Reprinted from The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Copyright 2015 by Masha Gessen

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 Kartashovs deputy Mohammed Gadzhiev. Gadzhiev was Tamerlans
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 friends 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
suspectedas 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 elaboratedand 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
Watertownhe talked so much about this town that Gadzhiev was sure that was
where he livedand, 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 Tamerlans
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 peopleand it would even give them an education, such
as the one Tamerlans 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. Russias foreign policy
was betterat least it did not support either Israel or the secular forces in the Arab
worldbut 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 Gods 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 actionsthen 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:
Tamerlans 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 perfectbut 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 itand Kartashov felt he had talked him down.
There were rumors, later, of Tamerlans 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. Talkingand 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 itbut that is just as certainly not what
anyone has meant by suggesting that Tamerlan might have been radicalized in
Dagestan.
#
Two months after Tamerlans 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 flaga 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.