a long factory, built in the 1970s, which once produced concrete and raw construction materials. The factory had long since been shuttered, but its mud-colored shell loomed grandly above everything that had been built since. In front of us, small concrete shacks dotted the landscape, the remains of the factory’s outbuildings. Cattle grazed in the wide square basins that used to hold water catchments. Farther away stood the rusted carcass of an enormous machine that once made asphalt; children played on the conveyor belt. The men, all of whom are now in their early 20s, grew up together amid these ruins. Except, that is, for the years that six out of the 11 of them spent in Russia.

Of those who had gone, Abdullo had returned from Moscow mostrecently, in January, after a six-month stay. He’d missed the birth of his first child, a daughter, who was born in late July, a few weeks after he left to start work installing electrical wiring in cheap, fast-rising apartment blocks. He spent the first months of her life calling home frequently, eager just to listen to whatever sounds his daughter might make over the phone. His friends in Moscow teased him for wasting his money. Abdullo was born in 1993, near the start of Tajikistan’s civil war. Just after he was born, his father was killed by a bomb that exploded not far from where we were barbecuing. Abdullo made his first trip to Russia when he was 14, when he sold fruit in a market in Moscow;