Without doubt Turkmenistan is an orderly place. In Ashgabat police and security staff outnumber citizens, and certainly tourists, of whom we saw none during our five day stay. Everything is clean. The grass around the monuments is even and very green, the marble surfaces kept spotless by teams of women in orange overalls and bright headscarves, the streets swept by constantly patrolling machines.
The construction goes on. New hotels and boulevards, offices and apartment buildings. The domes of the parliament and presidential palace are like something from a new Atlantis, gold and blue tiles and acres of imported white marble.
Of course behind this new city are the remains of the Soviet one. Rows of apartments and older dwellings built around courtyards. Our hotel, one of the latter, has sprawling grapevines and a pigeon coop full of white and fancy birds.
At the break up of the USSR the leaders of Turkmenistan found themselves in a fortunate position. A small, mostly rural population. A centralised power and security apparatus. No real enemies nor any desire to engage in the kind of revolutionary struggle taken up by Iran. Enormous gas reserves only a pipeline away from Europe.
It is these reserves that have fuelled the growth.
Billions have been spent on trains and roads and the new city of Ashgabat. Water is cheap, gas and electricity almost free. Needless to say the security situation is very tight indeed, and dissent strictly proscribed. Despite this the people seem relaxed, the restaurant at the train station always full.
So here is the question. Given the things an authoritarian country where the rulers have almost unlimited wealth and power might spend their money on - pointless wars, a nuclear weapons program, armaments – building a green and white city in the desert seems not so bad. Ashgabat's copy of Istanbul's Blue Mosque is very fine indeed.
