The Brothers

by Masha Gessen

  Some people could not figure out what to do. Anzor’s other closest friend, Badrudi Tsokaev, had worked all sorts of manual-labor jobs in the Soviet era and had done well enough to support his wife, Zina, and their four children. Peculiarly, the new capitalist system seemed to have little use for a jack-of-all-trades who lacked ambition, or a way of selling himself. Still, for Anzor and Zubeidat, Badrudi and Zina, who lived at the end of their block, remained authority figures. They were about a decade older, more experienced in the ways of the world and, both being Chechen, in the way that Chechens did things. Zubeidat went to Zina with questions on practice and ritual: How do you get the kids to sleep? How do you handle bedtime with two and then three toddlers? Zubeidat had given birth to two daughters after Tamerlan. Zina gave her practical advice rooted in custom; she told her, for example, that a Chechen boy past the age of seven would have to have his own bed—and extensive praise. Zubeidat’s children, especially the boy, continued to be perfect: always impeccably dressed, polite, quick to get out of the way whenever guests came to the house. Tamerlan, even at the age of five or six, had an obvious understanding of his role as older brother; he was responsible for keeping his sisters quiet when there were guests, and safe when his parents were out. Zina also encouraged Zubeidat to make sure the children prayed five times a day. Neither of their husbands had any interest in what little Muslim ritual had been passed on to their generation, but the women wanted to bring their children up right.

  Anzor responded to Zina’s praise for his son by saying he would have Tamerlan marry her daughter. Zina would say, “No way am I letting her marry your son! Your wife is not Chechen.” Everybody would laugh.

  Some people were perhaps too well suited for the new era. The brothers Alaudin and Aziz Batukaev, two other Sakhzavod Chechens, were on their way to becoming the organized-crime bosses of this part of Kyrgyzstan. They had many trades, but drug trafficking was the most important of them. Central Asian–grown marijuana had been moving into other former Soviet republics for decades, and Chechen crime groups were instrumental in setting up and maintaining those routes. Now they were also moving much more profitable drugs such as opiates from Afghanistan.

  The Batukaevs’ backyard abutted the Tsarnaevs’, and another of the Batukaev brothers set up a car-repair shop there. Anzor became his apprentice: cars would be his business. He would buy cars driven over from Germany, fix them up, and sell them at an outdoor market on the outskirts of Bishkek, as the capital of Kyrgyzstan was now called. Mercedes-Benzes were especially popular, but Audis and even some Volkswagens also had their buyers. If you asked Anzor, he would certainly tell you that this business, unlike some others, was perfectly legal. All the cars had papers of some sort, and customs tax had been paid. Whatever money had to be slipped to customs officers to expedite the process was just part of the system. Chechens always had to pay—if you took the train from Bishkek to Grozny, say, you would be shaken down by customs and border officials half a dozen times along the way, and traveling by train surely was not illegal. In fact, many of the cars making their way from Germany to the former Soviet Union were stolen, or had been reported stolen for tax-evasion or insurance purposes, or were salvaged “sinkers”—cars with severe water damage that could not be sold in Germany and had been written off. The profit margin of Anzor’s business was the product of flaws that made the cars undesirable in Germany and his ability to rectify or mask those flaws.

  Anzor was making a living, but, as long as his business was conducted one car at a time, the family would never be rich. In 1992, they moved again.

  • • •

  BY THIS TIME, Chechnya seemed as close to a promised land as it had ever been. It now had its own president, the wildly popular Dzhokhar Dudaev, a pilot, the only Chechen ever to have reached the rank of general in the Soviet military. He was assimilated and worldly, married to a Russian woman and serving in Estonia when the Soviet Union began to break apart. He resigned from the air force and returned to Chechnya to take the helm. The new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was a vocal believer in ethnic self-determination who had once famously told minorities to “take as much sovereignty as you can carry.” Once Gorbachev was toppled, Yeltsin facilitated the peaceful divorce of the republics that had constituted the Soviet Union: Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where most Chechens, including Dudaev, had spent at least a part of their childhoods, were now independent countries. Chechnya remained among the eighty-nine republics and regions that made up the newly constituted Russian Federation (a number that would shrink as a few of them combined over the coming years). Of these, Chechnya would be the only one to have the courage of its convictions and claim independence.

  Anzor, Zubeidat, and their three children moved to Chechnya, to the house Zayndy had been building in Chiry-Yurt. There were cars to be fixed here, too, so Anzor was busy. Zubeidat was pregnant with their fourth child. When the boy was born in July 1993, they named him Dzhokhar, for the republic’s heroic president.

  Chechnya had everything it needed to succeed on its own: international borders and easy trading routes with such potential partners as Turkey and Azerbaijan; oil, which it now planned to keep instead of shipping for processing to other parts of Russia; and the will to prosper once it was finally free, after nearly two centuries of the Russian yoke. The only thing it lacked was Moscow’s consent to let it go. When Yeltsin talked about sovereignty, he had apparently meant other Soviet republics, like Kyrgyzstan or Ukraine, not the ones inside Russia. The prospect of one of the eighty-nine regions breaking off and starting a chain reaction was unacceptable. Indeed, Moscow needed to nip such independence movements to prevent further ones. Cracking down on Chechnya would be a popular move—most Russian citizens remained deeply prejudiced against Chechens—and would send a strong message to other regions with pro-independence movements.

  Moscow imposed an economic blockade of Chechnya. When that failed to bring it back into the Russian fold, Yeltsin’s government reached for other measures. In the summer of 1994, unmarked planes began flying low over Chechen towns and villages, firing at random and dropping a few bombs. Kremlin spokespeople blamed those attacks on Azerbaijan, without bothering to explain why Chechnya’s southern neighbor would suddenly take to bombing it. These were Moscow’s warning shots, which, unsurprisingly, served only to mobilize the Chechens in support of independence.

  In December 1994, Russian troops amassed on the border with Chechnya. On New Year’s Eve, Russian planes bombed Grozny so hard an international expert soon compared it to Dresden. By this time, Anzor, Zubeidat, and their four children were in a battered Škoda, driving to Kyrgyzstan. They might not have learned to pick their destinations, but, with moving as their solution to everything, they did know when it was time to get out.

  Three

  DREAMING OF AMERICA

  Tamerlan’s grade-school teacher Natalya Kurochkina told me that the boy was afraid of fireworks, presumably because he had been terrified by the bombing of Chechnya. Badrudi Tsokaev, Anzor’s Tokmok friend and neighbor, told me that the rear right door of the Škoda in which Anzor brought his family back from Chechnya at the end of 1994 resembled a sieve from having been shot up by a machine gun—though it is not clear whether this had been Anzor’s car at the time of the shooting or someone else’s vehicle that he acquired later, since he had the skills required to repair it. Years later, in America, Anzor appears to have blamed the pains and worries that plagued him on the trauma wrought by war. On the other hand, his cousin Jamal, the one who had stepped into the father role after Zayndy died, told me with some resentment that, unlike him, neither Anzor nor Tamerlan had lived in Chechnya during the war. This was true: they left at the very beginning, and things got so very much worse after that. The Tsarnaevs never had to zigzag on foot along a road for miles, trying to avoid stepping on dead bodies. None of them ever saw a drunk Russian soldier stumble through the doorway of their house and shoot someone they loved. None of them had a friend
or relative die in their arms, the warm smell of his blood sticking to their clothes, their hair, their skin forevermore. As a family, they never endured the ordeal to which virtually every family in Chechnya was subjected: that of searching and waiting for a male relative who had disappeared.

  Of all the experiences of war, the Tsarnaevs were fully exposed only to one—fear. Unlike the people who stayed in Chechnya, they never learned to normalize war. Reporting on the war in 1994–1996 and in 2000, I saw women in Chechnya who for months cooked family meals on open fires on city sidewalks. I saw children who did not remember ever having set foot outside their apartments and who could not sleep without the sound of artillery fire. I saw young women who had mastered the care and handling of Russian soldiers and knew that if they ever failed, their family members would pay with their lives. The Tsarnaevs simply ran for their lives. Who is to say this leaves a lesser scar?

  Over the next two years, as the Russian army continued to pummel Chechnya, refugees from the war streamed into Kazakh and Kyrgyz towns where they had family. Some said they needed protection from the rebels; others said they were the rebels and needed protection all the more. They brought fear, and they brought guns, and they were not always welcome. “We are practically natives here,” Ruslan Zakriev, the cowboy-hat-wearing self-appointed leader of the Tokmok Chechens, told me. “We didn’t want any trouble.” And when trouble came—as when shoot-outs began on the Chechen streets of Tokmok and Bishkek—they blamed it on the new Chechnya. Anzor and Zubeidat confirmed: The new Chechnya was not a place for living. Anzor said he had sold the house his father had been building in the village of Chiry-Yurt. They would not be going back.

  Anzor and Zubeidat together took Tamerlan to Tokmok’s School Number Two to sign him up for first grade. It was the middle of the school year, but the other children accepted him quickly and uncritically because Natalya Kurochkina told them that this boy was running from the war. “We talked a lot about the war then,” she remembered almost twenty years later. “There were kids coming to the school who had lost fathers there.” Aside from a conspicuous fear of fireworks, which may be too handy a foreshadowing to be fully believed, Tamerlan stood out only for the best of all possible reasons. He was an exemplary child, polite to a fault and often speaking caringly about his younger sisters and brother.

  Zubeidat’s project of rearing perfect children remained on track. She was an overachieving stay-at-home mother while Anzor continued to fix cars. When he came to school, however, he wore a suit; the teachers perceived them as a white-collar couple who were seeking the best possible education for their children. Tokmok’s best, however, was not nearly as rigorous, challenging, or ambitious as Zubeidat wanted it to be. At the end of second grade Zubeidat withdrew Tamerlan from the school. Here the trail goes cold for two years, but in 1999 Tamerlan was enrolled in fifth grade at Tokmok’s Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One. “We got prestigious that year,” the principal explained to me.

  School Number One was a school for families like the Tsarnaevs, those whose plans for their children extended far beyond the boundaries of their own universe. In 1999 the state educational authority granted the town’s oldest school the status of “gymnasium”—no one could be quite sure what that meant except that now it was officially the best school in Tokmok. Anzor and Zubeidat sold the old Tsarnaev family home in Sakhzavod and moved to the center of town to live near the best school. From the second-floor window of their apartment they could see the white two-story building with its Greek portico and decorative Doric columns, and a red flag protruding from the middle of the facade as though it had been stuck between the school’s eyes. There was a skimpy garden in front of the school, and this was where I found the principal, Lubov Shulzhenko, sitting on a bench beneath a dry little maple tree on a scorching morning in July 2014. She was a bleached-blond woman in her early sixties, very short and very overweight, and she had been running the school for twenty-five years. She wanted me to know what a good school it was. She wanted everyone to know. In her office, the walls were literally covered with citations. She made sure her students entered every competition, big and small, in everything from Russian spelling to rope-skipping, and she maintained a carefully curated rotating exposition of the citations, because even her impressively sized office walls could not hold them all.

  She bragged about the graduates who had fulfilled their parents’ dreams, like a young man named Sergei who had won a mathematics scholarship and was now writing software for a German company. Inside the school, Sergei’s picture was one of a dozen in a display featuring the distinguished graduates of Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One. His accomplishment appeared more impressive than any of the others’, but the caption indicated he had graduated more than a decade earlier. Miracles do not happen very often. Most of the other graduates, including the distinguished ones, had stayed in Tokmok, doing what their parents did—working as clerks in the bloated town government or one of the other outposts of state power. And for the majority of graduates, the most useful skill they acquired at Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One was so-called professional training: woodworking for the boys and sewing for the girls.

  • • •

  ANZOR’S SIBLINGS who had left Tokmok were living an entirely different life. Bishkek, where Maret, Ruslan, and Alvi were living, was less than an hour’s drive away, but it seemed a century closer to the Technicolor world of the video-screening salons. Bishkek has its own Chechen neighborhood on its own outskirts, called Lebedinovka, or Swan Village. It is as flat and dusty as Sakhzavod, though the houses and gardens, hidden from view by tall concrete fences, are often larger and better tended than those in Tokmok. Many of the families who live here have relatives in Tokmok, including the Tsarnaevs and the Tsokaevs; some grew up in Tokmok. As Muslims, they pray five times a day and hold the fast during Ramadan; as Chechens, they acknowledge that children are the property of the father’s side of the family, and some of the women do not sit at the table with the men; and yet, life in the capital has a perceptibly different quality from life in the provinces, however close they may be.

  Ruslan was studying law at the university. Almost every night he stopped at the house of Badrudi Tsokaev’s niece Madina—rather, the house of her husband’s parents—and stayed until three in the morning. Incredibly, Madina’s mother-in-law, the head of that household, had no objections to a mixed-gender young crowd that talked endlessly and finished just about every night by dancing the Lezghinka, a fast, even frantic dance traditional to many of the cultures of the Caucasus.

  Then something truly incredible happened. Maret, who was now a judge, came to see an old classmate, Badrudi Tsokaev’s sister Yakha, at work. Yakha was a saleswoman at a small grocery store, and one could always stop by for a chat. Maret said she wanted to get married to a man who was “mixed.” Yakha thought this meant he was only half Chechen and assured her friend that if he was Chechen on his father’s side, the marriage would be accepted. But Maret was simply easing her friend into the news. There was nothing “mixed,” and nothing Chechen, about her fiancé: he was a Canadian. When she left for Canada with him, she did not even go to say good-bye to her old friends.

  Ruslan graduated and got a job with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the giant American consultancy, which was running a large-scale privatization program funded by the U.S. State Department. Then he started dating a young woman who worked there with him—an American woman, not a Chechen-American but a real, blond American named Samantha, who wore trousers, collected swords, was thoroughly used to getting her way, and had a father who had worked for the CIA. Then Ruslan moved in with her. Among the Chechens of Lebedinovka, a rumor began to spread that Ruslan was setting things up for a fake marriage so he could move to the United States. But the rumor did not stick: the impending marriage was in fact scandalously real. Ruslan and Samantha married in a Muslim ceremony and in 1996 moved to the United States, where Ruslan planned to go to law school—word at Lebedinovka w
as that he would be going to Harvard, though in fact he would eventually be accepted at Duke University Law School.

  And then Alvi went to the United States. He did not have a law degree or an American spouse—he was making money as a handyman and his wife was very much Chechen, and living in Kyrgyzstan—but he got a tourist visa and took off. By this time the entire Tsarnaev clan agreed: the future was in the United States—and the United States was within reach. Anzor and Zubeidat told all their friends that they were moving to America. They said it was the only place their children could get the education they deserved. In preparation, both Anzor and Zubeidat would obtain college degrees in law, as Ruslan and Maret had done.

  • • •

  MEDIA ACCOUNTS of the Tsarnaev story generally state as fact that Anzor worked at the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan—this was apparently what he consistently said after the family moved to the United States. Even the FBI investigators seem never to have questioned this claim. Some accounts add that at a certain point, as the political situation in Kyrgyzstan deteriorated, Anzor, as a Chechen, could no longer work in law enforcement. In fact, while it is true that Kyrgyzstan has seen extreme ethnic tensions and violence in the past twenty years, most of it has been directed at the large ethnic Uzbek minority; the tiny Chechen minority has not been affected—that is, it has not been marginalized further than it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Friends do recall that a few years after Anzor and Zubeidat began studying law, Anzor started showing off an employee ID issued by the Pervomaysky District Prosecutor’s Office in Bishkek. There is, however, no record of anyone named Anzor Tsarnaev ever having worked for the Pervomaysky or any other prosecutor’s office in Bishkek.