In 1985 Saparmurat Niyazov was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan. In 1991, after winning 98.3 percent of the vote, he became President; in 1999 he declared himself President-for-Life, although recently he has begun making noises about stepping down in 2010. Not much has changed since the Stalinist era, except that the ubiquitous portraits of Marx and Lenin have now been replaced by pictures of Niyazov.

It would be easy enough to dismiss Niyazov as yet another crazy dictator presiding over some backwater nation, except for the fact that Turkmenistan happens to be sitting atop 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and a large but undetermined amount of petroleum. Poor dictators are crazy; rich dictators are merely eccentric. And so the one of the last Stalinists enjoys cordial relations with parties as diverse as Turkey, Iran, America and the European Union.

Not all of Turkmenistan's neighbors are members of the Niyazov fan club. In 1994 Russia did serious damage to the national economy by refusing to transport Turkmenistan's gas to hard currency markets. There are also continuing disputes over Caspian Sea oil fields claimed both by Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Still, nobody is likely to disturb the status quo any time soon. Niyazov has ruthlessly persecuted "unofficial" varieties of Islam (along with Protestantism and other "foreign" influences) and has worked to stop drug shipments going through Turkmenistan.

Irrigation allows Turkmenistan to produce a good bit of cotton and wheat, but is contributing to the decline of the Aral Sea and to tense relations with Kazakhstan. Water is likely to be a major issue for the entire region over the next few years: much of Turkmenistan's drinking water is polluted with fertilizers and pesticides, as well as oil seeping from crumbling Soviet-era drilling sites).

The present situation in Turkmenistan could best be described as stable but tense. As with any one-party dictatorship, much depends on Niyazov's continued physical and mental health. Should he die suddenly, it's difficult to guess who would step in to fill the ensuing vacuum. It is also difficult to predict what Niyazov might do if he were to slip over the edge into gibbering megalomania, as absolute dictators are wont to do. Turkmenistan has also reached out diplomatically to the Taliban in the past, and has shown little interest in guarding the border between Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, where over 1 million ethnic Turkmen live.