The Soviet legacy and leader cults in Post-Communist Central Asia: the example of Turkmenistan

[Extract] While a new wave of democratic revolutions was widely expected in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, progress towards democratisation has proven slow. In many parts of the world, including Central Asia, victory in what Francis Fukuyama claimed was the last of history’s battles has proved elusive.2 Perhaps the most striking feature of the politics of Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the durability of the leader cults that have grown up around Presidents Nasultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, and Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan.