The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan

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Notes

I am grateful for the constructive comments on an earlier draft provided by two anonymous reviewers.

For example, a proposal made in 2007 by the Estonian Ministry of Defence to remove the Soviet Soldier Liberator monument from central Tallinn has elicited a hostile reaction from the country's normally quiescent ethnic Russian community and prompted Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov to urge Russians to boycott Estonian products (Osborn 2007).

Monumentalisation is not confined to public sculpture. It might be argued that, to name only a few examples, giant steel works and factories, avenues, the Palaces of Culture in many towns and cities, major canal projects, and model cities such as Nowa Huta, Stalinstadt (Eisenhüttenstadt) and Magnitogorsk, were all examples of socialist monumentalisation, but such projects do not fall within the scope of this essay.

In an artistic context, Khodjakuli Narliev's seminal 1972 film Nevestka[Daughter-in-law] movingly depicts the tensions between, on the one hand, material progress under the Soviet system and pride in the Soviet war effort and, on the other hand, the resilience of Turkmen and tribal values. On the fusion of Soviet and Turkmen architectural styles, see Kacnelson et al. (1987). Turkmen intellectuals defended the Turkmen language during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ in the Turkmen language journal Edibayat we Sungat.

On ethnic Turkmen communists learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ in order to articulate their political and territorial objectives during the demarcation of Soviet national borders in 1924, see Arne Haugen's analysis of Sovnarkom archives (2003, pp. 176–77).

For details see, Istoriya (1978a, pp. 32–35, 1978b, pp. 112–13, 186–87) and Kulturnoe (1958, pp. 42–43, 118–19).

Author's interviews with Captain Dr M.T., former head of the Turkmen army's medical corps, Leeds, UK, 14 September 2005, O.M.; former Soviet army officer, Ashgabat, 3 August 2004; and L.K., former Soviet army conscript, Balkanabat, 10 May 2005.

Turkmenistan Iskra, 15 February 1987; Turkmenistan Iskra, 5 May 1988.

Author's interview with Dr N.A., a paediatric neurologist from Dashoguz who had gained political asylum in the UK, Barnsley, 4 November 2005.

For a summary of other accounts, see Geiss (2003).

In other cases where living family members of leaders develop their own cults, they have become a threat to the leader's position. Rifat al-Asad, brother of former Syrian president Hafez al-Asad, is one such example.

Author's interviews, Ashgabat, 9–10 April 2004.