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GUEST: Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and best-selling author; his books include Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia; Boris Kagarlitsky, writer and political commentator, and senior research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-proclaimed lifetime president of Turkmenistan, died yesterday. Niyazov, who named himself Turkmenbashi – meaning Father of the Turkmen – died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 66. The former Soviet state had been ruled by the authoritarian leader for more than 20 years. Niyazov had developed a cult of personality, renaming the month of January to Turkmenbashi in his honor and erecting a gold statue of himself in the capital. During his dictatorial reign Niyazov replaced the educational curriculum with his spiritual treatise, the Rukhnama, turning schools into instruments of political indoctrination. Amnesty International has called Turkmenistan’s human rights record “appalling,” and the European Parliament passed a resolution saying that Turkmenistan had “acquired one of the worst totalitarian systems in the world.” Turkmenistan happens to sit atop the world’s fifth-biggest reserves of natural gas. For several years, Turkmenistan was a key player in the U.S. Caspian Basin Energy Initiative. The US has called for economic reforms such as market liberalization to enable access to the natural gas. The late President Niyazov did not name a successor and his sudden death is expected to spark instability, succession battles, competition over the gas reserves.