Identity politics is one of the most intensely studied aspects of the Soviet and post-Soviet experiences. With the notable exception of Adrianne Edgar's Tribal Nation (2004), however, the issue still remains under-studied with respect to Turkmenistan. Therefore, Victoria Clement's account of “the concepts of modernity, power, identity, and literacy” (13) among Turkmenistan's diverse population since the early-twentieth century offers a rare insight. Aspirations to modernity in its nationalist, Soviet, and post-Soviet iterations define the historical and contemporary transformations that she explores. Following the general line of the immediate post-Soviet scholarship that equated much of these transformations to identity formations, she interprets successive attempts to mold Turkmen society as identity projects. The advent to Central Asia of institutions and technologies such as popular education and the print media at the turn of the twentieth century jumpstarts the story. And the creation of a shared literary language through schooling alongside the introduction of functional literacy constitute the primary areas where successive cohorts of modernizers concentrate their efforts and fight their battles.

First come the nationalist reformists, or the “Jadid-inspired Turkmen” (18), as Clement calls them. Soviet modernizers follow suit. They cooperate with the nationalist reformists during the early decades of Soviet rule when korenizatsiia, or the mobilization of local resources toward socialism, undergirded the construction of a socialist society. Together, the two cohorts identify specific dialects to promote as the literary Turkmen language and design a Latin-based alphabet to write it. The choice of Latin letters symbolizes the Turkmens’ desire to connect to a “Global Modern” world (12) in this story. Yet the Soviet Union industrializes. The Communist Party consolidates its power. The capacity of the instruments of social and cultural construction at the disposal of the state grows visibly. Soviet modernizers push Jadid-inspired Turkmens out of the picture. The ideal of sliianie, that is, the merger of Soviet peoples, replaces korenizatsiia. Moscow begins to promote Russian as the lingua franca of a “socialist variant of modernity” (14). An abrupt push from the center replaces Turkmenistan's Latin-based alphabet with a Cyrillic one. In the decades of the Cold War, however, the Soviet state falls behind its capitalist rivals in delivering modernity, and the Union disintegrates at the beginning of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the events and motifs that lead to the Soviet Union's disintegration remain mostly beyond the Turkmen people's reach and concern. Independence releases Turkmenistan from Moscow's grip, but without an accompanying change in regime. As Soviet modernity ceases to be an option, the country's ruling elite falls back on nationalist modernity under President Niyazov's leadership. Yet they eviscerate it as the cover for the evolution of an authoritarian and obscurantist regime defined by Niyazov's personality cult, now anointed “Türkmenbaşy,” the Head of Turkmens. His death and replacement by Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov in 2007 raises some hopes for a reversal from that cul-de-sac, but such hopes too die away by 2014, when the book ends.

Learning to Become Turkmen narrates the Turkmen iteration of a story that is familiar to students of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. It fills a gap but does not reveal new conceptual grounds to explore. Clement deserves credit both for unearthing a subject that poses so many research challenges and for her introduction of the concept of power into this narrative. In doing so, she builds on the groundbreaking works of Shelia Fitzpatrick and Stephen Kotkin. She also applies Pierre Bourdieu's theories about the ability of language to endow “a speaker with social capital” (12) to the Turkmen context. While the post-Soviet discussions of identity tend to be limited to shallow descriptions of desires and designs for the future of respective societies, the discussion of power brings concrete questions of agency, empowerment, and reception to the table.

Clement's account remains spotty with regard to reception. Turkmenistan's continuingly authoritarian regime that has veiled Turkmen society from close scholarly attention limits the depth and breadth of the present study too. Consequently, Clement's probe rarely reaches beyond the designs of elite intellectuals and government agents, as articulated in the written record they have left behind. On the other hand, her analysis of changes in agency and power that lead to and are caused by various schooling and language policies is more satisfying. The book offers a detailed account of the relationship between changes in linguistic policies, such as the introduction of Latin, Cyrillic, and once again Latin-based alphabets, and the corresponding shifts in access to wealth, status, and jobs. Clement demonstrates that these changes initially favored the members of particular Turkmen tribes over others, then Russian-speakers over non-Russian speakers, and eventually Turkmens over Russians. We leave the book convinced that the lines between cultural idealism and power grabbing were blurry in defining the successive identity policies that gradually molded distinct Turkmen-speaking tribes into a Turkmen nation since the beginning of the twentieth century.