The Brothers Read online

  ALSO BY MASHA GESSEN

  Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism

  Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace

  Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

  Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

  The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

  Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

  Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories (editor)

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Masha Gessen

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-698-14870-3

  MAPS © 2015 BY DARYA ORESHKINA

  Version_1

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  The pain inflicted by the Boston Marathon bombing was one of the few aspects of that act of terror that were immediately evident and certain. Such is the nature of the crime that hundreds of individuals and families will suffer loss and trauma for many years to come. This book, however, is not about that pain. It is about something that, whatever evidence is unearthed, will never be entirely certain: it is about the tragedy that preceded the bombing, the reasons that led to it, and its invisible victims.

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  CONTENTS

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  Also by Masha Gessen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Cast of Characters

  PART ONE

  DISLOCATION

  Map: The Tsarnaevs’ Journey

  One LOVE

  Two WANDERING

  Three DREAMING OF AMERICA

  PART TWO

  BECOMING THE BOMBERS

  Map: The Failed Escape

  Four COMING TO AMERICA

  Five A DECADE OF BROKEN DREAMS

  Six HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD

  Seven PATRIOTS’ DAY

  Eight THEY ARE US

  PART THREE

  AFTERMATH

  Nine HOW MUSA KHADZHIMURATOV FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH AMERICA

  Ten THE STRANGE DEATH OF IBRAGIM TODASHEV

  Eleven EVERYONE IS GOING TO JAIL

  Twelve WHAT WILL WE KNOW?

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Selected Bibliography

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

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  THE TSARNAEV FAMILY

  The Brothers: Tamerlan, wife Karima (formerly Katherine Russell), daughter Zahira; and Dzhokhar (later Jahar)

  Parents: Anzor and Zubeidat

  Paternal grandparents: Zayndy and Liza

  Paternal uncles, aunts, and cousins: Ayndy; Malkan and son Husein; Maret; Alvi, wife Zhanar, children Aindy and Luiza; Ruslan, first wife Samantha Fuller, father-in-law Graham Fuller

  Sisters: Bella, husband Rizvan, son Ramzan; Ailina, husband Elmirza, son Ziaudy

  Cousin: Jamal Tsarnaev

  KYRGYZSTAN

  Friends and neighbors: Semyon and Alladin Abaev, Anzor’s closest friends; Badrudi and Zina Tsokaev, neighbors and advisors; Alaudin and Aziz Batukaev, organized-crime bosses; Raisa Batukaeva, next-door neighbor and unofficial Chechen community leader; Ruslan Zakriev, owner of amusement park and official leader of Chechen community; Yakha Tsokaeva and Madina, friends in Bishkek, the capital

  School personnel: Lubov Shulzhenko, Tamerlan’s principal; Natalya Kurochkina, Tamerlan’s grade-school teacher

  DAGESTAN

  Gasan Gasanaliyev, imam of Makhachkala’s Kotrov Street mosque

  Magomed Kartashov, Tamerlan’s second cousin, head of Union of the Just

  Mohammed Gadzhiev, Kartashov’s deputy

  Kheda Saratova, human rights advocate

  BOSTON AREA

  Other Chechen immigrant families: Khassan Baiev (sambo champion, plastic surgeon, author), wife Zara Tokaeva, children Islam and Maryam; Makhmud (Max) Mazaev (owner of an elder-care center), wife Anna, son Baudy (Boston University student); Hamzat Umarov, wife Raisa

  Joanna Herlihy, the Tsarnaevs’ landlady

  Nadine Ascencao, Tamerlan’s girlfriend

  Brendan Mess, Tamerlan’s best friend, murdered in 2011 along with Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken

  Donald Larking, home-care client of Zubeidat and later Karima

  Norfolk Street neighbors: Rinat Harel, Chris LaRoche

  At Cambridge Rindge and Latin: Larry Aaronson, retired history teacher and photographer; Steve Matteo, English teacher; Lulu Emmons, former classmate of Jahar’s; Luis Vasquez, Tamerlan’s friend

  Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, marathon bombing victim who was an early suspect

  Other early suspects: Sunil Tripathi, Salaheddin Barhoum, Yassine Zaimi

  Boston-area law enforcement: Sean Collier, murdered MIT campus security officer; Richard Donohue, wounded transit cop; Jeff Pugliese, Watertown policeman; David Earle, Essex County police detective also on the Joint Terrorism Task Force; Timothy Alben, Massachusetts State Police superintendent; Farbod Azad, Kenneth Benton, Scott Cieplik, Michael Delapena, Richard DesLauriers, Dwight Schwader, John Walker, Sara Wood, all FBI; Douglas Woodlock, federal judge; Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney; Scott Riley and Stephanie Siegmann, Assistant U.S. Attorneys

  “Danny,” owner of the SUV hijacked by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar

  Khairullozhon “Kair” Matanov, taxi driver, refugee from Kyrgyzstan, friend of Tamerlan; attorney Edward Hayden

  Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts

  UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS DARTMOUTH AND NEW BEDFORD

  Robel Phillipos, Jahar’s friend, also from Cambridge Rindge and Latin; friend Elohe Dereje (Maryland); attorney Derege Demissie

  Dias Kadyrbayev, from Kazakhstan; girlfriend Bayan Kumiskali

  Azamat Tazhayakov, from Kazakhstan; father Amir Ismagulov; attorneys Nicholas Wooldridge and Arkady Bukh (New York)

  Andrew Dwinells, Jahar’s roommate

  Other friends and classmates of Jahar’s: Pamela Rolon; Alexa Guevara; Tiffany Evora; Lino Rosas; Quan Le Phan, Robel’s former roommate; Jim Li, Quan’s roommate

  Brian Williams, teacher of class on Chechnya

  OTHERS

  Almut Rochowanski, founder of legal aid organization for Chechen refugees (New York)

  Musa Khadzhimuratov, Max Mazaev’s paralyzed cousin; wife Madina, son Ibragim (later Abraham), daughter Malika (Manchester, New Hampshire)

  Ibragim Todashev, Chechen immigrant killed during questioning by FBI agents and Boston police in 2013 (Orlando, Florida); wife Reni Manukyan, born Evgenia (Nyusha) Nazarenko (Atlanta), her mother, Elena Teyer (Savannah, Georgia), and her brother, Alex (Atlanta); girlfriend Tatiana Gruzdeva (Orlando); father Abdulbaki Todashev (Chechnya); best friend Khusein Taramov (Orlando; later Russia); lawyer Zuarbek Sadokhanov

  Yerlan Kubashev, with the consulate of Kazakhstan in New York

  PART ONE

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  DISLOCATION

  Visit http://bit.ly/brothersmap1 for a larger version of this map.

  One

  LOVE

  YOU CAN BE PROUD OF BEING A DAGESTANI, proclaim the billboards lining the highway from the airport to Makhachkala. It is the spring of 2013. The billboards picture, by way of argument, the recently appointed head of Dagestan, Ramazan Abdulatipov, speaking with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Both look unhappy, but the photo op, apparently a one-time occurrence, seems not to have generated a better option.

  The highway to the capital, like so much of Dagestan, is an object of pride and an embarrassment at the same time. It was built recently, and well; it is by far the best road in Dagestan, so good that at night young men race their souped-up Lada Priora sedans here. The Lada Priora is a bad, Russian-made car, but its twentieth-century technology lends itself to quick fixes. Which is a good thing, because as the road enters the city, turning into the main avenue, the smooth surface gives way to potholes that can cost you your tire or your life.

  Outside the city, the highway is lined with unfinished houses, scores of them. They betray modest ambition—small two-story structures along a highway—and yet even this dream has gone unfulfilled. Rectangular openings stare at the highway where windows should be. Cows graze in between these carcasses and wander lazily onto the highway.

  People you meet in Dagestan will tell you where else they have been. They have rarely ventured very far, but they have invariably found any other place to be remarkably different. Several drivers tell me that in Moscow or Saint Petersburg or even provincial Astrakhan, three hundred miles to the north of Makhachkala, people do not drive into natural-gas fueling stations (almost everyone in Dagestan seems to drive a car retrofitted for natural gas) with a lit cigarette in their mouths. In Astrakhan, one man tells me, they get all the passengers out of the car before refueling. This kind of regard for human life awes and baffles him. Astrakhan is no hub of bourgeois humanitarianism, but then, compared with Dagestan, almost anyplace is.

  The Russian Federation includes eighty-three nominally self-governing regions, districts, autonomies, and republics; the republics differ from the rest of the convoluted federation’s members in that they have the right to choose their own state language—mostly because the republics are, by and large, populated by non-Russian ethnic groups. Dagestan, a republic, sits on the edge of the Russian empire, a mere two and a half hours by plane south-southeast from Moscow but as culturally remote as the far northeast, where Russia borders the United States, or the far east, where it seeps into China. Dagestan borders Azerbaijan and Georgia to the south and war-torn Chechnya to the north. Throughout its history as a part of Russia, Dagestan has been one of the poorest parts of the empire, and one of the most embattled. It has also always been the most diverse, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups living in various states of war and peace. Each group has a fiercely defined identity, but no single ethnic group claims the region as an ersatz nation-state, and a Dagestani identity per se can hardly be said to exist. So the billboards seem to be calling on people to take pride simply in living in Dagestan. But why would anyone want to live here?

  This is where the story begins.

  • • •

  FIRST, Zubeidat ran from Makhachkala. In May 1985, she was walking in the outskirts of Novosibirsk, terrified of getting into trouble, though most people back home would have said she was asking for trouble just by being in Novosibirsk. She had graduated from high school in Makhachkala a year earlier, and she wanted to go to college. Worse, she wanted to go to Moscow. One of her older brothers lived there, and from what she could tell, this brother was an important person. He worked in retail, which in the Soviet Union meant access to all sorts of nice things and influential people, and she had kept calling him, begging him to take her out of Makhachkala.

  Makhachkala is a hard place to love. In the 2010s, a pair of journalists who set out to compile an oral history of the city, a coffee-table book with lots of nostalgic sepia-colored photographs, were repeatedly told by the residents they interviewed how unlivable Makhachkala had always been, what a misunderstanding of a city it was. A locally prominent artist called it “a town without a legend” that was “unsuited for normal life.” A fort reconstituted as a town in the mid–nineteenth century, it felt like a haphazard and temporary agglomeration of more than a hundred ethnic groups, each of which maintained its own language and used variously simplified and mangled Russian to communicate with one another and the outside world. Streets bore the names of the ethnic groups that had originally settled there: Armenian Street crossed Persian Street. Soviet authorities renamed the streets in the spirit of internationalism and Communist ideology, but the old designations remained in the vernacular. Each group made its own living arrangements, usually unaided by the Communist state that had assumed the obligation for sheltering and feeding all citizens but failed consistently, and failed worse the farther from the center the citizens resided. People lived in barracks, in rehabbed fort structures, in sheds and other temporary dwellings, and well into the late twentieth century, indoor plumbing and cooking facilities remained the stuff of dreams.

  Neighborhood borders were inviolate: a male outsider who tried to date a neighborhood girl would be knifed. The single unifying culture of the city was that of the prison. There were eight prison camps within the city limits before Stalin’s death in 1953; once released, many of the inmates stayed on in the city. In at least one case, a camp was abolished and the barbed-wire fence removed, but the barracks were simply renamed “dormitories” and everybody stayed. The city jail, which never stopped functioning, sat up on a hill, a major landmark and the center of the switchblade-making industry. Every Makhachkala-born male past the age of puberty had to own a switchblade that had been smuggled out of the jail and sold on the black market.

  Not that there was much of a legal economy: centrally distributed consumer goods rarely reached Russia’s southern edge. Makhachkalinians wore clothes and shoes made by local tailors and cobblers—there was one of each on nearly every block—and ate fish caught in the Caspian Sea by local poachers, who went door-to-door every day hawking sturgeon and black-backed herring so fatty it could be tossed into a skillet with no oil. Yet the Caspian itself seemed to have no place in the city, or in any story about it. A gentle, light blue sea that is actually the world’s largest lake, the Caspian was cut off from Makhachkala by a railroad constructed at the turn of the twentieth century. Only a thin strip of sand, barely a hundred yards at its narrowest, separated the water from the rails. The sounds of the railroad drowned out the murmur of the sea, and the bitter smell of tar, the metallic smell of hot rails, and the smoke of the engines overwhelmed the Caspian’s softly salty air.

  Whether people lived in nineteenth-century stone buildings or twentieth-century wooden barracks, they dwelled a family to a room if they were lucky, and used the courtyards for all their daily needs: wood-burning stoves for cooking, wooden outhouses never far away. At night young men went yard to yard, scooping human waste into large barrels mounted on their horse-driven carts, nicknamed “stinkies.” Household waste flowed in open trenches along city streets until the 1960s, when, legend has it, old gravestones were used to enclose the trenches in the city center—there are still residents who claim to have seen Arabic writing beneath their feet.

  Dwellings with indoor conveniences came in the 1960s, too, but in 1970 an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale shook Dagestan. The epicenter was less than twenty miles west of Makhachkala. Thirty-one people died and half the city’s population was left homeless. Twenty-two villages outside the city were completely destroyed, and their residents, too, flooded into Makhachkala even as more than a thousand aftershocks, some of them nearly as strong as the original quake, shook the city over the following six weeks. Makhachkala returned to the premodern state to which it seemed doomed.

  A year later, the newly u
nderequipped and overcrowded city was hit by a cholera epidemic. Moscow shut Makhachkala down: anyone who wanted to leave the city had to be tested for the germ and was not allowed to travel until cleared. The city’s population swelled further with those waiting to travel out of Dagestan.

  • • •

  ZUBEIDAT WAS BORN in Makhachkala three years before the earthquake. By the time she was a teenager, she was acutely and painfully aware of living in a backwater. Even the Chechens, who lived right next door and had been decimated by forced exile, had a real city: Grozny had fashion and music. It was from Grozny that young men would bring records and reel-to-reel tapes for Makhachkala’s first diskotekas—a fancy word for dances—in the early 1980s. To create disco lighting, the young men stole colored glass from traffic lights and, at great peril to themselves, flashing lights off police cars. In Grozny, young men were not too timid to wear pointy cowboy boots, which had roared into fashion; Makhachkalinians, who did not dare wear them, called them nokhchi-boots, or Chechen-boots. Men in Makhachkala still wore visored hats nicknamed “airport caps” for the exceedingly large flat surface they created on the wearer’s head. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union these caps marked men as hailing from the remote Caucasian provinces, but in Dagestan they were privileged as city wear: country folk wore fluffy white sheepskin hats. The possession most coveted by any young person who wanted to escape Makhachkala’s provincial uniformity was a white plastic bag printed with a full-color photograph of a man’s behind in Wrangler jeans. These cost up to five rubles on the black market; a loaf of bread ran sixteen kopecks, or just over three percent of the price of the plastic bag.

  Everyone in Makhachkala knew everything about everyone else. There was one Russian Orthodox church in the city and, directly across the street, one abortion clinic. Being seen entering either could ruin one’s reputation for life—the church because of Party prohibitions on religion, and the clinic because, while most Soviet women strove to control their fertility and had few means of doing that aside from abortion, Dagestani women were having more babies than women almost anywhere else in the USSR were having, and staying home to raise them. The home was ruled by the men in accordance with Adat, a set of rules that were said to derive from Islam but were largely local customs. Most of the local populations were Muslim; the Russian colonizers had imported Russian Orthodoxy, and migrants had brought Greek Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Judaism. The Communists had banned the open organized practice of all religions, and in Muslim groups over the course of decades the family and community practices of Adat came to reign supreme—and to be conflated with Islam in the popular understanding.