Saparmurat Niyazov (Super-murat Ne-yah-zov) was born on February 19th, 1940 in the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. He didn’t have the best childhood. His father either died fighting Nazis in World War II or dodged fighting and was therefore sentenced by a military court (two different stories on this). When he was 8 his mother and both his siblings were killed in an earthquake that leveled the city they were living in when the building they were all in collapsed. Niyazov spent 8 days digging himself out of the rubble with his bare hands. When he emerged he was the only living member of his family so he was shipped off to a Soviet-run orphanage in the middle of the mountains. (More on the podcast)