Turkmenistan

Ideology and propaganda 1905–1995 ↓ Removed 1957

Khrushchev’s theoretician who became “Shepilov who joined them”

June 1957 Presidium. Khrushchev cut off Shepilov's criticism: "How long did you study?" Shepilov: "Gymnasium, secondary school, three years at the Institute of Red Professors, four years of university." "I studied two winters with a priest — for a sack of potatoes." "Then why do you claim to know everything?!"

An economist who led the USSR's first political economy textbook, a rare intellectual in the party. Exempt from service, he volunteered in 1941 and finished the war as a major general. Rising through Agitprop and Pravda, he became a key Khrushchev theoretician, crafting the ideological language of de-Stalinization. As foreign minister in 1956 he opened Third World diplomacy during Suez. But he joined the Anti-Party Group the next year and fell under the mocking tag 'Shepilov who joined them.' He spent decades in obscurity in Kyrgyzstan and the state archive; his memoir The Unjoined brought posthumous reappraisal.

Socialist-bloc leader 1922–1999 ○ Natural causes

16-year leader of Brezhnev-era Turkmenistan who integrated its cotton and gas economy into the Soviet center

26 February 1943, on the Northwestern Front: a bullet through the leg, three shrapnel wounds to his right arm. That wound ended his war — and pushed him from the schoolroom into the party apparatus, toward the helm of Soviet Turkmenistan.

Born to a peasant family near Chardzhou, he began as a teacher before being drafted in 1941 and fighting as a submachine-gun squad commander on the Northwestern Front, where severe wounds in February 1943 ended his military service. He climbed steadily through the Komsomol and party apparatus, becoming Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister of the Turkmen SSR in 1963, then First Secretary of the Communist Party in December 1969, leading the republic for 16 years. His tenure saw major natural gas development and expanded irrigation agriculture, integrating Turkmenistan deep into the Soviet cotton and energy economy, though regional factionalism and nepotism also intensified. In December 1985, Gorbachev removed him over a cotton-related corruption scandal; he spent his last years writing memoirs and died at his dacha in 1999.

Foreign statesman 1940–2006 ○ Natural death

A Turkmen leader who turned late-Soviet rule into personal rule over an independent state

At the 1991 9+1 meetings, he weighed a reworked union against preserving Turkmenistan’s autonomy.

Saparmurat Niyazov was the Soviet-era party and government leader who became independent Turkmenistan’s first president. He led the Turkmen delegation in the 9+1 meetings during the 1991 New Union Treaty process, while the republic’s guarded autonomy limited his role in the negotiations themselves. After independence he invoked neutrality and state sovereignty while concentrating power in the presidency and using the Ruhnama and an extensive personality cult to organize public life. His rule remains a case of post-Soviet state formation fused with authoritarian consolidation.