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.

Structure or agency? Turkmenistan and its ruler could almost have been made up for a scenario-planning exercise or an academic seminar – the Central Asian desert state with large energy resources, a corrupt post-Soviet elite, a small but worrying jihadi problem, foreign relations balanced between Russia, Turkey and the US. No surprise that it turned out tyrannous, but did it have to go as far as it did?

Defenders of Nizayov – I’m sure there are some, probably Neil Clark – will no doubt say that he avoided civil war and maintained national independence. Well, as they say about George Bush, few people owe so much to low expectations. Turkmenistan wasn’t really at risk of the first, partly because of the limits on the second. The only large minority group in the country is Russians, and Turkmen gas travels to market via Gazprom’s pipes. Structure says no.

On the other hand, the future may be less bright than for, say, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, simply because Nizayov was a highly effective dictator as well as a mad one. He pursued a deliberate policy of denying education to the public, not to mention a manipulation of palace politics so thorough no-one has any idea who comes next. By changing chunks of the language to remind the public constantly of his power, he was following a literally Orwellian agenda.

It’s traditional to hope for democracy and peace, and possibly a pony, at this juncture. But I’m not at all sure a completely dumbed-down society is any more likely to avoid violence than a more factional, but less disempowered one.