The dumbfounded viewers, turning on the television as usual for the news, must have thought a Turkman had been blasted off into orbit. However the truth was far from that, for an event even more grandiose had occurred: the publication of the third volume of verses, titled “Spring of my Spirituality”, by the country’s president Saparmurat Niyazov.

According to the news presenter, the president’s fellow citizens have been impatiently waiting for just this epochal event, and as soon as it was announced the collection had been published, the people rushed out to the bookshops to buy the collection of verses of their “Favourite Leader”…

Commenting on the publication of the collection of verses, one of the most senior history teachers in Ashkhabad said the publication “is just another book for obligatory study at schools, high schools, colleges…the generation born and growing up in the thirteen years of independence knows practically nothing about the works of Makhtumkuli, Mollanepes, Andalib, Kemin, and other classic Turkmen literature. (The president’s) quasi-spiritual guide Rukhnama has replaced the works of Turkmenistan’s great poets and writers with, as our journalists write, the masterpieces born by the genius of Turkmenbashi”.

A journalist from a national newspaper sadly admitted that journalists “are obliged to prepare ‘enthusiastic’ responses from readers to the publication of the book. Every day the editor demands five such requests from each correspondent. It is said the campaign for reader responses will continue as long as so demanded ‘from above’”…

In schools and other educational institutions the schoolchildren and students are forced to learn practically off by heart the first book of Rukhnama, weighing in at over 400 pages. They should also be able to quote any poem from Turkmenbashi’s two previous collections: “Flourish, my Turkmen people” (2002); and “Five Epochs of Turkmen Spirituality” (2003). And so on to the third collection...

“I cannot memorise these verses”, admitted a schoolgirl in the seventh (Russian speaking) class of a school. “They are in Turkmen, and are completely unharmonious and obscure. I already declined to give reply on the blackboard and was punished for refusing. This will strongly affect my school results, but I nonetheless do not want to learn such verses, and not only me but other classmates too, also Turkmen native speakers.”

According to an employee from the Ministry of Education, the poems from the new collection, as well as those from the previous ones and Rukhnama, will without doubt be included in examinations at higher schools, as well as in questionnaires for introductory interviews. Thus those wishing to be students at Turkmen high schools should already start cramming the president-poet’s verses.

In connection with the new publication from the Leader of all Turkmen, work will even increase for teachers at the country’s kindergarten, as Turkmenbashi repeatedly insists his Rukhnama and other works act as reference books for all Turkmen, irrespective of age. And in Turkmenistan, the word of the president is law.