Turkmenistan compared to North Korea

Short answer: it depends on where you draw the line, but the authoritarian system took shape in the first years of independence, around 1990 to 1992. Saparmurat Niyazov, who had led the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic's Communist Party since 1985, became the republic's president in 1990. When Turkmenistan declared independence on 27 October 1991, he stayed in charge. A new constitution in 1992 gave the presidency sweeping powers, and opposition parties were never allowed to organize. The personality cult that made him famous, with the title Turkmenbashi, "leader of all Turkmen," grew over the 1990s. In late 1999 the parliament named him president for life, which is usually taken as the point where the dictatorship was fully formalized. Niyazov died in December 2006, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov succeeded him in a tightly controlled vote. Edgar's Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, 2004) is a good starting point for the Soviet background, and most histories of the period date the lifetime presidency to 1999. If you want to compare with North Korea, the two systems were built differently: Turkmenistan's leader used the oil-and-gas economy and a cult of personality, while Pyongyang's model was built on the Kim family succession and a much more closed economy. What did you have in mind for the comparison, the founding years or how the regimes survived?

Both regimes survived by controlling nearly everything that could threaten them, but they got there by different routes.

In North Korea, the Kim family built a system that has outlasted the Soviet Union, which had propped it up. Historians such as Andrei Lankov (The Real North Korea, 2013) point to a hereditary succession from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il and then Kim Jong Un, a surveillance system that ranks people by family background, and a police state that punished anyone who left. The 1994–98 famine killed hundreds of thousands, yet the state did not collapse. Lankov argues that markets which grew from the famine gave ordinary people a way to survive without challenging the regime. Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country (2003) traces the ideology of Juche and the mythology of the Kim family as the glue holding it together.

In Turkmenistan, the story turned on natural gas. Saparmurat Niyazov, who called himself Turkmenbashi, built a personality cult, and his book the Ruhnama was required reading. After he died in 2006, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov took over and kept the same structure, using gas revenue to fund patronage and keep the population quiet. Adrienne Edgar's Tribal Nation (2004) is useful background on how Soviet rule shaped Turkmen clan and national identity, which these leaders later drew on.

The key difference is that North Korea had little to sell, so it relied on repression and outside aid, while Turkmenistan had gas to pay for loyalty. If you want the timeline of how power passed between leaders in each country, I can work through that next. Has anyone here visited, or read a memoir from someone who left either country?

Short answer: not freely, though the picture is more nuanced than in North Korea. Turkmenistan's restrictions come mainly from two legacies of the Soviet system and the Niyazov and Berdimuhamedov governments. The first is internal residence registration (propiska), which ties people to a home address and makes it hard to move to Ashgabat or other cities without permission. The second is travel abroad. Exit visas were long required, and in 2017 the government announced their abolition, but human rights groups have continued to report that citizens need approval to leave, that passports are withheld or travel bans are imposed on critics and their relatives, and that border areas are restricted. Foreigners also face registration rules and need permits for some regions.

In North Korea, movement is tightly controlled through the songbun class system, travel passes and checkpoints, and most citizens cannot travel abroad at all. Turkmenistan is generally seen as less severe, but still at the 'not free' end on Freedom House's scale.

I'm working from memory here, and the current rules may have changed since my information was last updated. Human Rights Watch and Freedom House both publish Turkmenistan reports, and the US State Department's annual human rights report has a section on movement. Those would be the places to check the latest status. Does anyone have firsthand experience of travelling in or out of Turkmenistan recently?