Below is the translation of Abdulgamid’s post from the Russian-language part of the blog.

Though the situation with Internet access, what’s most important, connection speed remains the same as in 1995, there is a number of our compatriots in the world virtual space.

There are over 1000 users with Turkmen citizenship are registered in the most popular English-language social network “Facebook”. Actually, most of them are students of foreign higher schools in U.S., Turkey, Western Europe and CIS. The majority of them holding scholarships from various international programs and exchange programs. Still, there are also students that pay for their studies themselves, or, to be more correct, have their parents paying for it.

It is very intriguing to analyze what subjects and issues are interesting and exciting to our advanced youth. The priority of one or another subject is easily defined if you check the number of comments to the post. At this moment you’ll find out that the most of all the Turkmen students are concerned about their self-identification in the society, which is new to them, and where people frequently even are not aware of Turkmenistan existence. Therefore, such subjects like “Being a Turkmen” or “Turkmen Patriotism” get the peak number of comments (15-20).

We are Turkmen not because are born to be, but because are meant to be… We had been chosen to be Turkmen before we were born. It’s an honor granted to us by God.

… we are too much proud, I realize that our ancestors left a considerable footprint in the history by creating half a dozen (if not more) empires, but take a look at us from today’s point of view? Is it us who invented television? Is it us who invented airplane? What was that helpful for all mankind invented by us?

All these poignant attempts of self-identification sometimes turn to be quite weird:

Would U.S. attack Iran?
If this happens, I believe, the most important thing is to stay neutral and not to ally ourselves with neighboring countries.

Let’s support our brothers!
Being Turkmen we must condemn unfair attitude of Western governments towards our ethnic Turkic brothers, and stand only for truth. There was no genocide ever.

Above is a quote from the discussion of the international acknowledgment of over 1 million Armenians massacre in 1894 – 1923 in Turkey as the act of genocide.

When commenting each other our students prefer to use English, which is understandable – living in the respective language environment they try to accommodate in it as son as possible, so they wouldn’t, again, find themselves as “aliens” and natives of Neverland.

Facebook offers to us about 30 subject communities that are more or less dedicated to Turkmenistan. However there are not more than 10 “active” (regularly updated) communities among them. The range of subjects raised for discussion is very diversified, from football and music to a group of few Turkmenbashi fans.

I worship to the Great Turkmenbashi. I’m a Great Turkmen Fascist… The Turkmen – is a great nation, they are the creators and fathers of all Turkic nations in Central Asia…

To be fair we need to note that some are attempting to create regularly updated communities for discussion of politics, art and culture news, but going by practically observed zero activity in such communities we can say that either the subjects are of no interest to the users, or (as Maciula mentioned before) the students are weighed down with fear of “saying / writing something wrong!”.

Our “gilded youth”, which was lucky to escape the grasping paws of local educational system, socially represents the widest range of the upper class of Turkmen society. It’s beyond doubt, that in terms of quantity the majority of “gild youth” is represented by the descendants of the top-ranking (former or current) officers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the second place is reserved by the kids of officials from the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of National Security, then goes quite a small number of students represented by the kids of high-ranking functionaries from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Prosecution Office and Heads of Velayat (Regional) Administration.

What’s more surprising, there are mere mortals, who don’t have notable relatives, among such students. This is rather an exception, than a rule.
So, due to a number of objective reasons the Turkmen Facebook is, by it’s essence, the zone alienation, where only attractive pictures of night Ashgabat and Turkmen rappers’ videos.
Internet – is a new toy coming as an extra to the unlimited freedom of speech that became available to the Richy Kids who got out from our command management feudal system into the developed capitalistic environment.
However, they still don’t know how to play with it.