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ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan (AP) -- President Saparmurat Niyazov, who created a vast cult of personality during two decades of iron-fisted rule over arid, energy-rich Turkmenistan, has died, officials said Thursday. He was 66.

A terse report from state television said Niyazov died early Thursday of heart failure and showed a black-framed portrait of the man who had ordered citizens to refer to him as "Turkmenbashi" -- the Father of All Turkmen. An announcer in a dark suit read a list of Niyazov's accomplishments.

The funeral is to be held Sunday.

Under the Constitution, Parliament Speaker Overzgeldy Atayev is to take over as acting president until elections that must be called within two months. The Constitution, however, bans Atayev from running for president in that vote.

Niyazov underwent major heart surgery in Germany in 1997 and last month publicly acknowledged for the first time that he had heart disease. But he did not seem seriously ill; two weeks ago he appeared in public to formally open an amusement park named after him outside the capital.

Niyazov had led Turkmenistan since 1985, when it was still a Soviet republic. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, he retained control and began creating an elaborate personality cult and turning Turkmenistan into one of the most oppressive of the ex-Soviet states.

He ordered the months and days of the week named after himself and his family, and statues of him were erected throughout the nation. He is listed as author of the "Rukhnama" (Book of the Soul) that was required reading in schools. Children pledged allegiance to him every morning.

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Read it here.

[ 21 December 2006: Message edited by: Snuckles ]

he ruled in a Central Asian despot style, creating probably the most ass-kissing and detailed cult of personality ever.
Maybe even beat Stalin and Kim for this feat.

I wanted to mention other noted brutal pro-American egomaniacs like Saddam and Mobutu but forgot.

Saddam would probably best be a better comparison with this Turkmen madman.

In the first place, leave Lenin out of this. Lenin was an uncompromising revolutionary who warned the party not to let Stalin take power after his death.

In the second place, Niyazov was born in 1940 and didn't even have a career while Stalin was alive. He didn't become President of Turkmenistan until 1985.

He's not an "heir" to anybody. He was a product of the Stalinist system and became a successful bureaucrat, like millions of other Soviet bureaucrats.

Niyazov and his plundercratic ilk were the very class of people that carried out the capitalist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union starting in 1991. He built his one-man rule largely after his country had gained its independence from the Soviet Union. He should be one of your heroes.

Niyazov was a rabid nationalist - the kind of person Stalin would have squashed like a bug. But even as Niyazov sought to rid his country of the strong influences of Russian language and culture he was a faithful ally of the new capitalist Russia, providing it with exclusive access to the Turkmen gas reserves.

[ 22 December 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Niyazov was probably on the same “Enemies List” as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and Saddam Hussein, the other foreign leaders whose only crime is that they control vital supplies of dwindling resources. Like his contemporaries, Niyazov represented an obstacle to the American oil giants extending their corporate empire through Central Asia and the Middle East. Now that he’s dead, the power struggle can begin in earnest.

Turkmenistan has reserves which amount to a whopping 22.5 trillion cubic meters, the second largest supplies in Asia. Nearly all of Turkmenistan’s gas is pumped through Russian energy giant Gazprom’s pipelines. As economist Mikail Delyagin said, “Because of Gazprom’s mismanagement, the European part of Russia cannot exist without Turkmen gas. Control over it is a categorical imperative for Russia’s development during the next 10 years”. (Victor Yasmann RFE/RL Current Affairs)

Disruption of gas supplies from Turkmenistan would be a severe blow to Gazprom’s economic vitality. This ensures that Putin will be deeply involved in the selection of the country’s future president. It also sets the stage for another clash between Moscow and Washington.
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The media, of course, is playing its traditional role of championing Washington’s interventions by demanding “free elections”; another comical part of the Bush-kabuki which never seems to change. Turkmenistan has no history of free elections, but the western press sees an opportunity to serve its constituents by fomenting dramatic political change; change that is designed to install a US-friendly client.
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The power struggle is bound to be ferocious and Washington is preparing to be right in the thick of it. Bush has little choice but to do everything he can to establish an American stronghold in Eurasia’s energy-center. The geopolitical stakes are just too high to ignore. The country is perfectly situated between Russia and Iran on the Caspian Sea. In fact, the Pentagon’s own maps show Turkmenistan at the very center of CENTCOM’s global resource war; a pivotal location for military installations and pipeline corridors. It provides ready-access to an estimated 2 trillion in oil reserves in the Caspian Sea as well as the massive natural gas supplies.

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He was, as has been said here, a product of the Stalinist state-capitalist corruption of the Soviet era and a highly successful pork-chopper who sucked profits out of the system and hoarded them for himself, just like any other corporate climber anywhere else.

And, like so many others, helped undermine the democratic reforms and urged the break-up of the Soviet Union in a way that ensured he would get richer and solidify his power base over his fiefdom.

He can now sit and discuss politics and business strategies with Ford and (soon) Hussein, Pic Botha, Milton Friedman, Augusto Pinoshit, etc.--in Hell.

And, no Spector, you may see Lenin as an uncompromising revolutionary, but the fact is he was also the key architect of the state capitalist economic structures and systems in post-revolutionary Russia that allowed Stalin & Co. to seize power in the first place.

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Please spare us your anachro-syndicalist bullshit.

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The typical response of a loony pseudo-socialist fraud who can't deal with the historic truth--even when it's acknowledged by his religious icons.

It doesn't matter whether the info comes from a socialist, communist, social democratic, anarcho-syndicalist or even a capitalist political perspective. That historic fact is the Russian, Chinese, eastern European, etc. economies were/are primarily state capitalist in nature.

Your denial of these facts and defending the indefensible only makes you look like an even bigger hypocrite than you already are. You can either deal with it, or continue to get laughed at by the rest of us serious activist and by people across the spectrum.

Then again, don’t deal with it. I rather enjoy laughing at history-denying losers of all stripes.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

It doesn't matter whether the info comes from a socialist, communist, social democratic, anarcho-syndicalist or even a capitalist political perspective. That historic fact is the Russian, Chinese, eastern European, etc. economies were/are primarily state capitalist in nature.

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