The Brothers

by Masha Gessen

  Tamerlan flew to Dagestan in January 2012. Anzor and Zubeidat claimed he needed to renew his Russian passport. This had been the reason for one of their own trips back, but in Tamerlan’s case this was a pretext and almost certainly a lie. Tamerlan was doing what the Tsarnaevs always did: going from one place to another, looking for the one where he belonged. This time, he found it.

  Tamerlan had spent less than two years in Dagestan, but at a crucial moment in his life. He had been a young teenager, the age when the world comes into relief. And compared with either the Kyrgyz or the Chechen countryside—the two places he had known before—Makhachkala was spectacular: bursting with life, saturated with people, bordered by the sea. Plus, Zubeidat, who had once run away from Makhachkala, now seemed to think Dagestan was the promised land. It certainly felt like it. When you return after a decade, especially to a place the love of which has been impressed upon you, but even more important, a place where you were a teenager, everything feels right. The air itself is familiar, the light, the sky, the smells; even your own posture seems more comfortable, as though you have returned to the place for which your body was molded.

  Makhachkala had changed over the decade: it had, after its own fashion, turned into a city. The most outrageous of the haphazard construction had ceased; kiosks no longer sprouted overnight, blocking sidewalks. Instead, orderly-looking apartment towers went up, even if they were often shoddily built and fated to stay half empty. The city cleaned up its act, polished old monuments and erected a couple of new ones. A new road into the city was paved, smooth enough within city limits to inspire drag racing, rough enough on the outskirts to cause shame. The city’s population sorted itself into groups, classes, and neighborhoods again, and businesses mastered the science of appealing to distinct audiences. There were cafés that served halal food and provided prayer rooms, and clothing shops that sold only to women, and only appropriately concealing dresses; and there were sushi restaurants where waitresses wore short skirts and the sushi tasted as bland as in any such place throughout Russia and most of Eastern Europe.

  What made Makhachkala palpably different from every other hub of post-Soviet conspicuous consumption was the distinct and dangerous undercurrent of tension: between the women with exposed long, tan arms and the women in hijabs; between the clean-shaven men and the men with beards; between the local police and the young men suspected of having ties to radical Islam, often on the basis simply of being young and male; between all the locals and the Russian federal law enforcement, which had been policing Dagestan with unwavering brutality for more than a dozen years.

  • • •

  SINCE 1999, when Dagestan outlawed the people it called Wahhabis, life here had settled into a bloody pattern. The federal law enforcement, sometimes acting with or through the local police, hunted down suspected radicals. The bust went down in one of two ways: a young man was detained and disappeared or, far less frequently, tried and convicted of terrorist activity; or a SWAT team surrounded his house and laid siege to it for hours, until at the end of the day the suspected radical died in a blaze of gunfire. Roughly once a month law enforcement reported that a leader of the radical Muslim underground had been “annihilated”—the Russian term of choice, which conveyed much better than simply “killed” a sense that a less-than-human being had been fully destroyed. “Are we supposed to think that the insurgency breeds a new leader every month?” one Dagestani journalist grumbled. For every supposed terrorist who had been “annihilated,” one or two or three of his male relatives joined the resistance, sometimes going so far as to “go into the forest,” meaning to join the guerrilla fighters who lurked in the woods of Dagestan.

  The actual size of the guerrilla force at any given time was probably closer to one hundred than to several, but in the imaginations of both sides the might of the forest fighters swelled, as did the fear of escalating violence. The damage “the forest” did was inescapably real: for years, an explosion would kill one or several law enforcement officers every few weeks. Each of these attacks invariably brought another round of retribution from the federal troops, ensuring that the cycle of slow-burning warfare was never broken.

  Retribution was not, however, the only or even the most significant motivating factor in this war. Alexei Levinson, a leading Russian sociologist who was studying Dagestan around the time Tamerlan was there, concluded that what he was observing was war for war’s sake. “All this barbarity and brutality stem not from human qualities—it’s not that the federal troops have assembled a collection of lowlifes there, though that’s also the case,” he told me. “What this is, if we are to be exact, is terror.” To a Russian intellectual, the word is more evocative of Stalin’s Great Terror than of the many uses and misuses of it since September 11. Levinson was talking about a system designed for the random application of extreme brutality. And very much like the Great Terror, this system was ineffective and inefficient; if intimidation and control had been the goal, they could have been exercised far less expensively and more consistently. Instead, the machine’s primary function was the reproduction of violence. “If the federal troops succeed in conquering, in suppressing the underground, they have to pack up and go home,” he said. “What they need is a conflict on low heat.” Even the federal troops’ compensation structure reflected this: they were paid extra for the hours spent in combat—hence the long, elaborate siege operations that were, in the end, assassinations by extreme firepower.

  The economy of a region locked in a state of permanent war cannot function normally, not just because the constant presence of danger changes preferences and priorities—people invest in nothing, spending their money and themselves fully every day—but also because there can be no consensus on what the law of the land is. Conflicts in Dagestan were decided in accordance with Russian civilian law, Sharia law, or Adat—the set of local customs that mixed reliance on the Koran with tradition passed on through generations. The choice of laws depended on the parties’ preferences, interests, and relative influence. At the same time, the government of Dagestan, which in the Putin era began to be appointed by Moscow rather than elected locally, was forging an ever closer allegiance with the imams representing the Sufi Islam traditional to Dagestan. The government was taking its cues from the Kremlin, which was relying more and more heavily on the Russian Orthodox Church. In Dagestan, as Sufi mosques allied themselves with officialdom and through it with Moscow and the federal troops, nontraditional Salafite mosques began looking increasingly appealing to a growing number of young men.

  Men of Tamerlan’s age had grown up in Dagestan’s slow-burning war, and this distinguished them from the previous generation of local Salafites. The new Muslims of the nineties had often studied abroad; their religious evolution represented an investment in their own and their children’s urban, worldly future. The men who came of age in the aughts had, like all children of war, no investments and no future. They also usually had no education past high school and no jobs in any institutional setting: they were overwhelmingly engaged in financial scams. Caught in its own cycle of war, corruption, and blackmail with Dagestan, Moscow kept pouring into the troubled region money from a federal budget swollen with oil revenue. The money failed to ensure peace, but it did provide for the relative economic well-being of a large number of young men. The federal money was recycled into bogus, or at least partly bogus, housing construction, credits and mortgages that would never be repaid, and subsidies that did not always go to persons and institutions that actually existed but always, without exception, involved kickbacks. The combined effect of Dagestan’s shifting religious–political axis and its crooked economy was to turn all of its young men into outlaws and to link them all through an intricate web of money, blood, and what might or might not have been properly considered crime.

  • • •

  WHEN TAMERLAN LANDED in Dagestan, it was not only the physical environment that would have seemed made for him, as if his body had been plug
ged into its place in a puzzle: there was a social space ready for him as well. Dagestan was full of men in their twenties and early thirties who spent their days talking about themselves, their religion, and the injustices of the world. They sat around at cafés all over Makhachkala, sipping coffee at small round lacquered tables or eating lamb at long wooden ones; they went to one another’s family homes on special occasions and talked there; but most important, they went to the mosque on Kotrov Street.

  The mosque is built like so much of Makhachkala: outsize, at once grand and shoddy, whether because of lack of money or lack of skill. Each of its four levels provides a large space for prayer. In its sizable front yard sits a four-foot-high stack of rugs that will be laid out on the concrete come Friday. Even with all that room inside, there is always an overflow crowd of men praying, most of them young men with neatly trimmed beards. Inside is a large light-filled airy space, but the walls in many places are unfinished sheetrock. A rounded wooden stairway that looks like it was airlifted from the private mansion of an aspiring oligarch leads to the imam’s top-floor office, furnished like a Soviet bureaucrat’s. (But perhaps the stairway was here all along: one of Dagestan’s wealthiest men was building a house for his son on this site when he died suddenly in 1998 and someone decided to build a mosque here in his honor.) There is an unmanned security post in the corner of the office, six screens streaming the views from six surveillance cameras and, in front of them, an empty office chair with one missing armrest.

  I found the imam himself sitting behind a very large desk in the office. His name was Gasan Gasanaliyev, he was seventy-three, tiny with an unevenly trimmed gray beard, and he had been an imam since he was twenty-five. “Back then, if you studied the Koran, you got five years in jail.” I asked him if he had studied underground. “You could say that,” he answered cautiously. For his first quarter-century as imam, Gasanaliyev was employed as a construction worker: without an official job, he would have been arrested and charged with the crime of parasitism. The imam is a lifelong keeper of secrets. I asked him about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “I have no idea who comes here and who doesn’t,” he snapped. “But I asked every single person who comes here and none of them ever met him.” He also told me his mosque is Sufi, not Salafite, an assertion that made more than a few Dagestani Salafites laugh when I told them about it.

  • • •

  TAMERLAN REMET HIS RELATIVES, most of them near-mythical figures he had seen only a few times as a child. Jamal, Anzor’s organized-crime uncle, was around; nothing about him was ever clear, but he appeared to be based mostly in Grozny now: the capital of Chechnya is less than a three-hour drive from Makhachkala. Zubeidat’s side of the family hovered over the boy in Dagestan. Although the clan had once been concentrated in Makhachkala, the relatives who remained in Dagestan lived elsewhere now. Her brother, a law enforcement officer, was struggling with cancer up in a mountain village; her cousin lived in Kizlyar, a town of about fifty thousand that had once been part of Chechnya and had been gifted by Stalin to Dagestan in 1944, after the Chechens were deported. That and the town’s proximity to the Chechen border were enough to make it a presumed hotspot of insurgent activity in the eyes of the Russian authorities. Founded as a fortress more than two centuries earlier, Kizlyar felt very much under siege every day.

  The drive from Makhachkala to Kizlyar takes two hours through a valley that seems nearly deserted, a jarring impression in this region where land is at a premium. The emptiness is the effect of a war all its own. Dagestan’s nomadic and settled ethnic groups, who had for centuries existed in a state that could reasonably be called peace, were now battling over these lands. The nomads were not only expanding their pastures but also increasingly settling down, especially in the parts of the valley where ethnic Russians now lived. This was the other war the indigenous peoples of Dagestan were waging against Russia, and this one would evidently be won. The Russians were dying out in these parts, and this, too, served to underscore the nature of their presence: it was occupation. For now, you could see Dagestan’s past and future standing side by side along the road from Makhachkala to Kizlyar—abandoned collective-farm structures, long and low barracks-like buildings, and cinder-block private houses, barely half of them inhabited and the rest incomplete, their windows gaping with the dashed hopes of generations. As one got closer to Kizlyar, the Russian-made Lada Prioras increasingly ceded the road to ancient motorcycles with sidecars, and cows—yellow and reddish and brown cows that seemed to wander unattached. A massive federal checkpoint, a hundred-fifty-yard labyrinth of brick half-walls, greeted visitors to Kizlyar. The name of the checkpoint was Lesnoy, or the Forest One.

  Kizlyar is low and feels like the valley itself. The center is full of long gray-brick five-story apartment buildings; the outskirts are private houses, hidden behind concrete walls and covered front yards. Small shops sell identical local-fashion T-shirts and trousers with Ferre and Ice labels sloppily appended to them. For young men, the meeting place of choice—not that there is much choice—is Café Nostalgy, a cavernous space with large private booths that have low carpeted platforms for reclining.

  Nostalgy was where Tamerlan’s second cousin Magomed Kartashov liked to schedule meetings. The son of Zubeidat’s first cousin, Kartashov would have been considered a close relative by Dagestan standards: ordinarily, he and Tamerlan would have met as small children—Kartashov was less than a decade older—and seen each other at numerous family events throughout their lives. But at the point when Tamerlan was, briefly, a resident of Dagestan in the early aughts, the difference in their ages had been prohibitive. Tamerlan was still a boy, and Kartashov was a young man who had joined the police force in Kizlyar. He resigned a year later, and by the time Tamerlan met him properly in 2012, he was the leader of a group that some people perceived as nebulous and others as menacing; it was probably both.

  The Union of the Just, as it was called, was commonly known to be allied with Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the largest Islamic organizations in the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir proclaims the goal of creating a caliphate that would unite the Muslim lands of the world. This pan-Islamic state should be created by peaceful means, through political and philosophical struggle only. Hizb ut-Tahrir has consistently condemned acts of terror, including the September 11 attacks and the July 2005 bombings in London, but some analysts in both the United States and the United Kingdom have cast doubt on the sincerity of these statements. More to the point, Hizb ut-Tahrir is often viewed as a gateway organization that facilitates young Muslims’ passage from peaceful civilians to jihadis. In Russia, as in a number of other countries, Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned, which is why the Union of the Just kept its affiliation with the group quiet.

  Kartashov had launched the Union of the Just a few months before Tamerlan arrived back in Dagestan. In August 2011, Kartashov was one of the organizers of a protest against detentions carried out by law enforcement in and around Kizlyar. By the time he organized his second such protest, in November, his organization had a name and, apparently, a structure: Kartashov was chairman. In addition to protesting detentions, the Union of the Just claimed to address issues of social inequality and injustice in Dagestan—and, depending on whom I talked to, seemed either to have the financial resources to undertake a project of that magnitude or to be financially strapped and full of hot air. One impression local journalists consistently had of the group was that it had a complicated relationship with law enforcement. The head of the Kizlyar police, on one hand, expressed undisguised hatred for his former officer Kartashov; on the other hand, the Union of the Just had a way of learning about detentions before they became public knowledge—suggesting that it had a mole in law enforcement. Then again, as one of Kartashov’s defense lawyers would tell me later, long after his client had been sent to serve time in a prison colony thousands of miles away, “Law enforcement and the insurgents are all equally dumb, uneducated, and all affected by the same virus,” meaning the infectious desire to engage in pe
rmanent warfare. He then told me what he thought should be done to solve this conundrum, but he asked me not to print it; his solution was bitter and brutal and desperate.

  In all, the Union of the Just, to which Tamerlan discovered he belonged virtually by birthright, was a quintessential Dagestan organization: a group of self-important young men who trafficked mostly in words and yet balanced unmistakably at the edge of constant and extreme danger.

  The man with whom Tamerlan connected most closely was not his cousin Magomed Kartashov but Kartashov’s Union of the Just deputy Mohammed Gadzhiev (the two men had the same first name, but Gadzhiev preferred the less Russian-sounding, more Arabic pronunciation). Gadzhiev lived in Makhachkala, where Tamerlan felt much more comfortable than in dangerous, backwater Kizlyar. Gadzhiev was Tamerlan’s age; he was a snappy dresser, though not as flashy as Tamerlan; he had about him the confidence of an extremely good-looking and remarkably well-spoken man: he and Tamerlan were of a kind, and they hit it off instantly when Kartashov introduced them at a friend’s wedding in the spring of 2012. “Meet my American relative,” he said to Gadzhiev, and from that point on the two men saw each other several times a week.

  They talked. Tamerlan had things to tell Mohammed about America. He said it was a racist country and a deeply divided one: there was a giant gap between rich and poor. Foreign policy was as xenophobic and as shortsighted as Mohammed had suspected—as bad, in fact, as what he had heard on Russian television, which could be presumed to lie about everything except this. Morally, too, America was in decline. Mohammed had suspected as much, but he was pleased to have his general impressions confirmed and elaborated—and Tamerlan turned out to be a good storyteller, capable of supporting his passionate generalizations with carefully drawn detail. He described his friends, their struggles, the crooked cops of Watertown—he talked so much about this town that Gadzhiev was sure that was where he lived—and, for the first time in his life, Tamerlan got to feel like an expert. Gadzhiev could ask questions for hours, and his interest and trust in Tamerlan’s knowledge never wavered. He even accepted the positive things Tamerlan had to say about America. Tamerlan said there was freedom of speech, it really was a country open to all sorts of people—and it would even give them an education, such as the one Tamerlan’s beloved younger brother was now obtaining, thanks to a city scholarship.