by Masha Gessen
“He had a friend who worked at the Pervomaysky Prosecutor’s Office,” explained Badrudi. “He fixed Anzor up with an ID. It made talking to the cops a lot easier.” In other words, it was a fake ID. There was a fake uniform that went with it; no one remembers seeing Anzor actually wearing it, but he was photographed in it at least once. It is true, though, that Anzor got a new job in the late 1990s: he went to work for his older cousin Jamal.
My first meeting with Jamal Tsarnaev was set to take place at Grozny airport, a crowded and disorienting place. “How will I recognize you?” I asked him over the phone. “Oh, you’ll recognize me,” he responded. Then he paused and added, “You’ll know me by my hairdo.” Jamal turned out to have a perfectly naked, blindingly shiny skull. On the right side of his head there was a depressed patch about an inch and a half square—and it was almost perfectly square, with four round marks at the corners, where screws had been removed. As we settled in at a café for the interview, I asked Jamal what he did for work.
“Does that have anything to do with the story?” he asked tersely.
“No,” I said. “I’m just making small talk.” Asking him about his head injury or brain surgery was clearly out of the question.
He relaxed a bit and after a moment’s reflection said, “I pick up things that are not in their proper place.”
Translated, this meant something like: I am a crook. I don’t have a specialty—I am more of an opportunistic, general-interest criminal.
In the late 1990s, Jamal told me, he started a business transporting tobacco from Kyrgyzstan to Russia. By “tobacco” he could have meant just about anything, including tobacco—or drugs. Jamal was based in Grozny, and Anzor was his man in Kyrgyzstan. A prosecutor’s ID and a uniform would have been handy in this line of work.
Anzor and Zubeidat were not lying about going to America, though, or about studying law. They had both signed up to be correspondence students, a system that dated back to Soviet times, when it allowed full-time workers to obtain college degrees without taking time off—but also, in most cases, without learning much. They would travel to their colleges for one or two weeks each semester, to take exams. Anzor and Zubeidat always liked studying—Zubeidat generally grasped any new information as quickly and easily as she had learned Chechen, and Anzor had had the love of learning beaten into him by Zayndy, even if Anzor never was as good a student as his lawyer sister and brother. They were raising Tamerlan to be a good and versatile student, too. Not only was he getting near-perfect grades at Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One, he was also enrolled in extracurricular sports, advanced study of school subjects, and piano lessons.
In 2000, the Tsarnaevs left Tokmok. No one there saw any of them again until the summer of 2012, when Anzor showed up in the Sakhzavod neighborhood one afternoon. He knocked on the metal gate of the house of Badrudi’s brother, on the street where they all had grown up. To his delight, he found the old crew there, Badrudi and his brother and the brothers Abaev, sitting around a table in the garden, eating lamb kebab and drinking brandy. They filled him in on the neighborhood news of the last dozen years: a few marriages, a couple of divorces, some kids, a number of deaths, and the brothers Batukaev—Alaudin had been gunned down right here in Sakhzavod, and Aziz had been in prison for over five years and kept racking up more sentences for inciting unrest there. To his old friends, Anzor looked thinner and older than they had expected, but he sounded as good as ever. His eldest, Tamerlan, he said, was “the hope of the U.S. Olympic team” in boxing. The girls were both married with children. And little Dzhokhar was attending the best university in America on a scholarship. The story made sense to the men: everything had gone pretty much as Anzor and Zubeidat had planned.
• • •
WHEN ANZOR AND ZUBEIDAT disappeared from Tokmok in 2000, those who did not know them very well assumed that, after four years of talk and preparation, they had finally gone to America. Those who did know them knew that Zubeidat was “a dragonfly, never able to stay in one place,” as their Tokmok next-door neighbor Raisa Batukaeva put it. “She was always dragging him off.” This time they went to Dagestan. Why? It is possible that Zubeidat’s longing for the sea temporarily overpowered her American dream. It is possible that they could not conjure a way to move to America—studying law was not going to magically make it happen—and had the idea, however vague, that the troubled Russian Caucasus might make a better launching pad. It is possible that Anzor’s work for Jamal and his habit of impersonating a law enforcement official were starting to get him in trouble. Most likely, it was a combination of all these factors. They sold the apartment in Tokmok, which would have been worth about three thousand dollars at the time, and moved to Makhachkala.
Nothing—not even observing the radical changes in Tokmok after the collapse of the Soviet Union—could have prepared Zubeidat for what she found where the city of her childhood used to stand. It was as though every single building in Makhachkala had been impregnated by an architectural alien that caused it to sprout tentacles and grow other random organs. Everywhere something was being sold: cheap garish clothing imported from Turkey, counterfeit everything—cosmetics, underwear, electronics, footwear. Dagestan was still cobbling its own shoes, an estimated million pairs a year on which no one paid any taxes or extended any guarantees, but now these shoes looked like they had been made in China. The new trading outposts were kiosks assembled from plastic panels, panes of mismatched siding, metal sheeting, acrylic, and whatever else was handy. They would spring up overnight, sometimes blocking the sidewalk, and then change hands, begin to disintegrate, and disappear just as quickly, only to rematerialize as someone else’s shop that sold something else but looked and felt exactly the same as the one that was there before.
There were plenty of places for the residents of Makhachkala now to buy, sell, and haggle, but there was no place for them to conduct the business of being urban dwellers. No cafés or restaurants—only a very few larger stores provided the public space essential to the fabric of any city. Public transport, such as there had been, had fallen into disrepair, replaced by privately owned small vans that followed routes of their own choosing. At the same time, the city was ballooning: its population had gone from 300,000 to 800,000 in less than ten years, but only 100,000 of those who had lived there a decade earlier remained. Everyone was a newcomer, and almost no one had ever lived in a city before. Villages began to sprout at the outskirts of Makhachkala, unregulated construction that used much the same material as the kiosks; rural Dagestanis were trying to make a place for themselves in the capital. Virtually nothing and nobody remained of the city Zubeidat had loved and hated when she was growing up there.
While Makhachkala was swelling, Dagestan itself was starting to fracture in an unprecedented way. A generational religious chasm had opened up. Throughout the seventy years of Soviet rule, most formal study and practice of Islam had lived underground. The dangers inherent in practicing and teaching the religion varied with time—being an observant Muslim could land one in prison in the 1940s or bring reprimand from the local authorities in the 1970s—but the isolated state of Soviet Muslims remained a constant. Sheikhs—elders and teachers in the Sufi tradition—passed their knowledge from generation to generation, and with each iteration something changed. By the end of the twentieth century, Dagestani Muslims practiced local traditions, such as worshipping at the grave of a sheikh, that would strike a Muslim from a place like Saudi Arabia as nothing short of sacrilegious. And the Dagestani Muslims’ knowledge and understanding of the Koran would seem woefully superficial.
It was to Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the United Arab Emirates that young men from Dagestan began to travel in the 1990s, once the borders opened. There they discovered an Islam based on the rigorous study and discussion of the Koran, as practiced by the Salafis. Many of them stayed and studied for several years. Then they returned and confronted their village elders. Some of the young Salafi n
eophytes were driven from their villages; others left of their own accord; virtually none lived in peace with local elders, or with their families. Makhachkala’s uneasy boom was at least in part the result of an influx of these newly urban, newly religious disenfranchised young men. Those who continued to practice Sufi Islam, and the secular authorities who increasingly relied on the Sufi hierarchy, called these young men Wahhabis—a dangerous misnomer.
• • •
WAHHABISM is a modern fundamentalist movement in Islam, and in the late 1990s its presence was beginning to be felt in the Caucasus. The war in Chechnya, which began with Moscow’s crackdown on a secular ethnic self-determination movement, had changed Chechen society profoundly. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens had been killed or had left during the armed conflict from 1994 to 1996. When a peace treaty was finally signed in August 1996, giving Chechnya essentially the autonomy it had been seeking but without the official status of an independent state, its population had been depleted, its earth had been scorched, and its economy had been destroyed. Its leader, Dzhokhar Dudaev, had been killed by a targeted Russian missile in April of that year. He was replaced with Aslan Maskhadov, who had been his right hand. Maskhadov was very much in the Dudaev mold, also a former officer in the Soviet army, also entirely secular and assimilated, but he lacked Dudaev’s ruthless charisma, and by the time he signed the peace treaty with Moscow he lacked full authority over Chechen rebel fighters.
In the desperate years that followed, radicalism of every sort flourished. A small number of proselytizers from Saudi Arabia and other countries found a large number of young men willing to listen to them, and to begin proudly calling themselves Wahhabis. They believed another war was in the offing; Russia remained the enemy, but the soldiers’ new fervor was religious rather than ethnic. For several years they fought a guerrilla war that looked more like a number of gangs preying on vulnerable people under the guise of a holy war: they kidnapped journalists, foreign humanitarian workers, and even Chechens; some of the hostages were killed and others released for ransom. Then another war really did begin.
In the summer of 1999, armed Chechen fighters began crossing over into neighboring Dagestan. In August and September 1999, Russia was terrorized by a series of apartment-building explosions that killed more than three hundred people. Russia’s newly appointed prime minister and Yeltsin’s anointed successor, the former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, blamed these bombings on Chechens, linked the acts of terror to the new Chechen armed presence in Dagestan, and unleashed the Russian military on Chechens in both Chechnya and Dagestan. The new war, which would drag on for years, catapulted the previously unknown Putin to national popularity, ensuring he would indeed become Russia’s next president. In the years after the start of the second war, a wealth of evidence emerged pointing to Russian secret-police involvement in both the apartment-building bombings and the Dagestan incursions, but with Putin quickly turning Russia into an authoritarian state, this evidence never became the object of official investigation. Journalists, politicians, and activists who tried to conduct their own investigations were assassinated.
Dagestan, meanwhile, found itself in the middle of a war. In response, local authorities did something that essentially ensured the war would go on for years to come and the supply of soldiers would be limitless: they outlawed Wahhabism, by which they also understood Salafism. The urban young men whose conflict had been with their own fathers and their village elders were now, dangerously and romantically, outlaws. Their everyday religious practices were forced underground: even the imams of Makhachkala’s two large Salafite mosques took to pretending they were Sufis.
The local police and the federal troops now stationed in Dagestan soon settled on a singular, and singularly ineffective, tactic for fighting the enemy they had conjured—a witch hunt. Local authorities compiled lists of suspected Wahhabis. A young man could land on the list for wearing a beard, for attending the wrong mosque, or for no reason at all. Men whose names were on the list were detained, interrogated—in a couple of years some would report being asked, “Where were you on September 11, 2001?”—and, in the best-case scenario, released only to face further harassment. In the worst case, they disappeared.
In response, some of the young men took up grenades, mines, and bombs. These were most often used to blow up police vehicles. Makhachkala and much of the rest of Dagestan became a battleground, with explosions and gunfights erupting daily. This was the Dagestan to which Anzor and Zubeidat brought their four children, including Tamerlan, who at fourteen was on the verge of becoming that most endangered and most dangerous of humans: a young Dagestani man. Anzor and Zubeidat had to move again, to save their children—again.
They would go to America after all.
PART TWO
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BECOMING THE BOMBERS
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Four
COMING TO AMERICA
Many media accounts of the Tsarnaev story have hinted or simply stated that they lied to get into the United States, that they never should have been granted asylum—indeed, that had the asylum process worked as it should, weeding the worthy victims from the dangerous ones, a tragedy could have been averted. In fact, the Tsarnaevs typified asylum seekers in America, and the process in their case worked as well, or as poorly, as it does the vast majority of the time. Future asylum seekers usually come to the United States on visitors’ visas and then, relying on a network of family and friends, try to make ends meet, not quite legally, while they apply for asylum. And yes, they usually lie, or at least embellish.
Making your case to the immigration authorities is different from making a case in court: rather than tell a coherent story, you, the asylum seeker, tell of everything that has gone wrong in your life—at least the things that went wrong that the asylum officer might find worthy of notice. You exaggerate, you mold your story to fit the requirements. It probably would not work to tell the officer that you were born in a country where you could never be a full citizen, a country that then broke apart into several others, which you crisscrossed trying to find a home and could not, and so you came to America. Instead, you have to say that you have been subjected to persecution based on your ethnic origin and you are fleeing a war. The Tsarnaevs did just that: they relied on the war in Chechnya and the ethnic discrimination in Kyrgyzstan to establish their credentials. Anzor appears to have claimed that he was briefly jailed and tortured in Kyrgyzstan as part of a broad anti-Chechen crackdown. He may indeed have been detained in Kyrgyzstan toward the end of his time there, though this was most likely to have been connected to his work for Jamal’s business. It would have been much too complicated to try to explain to an asylum officer that the Chechens’ very existence on the permanent wrong side of the law in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere was a function of generations of disenfranchisement. Anzor could be said to have used shorthand.
• • •
THE TWO CHECHEN WARS, the one in the mid-1990s and the one that began in 1999, displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them stayed in the former Soviet Union, joining relatives in Central Asia or Russia. Tens of thousands sought refuge in countries of the European Union, where they often spent years in refugee camps. Very few made it all the way to the United States. The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping. “With any country early on in a conflict, the people who claim asylum first are usually the elites or people who don’t actually live there,” says Almut Rochowanski, a Columbia University legal scholar who in the early 2000s started an organization that helped new Chechen refugees find legal representation, although she herself was born in Austria and had no personal connection to Chechnya until research and human rights work took her there. The first Chechen refugees to arrive in the United States were members of the Dudaev pro-independence government and Cheche
ns from Central Asia. Later came the people whose family members had been disappeared by the Russian authorities or the Chechen fighters. In refugee camps and in tiny Chechen communities that formed abroad, they often mixed with people who had actually been fighters—making for messy alliances at best and open conflict at worst.
The Chechen community in and around Boston numbers only a handful of families. This was the community that Anzor and Zubeidat joined when they came. It also happens to come close to representing the entire range of the Chechen immigrant experience in the United States. Makhmud Mazaev was probably the first to arrive—in 1994, just as the war was about to break out. He had been a urologist in Grozny, but learned upon arrival in the United States that he was too old to requalify as a doctor. He got a nursing certificate and worked as a visiting nurse. Later he created a thriving business, a day center for elderly Russian speakers. It is called Zdorovye, the Russian word for “health.” In the morning a half-dozen Zdorovye vans make the rounds of several Boston neighborhoods, collecting elderly people who are well enough to live on their own but not to care for themselves during the day. Zdorovye attends to their meals, tracks their medical appointments, and celebrates their birthdays with them. Mazaev is the classic—and rare—example of a successfully assimilated Chechen refugee. He goes by the name Max; his American-born son, Baudy, who is about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age, is a student at competitive Boston University; and he has friends in Boston’s large community of Russian-speaking Jews, from which he draws most of his clientele. One friend is a younger Russian Jewish doctor who often joins Mazaev on trips to New Hampshire, just an hour’s drive north, where Mazaev likes to go for target practice: even an assimilated Chechen man wants to get his shooting done, and the range in New Hampshire is the only open-air one in the area.