Jahar graduated from Rindge with honors in May 2011. He had been accepted to several colleges. He had not set his sights all that high, ruling out from the start the most competitive Boston-area schools, such as Tufts and Boston University, where Hamzat Umarov’s children were studying. He told friends these schools were too expensive. He would have to finance his education through loans. Of the schools to which he was admitted, Jahar chose the least academically challenging, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. On the plus side, one of his best friends from Rindge, Robel Phillipos, was also going to go there.
LOOKED AT from a very particular angle, and from a great remove, by the time Anzor and Zubeidat moved back to Dagestan, their children were settled. The girls were in the great city of New York. The baby of the family was attending college on a scholarship: the City of Cambridge had granted Jahar $2,500 upon graduation. Anzor would not tell his friends he had divorced his wife, and her absence from his side would not make anyone suspect a thing, because, as one of their friends in Tokmok told me, if those two ever split up, red snow would fall from the sky. And Zubeidat would tell everyone that her beautiful firstborn son was taking care of the entire family, just as the eldest boy should.
Six
HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD
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 reaclass="underline" 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.