Like everyone else, I woke this morning to news of the shootout and the manhunt in Boston, which was soon followed by the revelation that the two suspects were Chechen — or born to Chechen parents — and that they were raised, before coming to the United States, in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya and was attacked in the late '90s by Chechen rebels bent on creating a single Islamist state. What I thought of almost immediately was an article that Elizabeth Rubin wrote for this magazine back in the summer of 2001, which I was lucky enough to edit. "Only You Can Save Your Sons" is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, as powerful and haunting as any magazine article I've ever read. It turned out that other editors here at the magazine were thinking about Elizabeth's story, too, and as the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the day turned to questions of whether the Tsarnaev brothers were influenced by the Chechen war — and as the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the root of the Tsarnaev's "evil" lay in America and not in Chechnya — it seemed like a good idea to reach out to Elizabeth and get her thoughts, which follow below, on the Chechnya she experienced then and its connection, or lack of connection, to the men thought to have bombed the Boston Marathon.
Elizabeth Rubin writes:
My first thought after I read that the Boston bombers were Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, from Chechnya was: Poor Chechnya. Do the Chechens really need another violent stain on their image? And what do all these people who they killed and maimed at the Boston Marathon have to do with their plight and rage? We don't know yet how the brothers, who have moved around quite a bit in their short lives, became infected with the idea that violence against unrelated innocents could possibly fix whatever personal and political wrongs they faced. Their uncle is telling reporters that the boys are losers, a shame on Chechnya. He does not want to dignify them with a cause, and maybe he is right.
I went to Chechnya in the winter and spring of 2001, during the second Chechen war, when Tamerlan would have been around 14 and Dzhokhar around 7. I lived with Chechen families, with mothers whose sons were missing, rounded up by Russian soldiers and dropped into fetid pits in the ground, left for months to howl in the dark.
Needless to say, it was a chaotic time. Chechen society was so crushed physically, emotionally, psychologically, that I remember a mother telling me: "Trust my sister? I don't even trust my own shadow." Few had money. And you could earn fast cash, enough money for a meal or some fuel to drive your car, by selling information to the Russians. There was almost no electricity or heat. The buildings were carcasses. And the Russians, too, were paranoid. One evening I heard that just that morning a girl living downstairs had poked her head out the window maybe to gaze on the view below or get some fresh air, and a Russian sniper, thinking she was a sniper scoping him out, shot her in the head. No one I met was sane.
Every day I met beautiful young Chechen boys who told me they were ready to blow themselves and the Russians up until every last Russian soldier left their soil. They had lost a brother, a sister, a parent, and they would never stop avenging those deaths. The Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary and can last a century or more. I remember a 46-year-old Chechen commander who was a professor of philology telling me: "This generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They'll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won't value their own or anyone else's lives." That was 2001.
We don't know if that was the journey of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and who knows if we'll ever fully know. But there is another Chechnya I remember, and want to leave you with it, lest we tarnish the whole nation. There was Hava, a 17-year-old girl, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She had learned English by memorizing five Dickens novels. She could recite them and knew what every word meant. She wanted to be a teacher of English literature. "I know if you have a goal you will reach it," she told me. "And mine is to be the best master of English in Chechnya!" There was the librarian in Grozny still attempting, amid unimaginable terror and chaos, to preserve shelves and shelves of Russian books. There is the image of my friend frying up chirimshala, wild garlic root greens that grow only in Chechnya under the snow. She was obsessed with their health properties and said they possessed the only nutrients that could stave off the poison from the bombs, the fires and the methane gas that was the Grozny air. And there was the rigor of Chechen tradition that has held families together through deportation and wars. These were people with a sense of shared cultural history who were doing everything the could to hang onto it even as it was breaking down.
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