It took Saparmurat Niyazov (1940-2006) just a few years to turn from a humble and taciturn top Soviet official into Turkmenbasy ("leader of the Turkmen"), the president-for-life of newly independent Turkmenistan, a sort of demigod glorified by lavish golden statues, epic poems and huge billboards with his face, and of cities, streets and institutions named after him. This book examines the personality cult of the late president-for-life of Turkmenistan Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbasy. The first thorough analysis of why such a personality cult developed and why it did so in Turkmenistan. Using solid theoretical tools, this book looks at the Niyazov cult as a phenomenon related to a concrete historical situation and explains it through the lenses of nation-building from a comparative perspective. In particular, on the basis of previous works that have established a surprising number of structural similarities between Libya and Turkmenistan. The author applies the Qadhdhafi cult in Libya as a foil, reaching the conclusion that the Niyazov cult was actually deliberately set up to serve as a unifying tool for Turkmenistan's nation-building, in order to provide the new state and its ruler with a much-needed ideological legitimacy. The hyperbolic character of such cult can be explained by the ruling elite's fear of the country's disintegration under the pressure of centrifugal forces and by the relative lack of "usable past" and ideological resources available, which forced the elite to have recourse to extensive mythmaking both in their search for national symbols and in the role attributed to Niyazov in the official national narrative. A fascinating analysis of the political situation in Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Niyazov, this book will be of interest to scholars of Political Science, Comparative Politics and in particular Central Asian Studies.