By Jeff Sparrow
Terror
The Tsarnaev Brothers: The Road to a Modern Tragedy
MASHA GESSEN
Scribe, $29.99
Ambrose Bierce once described war as "God's way of teaching Americans geography". The same might be said about terrorism. The Boston bombings of 2013 focused Western attention – at least briefly – on Chechnya, the ancestral home of the two terrorists, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The Tsarnaev Brothers by Masha Gessen.
Russian-American author Masha Gessen has previously written on Vladimir Putin and Pussy Riot. That background facilitates a much deeper than usual engagement with the context of the Boston atrocity, in a narrative that begins in the 1940s with the Stalinist deportation of Chechens to the central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The Tsarnaev family were among those who moved back to Chechnya before heading to neighbouring Dagestan and then seeking refuge in Boston: a perpetually displaced clan left permanently rootless by political and economic turmoil.
For a while, the US seemed to deliver the quintessential American story of immigrants making good in a land of opportunity. Yet, somehow, the dream soured. Anzor and Zubeidat, the Tsarnaev parents, found only menial work and the extended family ended up crowded together in a tiny apartment.
Great things were expected of Tamerlan, the favoured son. But his once-promising boxing career never panned out. He dropped out of college, delivering pizzas and selling marijuana. His brother, Dzhokhar, regarded by everyone as an easygoing, loveable kid, won a scholarship to university. But that, too, went bad, as he skipped classes to play computer games and smoke dope with the campus slackers.
In 2012, Tamerlan returned to Dagestan where, in the chaos of neo-liberal Russia, modern Salafism was gaining a toehold, displacing the rather lackadaisical version of Islam traditionally practised in the region.
But Gessen rejects the usual narrative of religious "radicalisation". No one in particular inducted Tamerlan into jihad – he certainly never attended anything resembling a training camp. Rather, he sat around cafes with other aimless young men, where he found himself treated with a deference no one accorded him in Boston.
Nonetheless, even after Tamerlan's return, neither of the brothers seemed particularly pious. If Dzhokhar used his social media page to post a video about Syria, he also tweeted: "Now we ain't come here to start no drama, we are just looking for future baby mamas."
To his friends, he seemed a likeable doofus, more stoner than Salafist – right up to when the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264 others.
Gessen dismisses any suggestions that the Tsarnaevs were framed. "[This book]," she says, "assumes from the start that Tamerlan and Jahar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers."
But she does note several respects in which the official story might not be quite true.
Gessen argues that Tamerlan may have, at some stage, been an FBI informant and that, in the wake of the bombing, the agency engaged in a degree of ass-covering to cover its relationship with him. She also wonders how exactly the brothers managed to construct such an effective bomb without external assistance.
The final third of the book deals with the consequences of the crime for the Tsarnaevs' associates and Boston's Chechens more generally, a community that suddenly found itself under siege. Several of Dzhokhar's dope-smoking friends now face long stints in jail (as long as 25 years), not because they knew of his plans (they didn't) but because, in the confused aftermath of the bombing, they made hapless attempts to dispose of his backpack, worrying that it would link them to the crime.
Gessen subtitles The Tsarnaev Brothers "the road to a modern tragedy" but her argument is that no single route led Tamerlan and Dzhokhar to their abominable deeds. We'd prefer, she suggests, to think of terrorism in terms of ideological fanatics carrying out an elaborate and well-thought out plot, because that allows us to externalise the evil.
But the Boston bombings actually resulted from a tangled web of frustrations and unhappinesses, in which the personal, the political and the religious were inextricably entwined.
"The people in key roles in this story are few," she says, "the ideas they hold are uncomplicated, and the plans they conjure are anything but far reaching.It [is] the hardest and most frightening kind of story to believe."
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster.