in state hands.

Niyazov may face little formal opposition, but he has run a curious campaign that has made clear that he is up against rising economic grievances.

The situation is ironic, since Turkmenistan is a major grower of high-class cotton and sits on the world’s third-largest natural gas reserve, from which diplomats estimate it could earn $6 billion a year. But pipeline and rail projects have come to naught, and a price dispute with Ukraine has blocked traditional export routes.

But as a water-sharing dispute over the Amu Darya River looms with populous Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan has had to look for friends. And priority has gone to where it has been for the past 70 years.

“Our main economic partner will be Russia,” Niyazov told workers at a factory here, explaining that a five-year cooperation treaty and mutual defense pact signed with Moscow this month will leave Russian troops in the republic under “joint control” with his government.