President Saparmurad Niyazov's soft features and shock of white hair are inescapable all over Turkmenistan. His portrait is not only in every room, but also hangs over the main entrances to public buildings in Ashkhabad, the capital, and adorns the top of the downtown high-rise office of the national airline. Here he poses formally in a dark suit. There he leans casually on an elbow in white shirt and tie. Of all the quasi-dictatorial presidents in the region, each one a former high Soviet official, Mr. Niyazov is the most extreme in personalizing his power.
Women walk through clouds of sulfate.
Despite its vast resources, Turkmenistan remains impoverished. The irony of this place is that Turkmenistan is blessed with the third-largest gas reserves in the world, according to a US Department of Energy report, and its estimated oil reserves in the Caspian Basin are second only to Kazakstan's. Yet the country vies with war-shredded Tajikistan as the poorest country in the former Soviet Union. Here in Turkmenbashi, economic life has been stagnant since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russians and ethnic Germans whom Stalin exiled here have left in droves.