The Tsarnaev Brothers: The Road to a Modern Tragedy review: small lives, big atrocities

The Tsarnaev Brothers: The Road to a Modern Tragedy

Author: Masha Gessen

ISBN-13: 9781922247506

Publisher: Scribe Publications

Guideline Price: £14.99

On May 15th, just over two years since two bombs were detonated at the Boston Marathon, a federal jury in the city condemned Dzhokhar (“Jahar”) Tsarnaev to death. The bombs, built with pressure cookers packed with gunpowder, BBs and nails, killed three people, resulted in 17 people losing at least one limb, and seriously injured 240 others. Jahar planted the explosives with his brother Tamerlan, who was killed in the ensuing manhunt – shot by police and then run over by Jahar in a stolen SUV as he lay in the street.

Lawyers for the Kyrgyzstan-born Jahar, now 21, never contested his guilt. They argued that Tamerlan, who was 26 and had drifted into extremism, led his younger brother astray. The jury rejected this and found Jahar guilty of all 30 charges related to the bombing and to the death of an MIT campus police officer, whose gun the brothers were trying to steal as they fled police. Jahar’s apparent lack of remorse – going back to his tweets in the days after the bombing, which include “I’m a stress free kind of guy” – couldn’t have helped.

Masha Gessen has written a penetrating and compelling study of how and why the two brothers came to commit the crime they did. The journalist is well-placed to tell the story. Born in Moscow, she emigrated to Boston when she was 14, and later returned following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gessen was never beloved of Russian authorities; her previous books include The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and she is an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights. She returned to the US in 2013 with her wife and children when it became clear that Russian authorities were threatening the children.

In The Tsarnaev Brothers, Gessen spends much time on the practical and psychological disorientation of exile. In their search for a better life, the Tsarnaevs engaged in a dizzying amount of to-ing and fro-ing between Kyrgyzstan, Dagestan, Chechnya and elsewhere.

In 2002, fleeing the second Chechen war, Anzor and Zubeidat took their son Jahar to US and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Tamerlan and his two sisters, Ailina and Bella, joined them the following year.) They applied for asylum on the basis that, as Anzor was from Chechnya, they were escaping persecution.

Gessen’s chapter on the family’s travails between their arrival in America and the marathon bombings is called “A Decade of Broken Dreams”. Anzor worked as a backyard mechanic and suffered from poor health. Zubeidat tried translation work but ended up working mostly as a home health aide. Their daughters both dropped out of high school. By the time Ailina was 16, she had entered an arranged marriage and was pregnant; her husband was arrested for beating her. Bella fared hardly better.

Boxing champ

For a time it seemed as if Tamerlan might make it. As a promising young boxer, he had won the New England Golden Gloves heavyweight division in 2009-2010 and hoped to join the US boxing team, but his status as a non-citizen rendered him ineligible. At some point he started dealing pot. He dropped out of community college and delivered pizzas.

He and his mother began studying the Koran, Tamerlan carrying a small prayer rug in his car which he spread anywhere “in between smoking a couple of joints”. Islam, Gessen writes, provided a connection to home. Tamerlan married an American, Katherine Russell, who converted to Islam, and they had a daughter.

Then, in early 2011, Russian authorities asked the FBI to investigate Tamerlan, who they said was becoming radicalised. Following interviews with him and other family members, the FBI said it found no evidence of terrorist activity.

That same year, there was a triple murder, still unsolved. In Waltham, Massachusetts, three friends of Tamerlan’s had their throats slit; marijuana and thousands in cash were strewn about the scene. Another friend of Tamerlan’s, Chechen immigrant Ibragim Todashev, was shot dead during questioning by FBI agents following the bombings, allegedly while confessing to the triple murder and implicating Tamerlan.

Only Jahar seemed set to shine, “in his cloud of sweetness and light”. He, too, smoked and dealt weed, but he was also captain of his high school wrestling team and made good grades. The city of Cambridge awarded him $2,500 in scholarship money. He attended the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and in 2012 became a naturalised US citizen.

Clear and accessible

So what happened? The difficulty with making sense of the brothers’ trajectory, Gessen writes, is that it lacks “a clear and accessible explanation” for why they chose to cause carnage. Gessen dismisses the “radicalisation theory”, dominant in the West, which holds that a person becomes a terrorist via identifiable stages of adopting increasingly radical ideas, as well as various conspiracy theories.

Instead, she suggests that the “impressive list of inconsistencies” in law enforcement’s narrative of the bombing may indicate that the FBI recruited Tamerlan as an informer during the bureau’s regular visits to the Tsarnaev home.

It seems a plausible theory. Jahar’s lawyers sought a court order forcing prosecutors to turn over evidence in relation to the FBI’s conversations with Tamerlan, arguing the FBI had encouraged him to inform on Muslim and Chechen communities. The evidence Gessen presents is slim enough, and the FBI denied ever recruiting him.

Ultimately, Gessen writes, the brothers’ story remains a small one, in the sense that no extraordinary event is needed to explain what happened. “One had only to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . to never feel that one belongs, to see every opportunity, even those that seem within reach, pass one by – until the opportunity to be somebody finally, almost accidentally, presents itself. This is where the small story of the Tsarnaevs joins the larger story of the War on Terror.”

It may be, she writes, “the hardest and most frightening kind of story to believe” precisely because it grows out of the everyday experiences of so many. It isn’t the result of “big conspiracies or even giant examples of injustice”, but rather the accumulation of losses and defeats – coupled with a sudden possibility of purpose.

Molly McCloskey is the author of Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother