The website collects the history of Turkmenistan’s “alternative thought”, unknown to the generation that grew up under the rule of the Ruhnama ideology, the “guiding text” written by the first president Niyazov. Opposition publications, including Soviet-era “samizdat” texts, as well as country reports produced by international organizations, will also be available.
Ashgabat () – On June 5, the “Turkmen Notebooks” site, Turkmenskye Tetradi, dedicated to the history of “alternative thinking” in Turkmenistan, was launched. The project was carried out by Turkmen civil and humanitarian activists who today reside in different countries of the world and others who still live in Turkmenistan.
The authors of the portal explain that the rigid isolation of the country from the outside world imposed by the first post-Soviet president Saparmurat Niyazov, and the repression of all forms of dissent, have caused the dispersion and oblivion of the legacy of the intellectual opposition to power that was installed in Ashgabat. That is why it was necessary to collect everything that can be reconstructed.
The current generation of Turkmen, many of whom want to participate in the civil society revival movement, have grown up under the sway of the Ruhnama ideology, the “Book of the Soul” written by Niyazov which is considered the “guiding text”. of the Turkmen people. In the introduction he offers “the synthesis of the historical conquests of the intellect, the customs, the traditions and the desires and intentions of our people, of its illustrious past and its brilliant future… One part of the Ruhnama is Heaven, the other is Land!”.
As Khalmurad Sojunov, a deputy of the last Supreme Soviet of Turkmenistan during the Gorbachev government – who now lives in Sweden – recalls in one of the testimonies collected by the site: “Perestroika was a great novelty for all Soviet peoples after the series of decrepit secretaries and party bosses, and we all tried to extract from our blood, drop by drop, the essence of the slave, to create a new society.
In those years, the Council of Turkmenistan Military-Internationalists was formed to overcome the trauma of the war in Afghanistan and try to reform the country’s policy in the transition from Soviet imperialism to independence, but the forces of the past prevailed. As the Turkmen writer and journalist Ak Velsapar recalls, “our freedom of expression lasted less than a year”; In February 1991, two months after the fall of the USSR, the new President Niyazov restored censorship.
Young people know nothing of the opposition to the regime in force in the last 32 years of independence. Much of the writing of early dissidents has been lost or is in private collections and is not accessible to today’s activists, journalists, and scholars. The site has been made possible thanks to the availability of the American platform Crude Accountability and has been divided into several sections: “News”, “Library”, “Analysis”, “Interviews and Memories”, “Special Projects” and “Tribune”.
It will finally be possible to access the publications of Turkmen opponents, including the Soviet-era “samizdat” texts and those of exiles abroad, which began to be published in print in the early 1990s. On the site you will also find reports of international organizations on Turkmenistan and books by Turkmen authors, foreign scientific editions on ethnography, history and culture of the Turkmen people, interviews with important figures of the country’s social and political life and research on topics specific.
