PHILIP MARCHAND
‘What motivated the bombers, two Chechen brothers, men in their twenties who came to America with the hope of a better life?’
The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy Masha Gessen Riverhead Books 288 pp; $33
The planting of the bomb at the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, killing three bystanders and injuring more than 264, was such a despicable act that people naturally want to know why it was committed. What motivated the perpetrators, two Chechen brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — men in their 20s who came to America with the hope of a better life?
Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who has written books on Vladimir Putin and Pussy Riot and who currently resides in New York City, acknowledges this desire in her book The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. It’s the desire for a story that will explain the matter. One such story is that the brothers were “radicalized” by exposure to the ongoing war between Russia and the Muslim insurgents of their native Chechnya, a war they believe was abetted by the United States. This is the theory cherished by the FBI, for example. Unfortunately, Gessen reports, there is no real evidence for such “radicalization” on the part of the Tsarnaev brothers. They weren’t “radicalized” — they simply objected to U.S. foreign policy.
Another predominant story is that the brothers were insane. This was the conclusion reached after an exhaustive investigation by a team of journalists for the Boston Globe that lasted almost eight months. They believed Tamerlan suffered from schizophrenia. “He apparently heard voices that made him do terrible things,” the Globe stated. There is even less evidence to support this conclusion, however. Almost by the nature of the case, successful terrorists are not mentally unbalanced — to carry out their complex and high risk deeds requires a “firm grip on reality,” terrorist experts agree.
What is left, Gessen writes, is a small story — no grand conspiracies, no sinister ideas polluting the mindscape. In this story, you don’t have to be introduced to hypnotic thinkers or fanatical religious leaders to become a terrorist. “One had only to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, as many people are,” Gessen writes, “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.”
If this is a “small story,” it doesn’t have to be an uninteresting story — especially when told in the context of history, beginning with Stalin’s forced removal of the Chechen nation to remote areas of Central Asia during the Second World War. Millions of Chechens died in this internal exile, of violence and hunger and privation. In the Khrushchev era, surviving Chechens made their way back to their prewar territory, but Chechnya was denied independence when the Soviet Union collapsed and various federated republics, selfgoverning regions, districts, autonomies and so on, were allowed to break away.
The result was civil war between Chechnya and Russia, an unusually brutal affair even for modern conflicts of this type. The Chechen capital of Grozny, for example, has been declared by a United Nations report to be “the most destroyed city on earth.” In turn, the conflict spread to the neighbouring republic of Dagestan where the Tsarnaev settled before their trek to America, and where Muslims, including Chechens, were considered to be extremists of the most dangerous variety. Police goaded these young Muslims into armed rebellion.
The world of the Tsarnaevs then was a world of official lawlessness, combined with a fevered entrepreneurial spirit — a dream, Gessen writes, “of going home to someplace beautiful and far away.” Into this dream in Boston stepped one Joanna Herlihy, a vigorous, one-time Peace Corps volunteer, aged 68 years. “For most of her adult life,” Gessen writes, “she had been trying to save the world.” She rented the Tsarnaev’s an apartment she owned, and did her best to help them adjust to life in America.
Her place in this story is a peculiar one — that of historical echo more than anything else. Across the decades her original prototype resonates in the mind: a folk-dancing, madrigal-singing Quaker and fellow do-gooder by the name of Ruth Paine. Ruth Paine also took interest in helping a Russian-speaking émigré, this one a woman by the name of Marina Oswald. Ruth Paine could do little with Marina’s husband, just as Joanna Herlihy could do little with the Tsarnaev men — males, all of them, with a disconcerting streak of violence as well as grandiose visions of success.
Tamerlan, for example, played the keyboards. “He talked of becoming a performer,” Gessen writes, “a musician and a dancer.” Then someone suggested martial arts. This was a terrible suggestion, although not bizarre. Tamerlan was a very good fighter. And back home, being a martial arts champion often brought worldly success. In the United States, however, it was a dead end. After winning a few tournaments, Tamerlan quit.
Meanwhile, no one was getting an education. Tamerlan ended up as a pizza delivery man. Dzhokhar, an excellent student, spent most of his time at school selling pot.
Gessen is clearly sympathetic with the boys. “Both of them had been staring at hard and hopeless lives as workingclass young fathers in an overpriced American city where they had been led to believe they could lead lives of meaning,” Gessen writes. But this still does not explain why they planted the bomb.
Near the end of the book, Gessen suggests the brothers were set up as part of an FBI sting. This happens in America. If so, something went terribly wrong. Tamerlan, killed in a police shootout, will never enlighten the reader on this score. Dzhokhar’s story is not over — but if he is executed, as a Boston jury has recommended, his secrets will also go to the grave.
As a true crime book, The Brothers is authoritative and well-written. Gessen knows her material. The narrative does lose momentum, however, when Gessen’s focus switches to peripheral figures of some importance to Gessen’s thesis about the FBI’s clumsiness and witch hunt mentality, but distracting from her main storyline of the brothers in America
The story she tells us, nonetheless, is probably the closest we will ever get to understanding this tragedy.