Over the years, Turkmen authorities have made many claims that have stretched credibility, to put it mildly.

The official assertion that there have never been any covid cases in Turkmenistan is one of the cruder examples.

The latest highly dubious claim from the Turkmen authorities is that the results of the national census show that there are more than 7mn people living in the country.

The announcement amounts to the first time that Turkmenistan has released a population figure in almost 17 years, and it appears the authorities are once again fabricating information.

On July 14, the state released its count for the census conducted last year between December 7-17. It gave Turkmenistan’s population as 7,057,841.

When the Soviet Union conducted its last ever census in 1989, the population of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic was put at just over 3.5mn people.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, the governments of the new countries in Central Asia faced many problems in establishing  claims to sovereignty. Small populations were among the problems for the five states, with the exception of the region’s most populous country, Uzbekistan (its current population stands at more than 36mn).

Laying claim to land meant having people on the land.

The governments have therefore encouraged population growth in their countries. Kazakhstan took the biggest step by offering citizenship to any ethnic Kazakh outside Kazakhstan willing to return to their historic homeland.

In terms of territory, Turkmenistan is a bit smaller than Spain, but nearly 90% of Turkmenistan is covered by desert.

The results of a census that Turkmenistan released in April 1995 showed that there were just over 4mn people in the country. Subsequently, the Turkmen government started reporting huge population increases. In early 1996, the authorities said the population was now 4.5mn; by the start of 2001, it was said to be near 5.37mn; in April 2003, the government announced the figure of 6mn.

In March 2006, the Turkmen National Statistics Institute reported the population as 6.786mn.

That was the last time Turkmen officials provided a population figure. The results of the census conducted between 15-26 December 2012 were never released.

Few believed the official reports of rapid population growth between 1995 and 2006, and few seem to believe the Turkmen government’s claim that the country now boasts more than 7mn citizens.

RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service has previously spoken with sources in the Turkmen government, including people in the Population and Housing Department that conducts the census.

In a June 2021 report, the media outlet said that those sources indicated that the population had dwindled to just 2.7-2.8mn people.

Lack of employment opportunities and a general worsening in Turkmenistan’s socio-economic conditions in the last eight years caused hundreds of thousands of people, at least, to leave Turkmenistan in search of a better life. They usually headed to Turkey or Russia.

Turkmen.news and Hronika Turkmenistana, both independent media outlets operating outside Turkmenistan, reported in May last year that the number of young people finishing mandatory education in the country steadily dropped from 115,000 in 2009 to 82,000 in 2022, marking a 30% decrease.

However, both publications also reported that the number of children enrolling in the first year of school increased from 100,000 in 2011 to 161,739 by 2022.

Turkmen authorities have done all they can to isolate the country from the rest of the world, so independently verifying the size of the population is impossible.

RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, however, did some random polling of towns and villages. Each location showed a population decrease of between 20% and 40%, or more, since the year 2000.

The problem with Turkmen government figures is that they have been inaccurate so often that few believe any official Turkmen data. The World Bank stopped using the government’s economic figures after 2020 “owing to a lack of reliable data of adequate quality.”

Back to that claim about the apparent failure of the covid pandemic to arrive in Turkmenistan. The believability of the assertion that there are 7mn people in the country is further undercut by the government’s astonishing denial that the country has ever logged a covid case.

Numerous reports during the height of the pandemic indicated that Turkmen hospitals were so crowded that people were being turned away.

The bodies of those suspected of having died from the coronavirus in hospitals were wrapped in plastic and were often quickly buried without any funeral ceremony.

Many burials were performed at night and in such a way as to not leave any signs of the unusually high numbers of new graves in the given cemetery.

Anecdotal evidence suggests tens of thousands of people in Turkmenistan did in fact perish from covid. That alone should have lowered the final census tally.

Suspiciously, the Turkmen population figure is very close to that of Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan’s National Statistics Committee said at the start of 2023 that the Kyrgyz population was 7,037,590. That makes one wonder if Turkmenistan’s figure was contrived so as to make it appear that the country does not have the smallest population in Central Asia.