When a local newspaper here in Montana called for my views on a 19-year-old wrestler named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the confusing pedigree of being a Chechen from Dagestan who was reportedly born in Kyrgyzstan but mostly grew up in the United States, and what his motivations for the Boston Marathon terror attack may have been, I tried to use my background as the resident “Chechenologist” to help out.
Answering the second part of the question—“Why?”—was easy: I did not know Tsarnaev’s motivations. But if he is guilty of the bombings—and I have little doubt at this point that he is—there must be a link to the deeply troubled history of Chechnya, and to the generations of anger, despair and trauma experienced by his people.
To start: Chechens are not Russians but a distinct national and lingual group, known as the Nakhs or Vainakhs, who are indigenous to the north slope of the Caucasus mountain range, where they have lived since before recorded history. Rather like Native American peoples, whose sad history is a strange and cruel mirror of the Chechens’ experience at the hands of Russian imperialism, the people of Chechnya do not call themselves “Chechens.” In their own language—as distinct from Russian as Navajo is from English—they are the Noxchi, which translates more or less as “the People.”
During the Murid wars of the nineteenth century, the Chechens were the backbone of Muslim tribal resistance to czarist expansion, earning their reputation as fearless Sufi-inspired warriors. After the resistance collapsed with the capture of Imam Shamil (an event somewhat akin to the surrender of Sioux/Lakota chief Sitting Bull), many of those warriors took their skills into exile, serving the Ottoman Empire in problematic border areas such as the Balkans and the Arab lands of the Levant, where they became known under the generic name Circassians, a term that includes related North Caucasus mountaineers such as the Ingush, Abkhaz and Adyghe, who were also driven into exile by the czars.
The ceremonial guard of Jordan’s king are Circassians; in Syria, they are (or were) concentrated in the Golan Heights but are now attempting a reverse migration to their ancestral lands in Russia, even while undetermined numbers of their “cousins” from Chechnya-in-Russia take up arms alongside jihadists against the secular Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the Chechens maintained a low-boil resistance to Soviet rule and collectivization. But it was also thanks to Joseph Stalin and his commissars that Chechnya was first defined as an “autonomous republic,” a territorial entity replete with borders, an official “culture” and other Soviet-style attributes of statehood.
Many other marginal peoples in the USSR did not fare so well, and were thus absorbed into larger, non-Slavic nutshells whenever Stalin sneezed. For the Chechens, that sneeze came in February 1944, when Stalin and his fellow Georgian henchman Lavrenti Beria accused the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazis, dissolved their autonomous republic, and sent the new nonpeople into exile in Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. They were transported in boxcars chillingly similar to those that brought Jews to Hitler’s death camps. In the case of the Chechens, roughly half of the exactly 478,479 who were exiled died en route. The Vysl, or Deportation, became the defining event in Chechen collective memory, as resonant as the Trail of Tears for the Cherokees, the Retreat of the Nez Percé or the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews.