Well, he’s dead – Sapuramat Nizayov, or Turkmenbashi, the design classic Central Asian dictator. In 1985, when he was appointed first secretary of Turkmenistan by Mikhail Gorbachev, he must have seemed terribly normal – just another, formally Marxist but probably not very, formally Muslim but deeply russified, bureaucrat like so many others.

There were many like him, but this one was special. Having succeeded to the title of president of an independent nation, he unfurled like a black flower into a genuinely bizarre and vicious tyrant, someone who had far more in common with the Soviet Union of 1935 than 1985. He started out believing he had to create a national identity for Turkmenistan, but pretty soon this goal became indistinguishable from the creation of a Stalin-like personality cult that got more and more bizarre with time.

Everyone knows their favourite bits of Turkmenbashi – renaming the months, the ice palace – but it’s probably more interesting to wonder why.
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