After the fall of the USSR Central Asia had a major boost in nationalism becoming a significant political force, active in language culture and the academic sphere. The collapse changed their status to being under the radar to ones with much more vigor. This wasn’t only due to the Soviets leaving a vacuum but because the mounting national and nationalist movements that accumulated popular dissatisfaction with the center. As a result, the Turkmen nationalists’ function in authoritarian states with very powerful and loud colonial political legacies, which led to the development of regional nationalisms. The continuity between Soviet and new national forms of political authoritarianism was a sign of the region’s post-Soviet character. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics’ nationalist movements were crucial in weakening and ultimately demolishing the Soviet regime. However, despite this they never switch from authoritarianism to democracy. This is seen with Saparmurat Niyazov’s dictatorship in Turkmenistan turning into a very different look post- Soviet authoritarian regimes in Central Asia. Despite being on their own they were very similar to how the USSR ran their government making it so that theirs aren’t different but is just pretending to be. This goes back to how it is very hard to really be away from http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Turkmenistanhow one used to live immediately despite really wanting to be different.