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 plugged 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.