Toward a New Maturity

Abstract

the fate of the nation on whose language it is based is indisputable. The truth of this fact is revealed most clearly during moments of sudden turns and cataclysms which result in fundamental changes to the established social order and spiritual life of a nation, as the latter is forced to confront once again a most complicated and fateful task: which new path in the sociopolitical system should it choose, and how should it make certain of moving in that direction in a dependable fashion? One such cataclysm in the twentieth century, without any doubt, was the dissolution of the USSR, at one and the same time disinheriting and dispersing populations which until that moment had made up the multinational, unified, and mighty Soviet Union. Many of the peoples affected were totally unprepared for such a violent shock. Furthermore, the conformist style of life under the Soviet system did not encourage habits of independent thinking, neither as individual human beings nor as a nation. Salvation lay in the unity of the nation, in the cohesion of all its social layers. But each country from the former brotherhood of nations sought this salvation in its own way. The Turkmens are a nation with very ancient roots. Their ethnogenetic ties reach down to peoples and tribes preceding our era: to the Dakhs, the Massagetae, the Alans, the Huns, and others. They were famous in the Middle Ages when they took an immediate part in the formation of the great Seljuk Empire at the beginning of the current millennium. Many tribal groups became detached from the core of their fraternal tribes and penetrated into Asia Minor, where the Kharagoyunlies and the Akhoyunlies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created