The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

In Dagestan, Tamerlan remet his cousin Magomet Kartashov,

who just a few months before had launched a group that
some people perceived as nebulous and others as menacing;
it was probably both. 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 deputy
Mohammed Gadzhiev. 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 the 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.
They talked about Russia as well, and concluded that its
racism, religious persecution, and propensity for
manufacturing criminal charges against undesirables made
the two countries substantially similar. Russia’s foreign
policy was better—at least it did not support either Israel or
the secular forces in the Arab world—but the deep-rooted
corruption inside the country more than made up for this
comparative advantage over the United States. “I refuse to
choose between two kinds of fecal matter,” Gadzhiev
concluded.
“Both taste like shit.” Tamerlan concurred.
On topics other than the United States, Tamerlan got little
credit. Gadzhiev found his knowledge of the Koran cursory
at best. He appreciated that Tamerlan claimed being a
Muslim as his primary identity, but criticized him for vague
statements and uncertain ideas. “If your goal is to fight
injustice and promote God’s law in the world, then you have
to achieve clarity,” Gadzhiev would say. “As long as your
ideas are hard to comprehend, your actions, too, will be
dispersed. You have to be specific.” Gadzhiev introduced
Tamerlan to the concept of intention, essential to the
interpretation of the Koran. “You must know that your
actions are right even if you will never see the results of your
actions—then you must trust that one of your descendants
will see them in the future.”
Tamerlan listened.
Gadzhiev saw his friend as a bit of a baby. Tamerlan stood
out in Makhachkala. Some days he wore a long Arabic-style
shirt of the sort rarely seen in Dagestan, slicked his hair back
with peanut oil, and lined his eyes with kohl. Other days, he
put on regular trousers with brightly colored sneakers, and
this looked as foreign as his ersatz Middle Eastern getup.
Gadzhiev himself dressed stylishly, but in keeping with the
understated ways of local men: he wore dark-colored T-shirts
and trousers over neutral flip-flops.
When Gadzhiev reprimanded Tamerlan for sticking out too
conspicuously, his American friend seemed to take it as a
compliment. Indeed, he regarded all expressions of interest
as both complimentary and wondrous. One time a girl at a
party slipped him a scrap of paper with her phone number
written on it and he showed it around to his friends, asking
aloud what it was they thought she wanted. Gadzhiev and
others found this indiscretion both regrettable and endearing:
Tamerlan’s cockiness had a way of coming off as innocent,
and in his friends it produced a feeling of benign
condescension.
After the Boston marathon bombing, there would be much
speculation about whether Tamerlan had been “radicalized”
in Dagestan. The question was not unreasonable. Dagestan
presented many opportunities for a young man in search of a
radical future. He could have joined the struggle in Syria;
dozens and possibly hundreds of men were recruited in
Dagestan around the time he was there. If he was a budding
jihadist opposed to U.S. foreign policy, the Syrian
opportunity would have seemed perfect—but Tamerlan did
not take it. Even more obvious, he could have joined the
guerrillas in the forest. He did not, though Kartashov later
told the secret police he had talked about it—and Kartashov
felt he had talked him down. There were rumors, later, of
Tamerlan’s making contact with William Plotnikov, who had
emigrated from Russia to Canada at the age of fifteen,
become a boxer, and gone to Dagestan to join the Islamic
insurgency. There does not, however, appear to have been
any connection between the two, aside from the eerie
coincidence of superficial details of biography. Plotnikov
died in the typical blaze of gunfire in a Russian security
operation in July 2012; ultimately the only people who
linked him to Tamerlan were unnamed Russian secret-police
operatives who leaked the information to an enterprising but
notoriously unreliable Russian newspaper. The same
unnamed sources claimed Tamerlan was connected to
another insurgency fighter, Mahmud Nidal, who, by the time
this unsubstantiated leak appeared, had been killed in another
firestorm, in May 2012.
In the end it seems that most of what Tamerlan did during his
six months in Dagestan was talk. Talking—and having
someone not only listen to what he had to say but also take it
seriously enough to question and criticize and try to guide
him—was a radically new experience for him. Feeling, for
the first time in his life, like he belonged most certainly
entailed a kind of radicalization, a fundamental shift in the
way he perceived the world and himself in it—but that is just
as certainly not what anyone has meant by suggesting that
Tamerlan might have been radicalized in Dagestan.
#
Two months after Tamerlan’s departure, the Union of the
Just staged a protest that criticized not only the Russian
regime but also American foreign policy. Shocking
onlookers in Kizlyar, the protesters burned a United States
flag—a gesture that had never before been seen in Dagestan.
Months later, when Gadzhiev was interviewed by men
representing the FBI, he would taunt them by recalling that
protest. One could say, if one were so inclined, that it was
Tamerlan Tsarnaev who had radicalized the Union of the
Just.