TURKMENISTAN: "DECISIVE STEP" CLOSES ANOTHER

UNCLAS ASHGABAT 001166 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS STATE FOR SCA/CEN E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV SOCI SCUL TX SUBJECT: TURKMENISTAN: "DECISIVE STEP" CLOSES ANOTHER DOOR ON THE NIYAZOV ERA REF: ASHGABAT 1164 ¶1. (U) Sensitive but unclassified. Not for public Internet. ¶2. (U) On Sunday evening, October 28, as the capital relxed after the successes of its Independence Day events, Turkmen television aired a surprising film from the old Soviet film vaults that captured our attention. "Decisive Step" was produced during the Soviet era. The film takes place just before the Russian revolution, and follows a young Turkmen who allies himself with a local warlord who is opposing the tsarist forces. Lauding the arrival of the Soviet power and SIPDIS the rescue of the Turkmen people from their feudal past, the movie was regular television fare in Turkmenistan in the 1980s. ¶3. (U) The plot is from a book by noted Soviet Turkmen author Berdy Muradovich Kerbabayev. A well-respected Turkmen author, poet, and translator who belonged to the Turkmen SSR Academy of Sciences from 1951 until his death in 1974, Kerbabayev published "Decisive Step" in 1940, in Russian, but a Turkmen language version was published within a few years. Kerbabayev is also known for his well-executed translations into Turkmen of traditional Russian works by Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Gorkyy. ¶4. (U) When Niyazov became president of Turkmenistan at independence in 1991, he made clear he disapproved of the story's portrayal of ethnic Turkmen as backward, uneducated nomads who benefited from absorption into the Soviet state. The film covers a period of history that is still altogether avoided in the public school system, either to avert discussion of the Soviet occupation or to avoid highlighting the Turkmens' historically well-deserved propensity for rebellion. In the early 1990s, Niyazov ordered Kerbabayev's family home demolished, and in a 2001 interview said the author's works were not part of the Turkmen conscience and that ethnic Turkmen had never accepted them. In the same interview, he used his disapproval of the plot line of "Decisive Step" to underscore the need to finish and circulate his Ruhnama, to achieve what he said Turkmen writers of the Soviet era had not: proudly showcasing the Turkmen people, their culture, language, and religion. ¶5. (SBU) COMMENT: Presenting this classic Soviet realist film to the Turkmen public at a time when President Berdimuhamedov has announced a "rebirth of the country" and is re-emphasizing Turkmen cultural heritage (reftel) is open to interpretation. Perhaps he is allowing the film to be shown to demonstrate Turkmenistan's more objective acknowledgement of the past. Just as likely, it may have been another effort to close the door on the Niyazov era. END COMMENT. HOAGLAND