The Brothers (3 page)

Zayndy Tsarnaev, Anzor’s father, was brought to Kyrgyzstan at the age of thirteen. The family was placed about forty miles east of the Kyrgyz capital, Frunze, in Tokmok, a settlement wedged in a narrow valley between the Kyrgyz Range and the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains. Local legend has it that the Soviets once considered making Tokmok the capital, but the Chu, a furious mountain river that took over the entire valley every spring, rendered the location unsuitable. When the exiles arrived in Kyrgyzstan, an effort to harness the Chu was under way. The men were immediately rounded up and loaded onto horse-driven carts, which took them to the construction site for the future hydroelectric plant. Delivered late at night, the men escaped early the next morning to look for the railroad station so that they could go back to help their families. Secret-police files overflow with reports and complaints filed by construction supervisors, who demanded a police cordon at the site to keep the men from leaving. The paperwork details living conditions at the site. There was no shelter. There were no bathing facilities, which meant the men were flea-ridden. They received two meals a day, at six in the morning and at five in the evening. The rations consisted solely of grain and water. As the men died off, secret police conducted raids to round up new workers from among the special settlers and deliver them to the site. Construction supervisors complained the new arrivals were unfit for work because they were not only extremely emaciated but also naked and barefoot.

The death rate among the exiles remained steady through the freezing spring and the scorching summer; they entered the winter of 1944–1945 with no suitable shelter or reliable source of sustenance, and the dying continued. The following year decimated the survivors, and the year after that killed many of those who remained. And yet, after three or four years—after the death of half or more of the Chechen population, after the pain and humiliation and dread of living in an open-air prison and, incongruously, in a constant state of uncertainty—the life of the “special settlers” appeared to stabilize. They were still, in essence, prisoners, with their movement and activities severely restricted and violence a daily threat, but they gradually secured housing and, to some extent, succeeded in assimilating. Some families continued to hold their children back from Russian- and Kyrgyz-language schools—Chechen-language education had effectively been outlawed—but after a few years this was a small, albeit constant, minority. Access to the legal local economy, accorded only to fully vested Soviet citizens, never really opened up to the exiles, but the Chechens compensated by creating gray-market trading systems, so that after a few years they were not only able to move out of cramped barracks and freezing mud huts but also became providers of coveted goods for the locals—and since virtually all goods were in short supply, most goods were indeed coveted. While most families submitted to having their children educated at Russian- and Kyrgyz-language schools, virtually everyone still spoke Chechen at home, considered intermarriage impossible, and continued to live in accordance with Adat, which, in exile, gradually became both more important and less detailed.

•   •   •

STALIN DIED IN 1953,
nine years and one day after the Chechens began arriving in Kyrgyzstan. In another three years the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, began gingerly to lift restrictions on the deported ethnic groups. The Party now admitted that the exiles had been wronged—in a meeting with a group of them, Khrushchev even said the dictator had been paranoid and out of control—but the bureaucracy did not know how to handle hundreds of thousands of people who had been displaced. Their houses and lands had long since been occupied by others, in the concerted campaign of colonization that the state had conducted for years after the deportation. Ethnic Russians had been moved into Chechnya by the orphanageful, in conditions scarcely less punishing than the Chechens were facing in Central Asia, and those who survived had by now put down roots. What kind of violence would break out if the Chechens—or the Kabardians, or the Balkars—returned to claim their homes?

Representatives of the displaced peoples begged that they be allowed to return, in exchange for promising to not challenge the current residents and to settle on empty land, as long as it was in the Caucasus. The Khrushchev government did not believe them and, after much hemming and hawing, settled on a particularly cruel way of sawing the baby in half: the exiles would be effectively freed, which is to say, they would be given standard-issue Soviet documents and released from all limitations on freedom of movement, allowing them to settle anywhere in the USSR—except in their lands of origin. The first few groups of exiles who were offered this deal accepted it, but in the fall of 1956 the Kyrgyzstan Chechens balked en masse and refused to sign the agreements that would have entitled them to regular identity documents. At the end of that year, the Central Committee finally approved a plan for returning Chechens to Chechnya, gradually, over the course of three years, in a highly controlled manner. The process was hellish and hellishly corrupt. It also took much longer than planned. But by the mid-1960s everyone who wanted to move to the Caucasus had left. Soviet statistics make it all but impossible to determine what proportion of the exiled population went back, but thousands of families stayed in Kyrgyzstan. Those who stayed also wanted to go home—but to them, home had become an abstraction, or at least a distant goal. Some lacked the money to move. Others could not face the hardship. “No one is kicking us out of here, and no one is waiting for us there,” a Chechen man in Tokmok told me in 2014.

Sixty years to the week earlier, a man named Medzhit Baiev said in the presence of a secret-police informant: “I am an old man and don’t need to go anywhere, but my children will now have the same rights as all the other peoples of the Soviet Union. I am deeply grateful to the government.” He was right: his descendant Khassan would grow up in Chechnya. In the 1990s he would face the war there, work as a surgeon operating on the wounded, then escape to the United States and settle in Boston, where he would eventually help another Chechen family, the Tsarnaevs, to settle as well.

But in the 1960s, the Tsarnaevs also stayed in Kyrgyzstan. Zayndy had made it by then—he ran the dumping ground that had formed in an old quarry in Tokmok. Between his official salary and a sideline of collecting scrap metal, paper, and clothing that he fished out of the refuse and turned in to the relevant recycling plants, he was making a good living. His wife was having one child after another. He ran the house like a homegrown tyrant; his wife would stay home and raise their kids to be educated and ambitious, but she would never be seen outside the home. Zayndy would invest in some land in Chechnya and build a house, so that eventually his children’s children would grow up there. This was the thinking of most of those who stayed behind: they were not putting down roots in Kyrgyzstan—they were just extending their stay before their families returned home at last.

In 1985, Anzor Tsarnaev returned from his military service in Novosibirsk to his father’s home in Kyrgyzstan, bringing his young wife with him. The neighborhood was Sakhzavod, so named for the nearby sugarcane-processing plant. There was also a cannery and a wool-processing plant—it was the industrial outskirts of Tokmok, which itself had come to feel like the remote outskirts of Frunze, the capital. Frunze was like a flattened version of Novosibirsk—the same vast squares and broad avenues and Soviet neoclassical buildings, only much lower. And Tokmok was like nothing in particular. The Chu had been harnessed in 1982. It was now a tame little stream flowing through a concrete enclosure, but Tokmok itself still had a makeshift, insecure sense about it, as though every structure could be washed away any minute. With the exception of a couple of school buildings, nothing here looked like it was meant to last.

A conglomeration of settlers had nested their homes near the factories: cinder-block first stories with wooden attics and sharply pitched asbestos-board roofs. One of these roofs had given way under the feet of Anzor’s older brother in 1979 as he was replacing a worn red Soviet flag on top of a trade school with a newer one, and he had fallen to his death. In 1985, when Anzor and Zubeidat came, most of the other five Tsarnaev children were still in or around their parents’ house. The street on which they lived was split about equally between Chechens and ethnic Germans. The latter called their children by Russian diminutives but continued to speak German to them:
“Yasha, herkommen,”
they called out into the street at suppertime, and the children disappeared behind the cinder-block fences. The street had a blind feel to it—a single block long, lined with solid gray fences, it ran perpendicular to the mountain ranges, so neither of them could be seen from a house window. Immediately upon arriving, Zubeidat commenced dreaming of living by the sea again someday. Everyone on this street dreamed of someday going home to someplace beautiful and far away.

WANDERING

T
he idea that they were like brother and sister because they were both from the Caucasus really held only as long as Anzor and Zubeidat stayed far away from both the Caucasus itself and their families. According to both Avar and Chechen traditions, now that Anzor and Zubeidat were married, she was to enter his parents’ house as a member of his family. Had she married an Avar, she would have had the support and coaching of the women of her own family in this endeavor; as it was, she was now alone. And to her new family, she was immediately suspect. Neither Anzor nor his parents, who had grown up in Kyrgyzstan with only a mythical, vague story of the Caucasus, had ever even heard of the Avars, although they speak a language closely related to Chechen and have historically been viewed by their Russian rulers as a subset of the Chechens. To the Tokmok Chechens, Zubeidat was just not-Chechen. She worked conscientiously to fit in, quickly and easily learning to speak Chechen—though she and Anzor always spoke Russian to each other—but in other ways she was as different as a woman could be from her new mother-in-law. Liza was what Americans might call a victim of domestic abuse; her Chechen neighbors from Tokmok just say that Zayndy was “very strict” and never let his wife go out in public by herself or, for that matter, with him. Few of their former neighbors can even recall her name, so quiet and invisible was she. Zubeidat and Anzor, on the other hand, appeared inseparable; more than that, they appeared to be equal partners. Not for Zubeidat the Chechen—or Avar—custom of serving the men and never sitting down at the table with them, or with the guests. Nor did she hold back in conversation. She could be charming, she had a loud, unabashed laugh, she invited and accepted compliments, and unlike her gentle husband, she could occasionally be cutting. If anything, these rebellious ways had to do with Zubeidat’s having grown up in a city, and with having made a break with her own family, but Liza had only one word for all of it: Avar.

Anzor had promised Zubeidat back in Novosibirsk that he would take her as far as they needed to go to be happy together. It is not clear how they chose Kalmykia as their destination after Tokmok. Most of Anzor’s uncles and cousins had moved to Chechnya, and Zayndy was, according to his plan, slowly building a house there as well, in the village of Chiry-Yurt. But Zubeidat may have feared she would not be accepted in Chechnya, or perhaps none of Anzor’s uncles had extended an invitation. An older cousin on Liza’s side, though, invited them to Kalmykia, Dagestan’s northern neighbor—and perhaps the idea of living on the Caspian again appealed to Zubeidat. But Kalmykia turned out to be the opposite of Makhachkala, a desert—just sand and steppes and emptiness that made even what sea it touched seem desolate. And Anzor’s relative turned out to be a cattle farmer. Anzor’s family, like all the Chechens in Tokmok, had always kept cows, sheep, and goats in numbers the Soviet government deemed excessive. (Most of their livestock was part of the shadow economy and had to be hidden when inspectors or snoops came around.) So Anzor easily fell into the farmwork: he was generally willing to do any kind of labor, and this he was good at. But Zubeidat, although she had family who lived in a village back in Dagestan, was herself a city girl, and she had not imagined that a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere would be the place where she would find happiness.

Happiness came in the form of their first child. Zubeidat gave birth to a boy in October 1986. They named him Tamerlan, for the Central Asian conqueror with refined tastes—Tima, Russian style, for short. He was perfect and, Zubeidat knew, always would be. And she would be a perfect mother. He was decked out in bow ties from the time he was a toddler; in grade school, he would stand out among his classmates for his clean clothes; in middle school, for his near-perfect grades. But none of this could happen on a cattle farm in the steppes of Kalmykia. For the boy’s sake, Anzor and Zubeidat moved again.

•   •   •

THEY RETURNED TO
Tokmok after just six months in Kalmykia. Zubeidat was nineteen now, Anzor was twenty, and they were parents. Now that Zubeidat had given birth to a male child, Anzor’s family might treat her more kindly. The move back to the Tsarnaevs’ house, though, was a gamble. In the Chechen tradition, the child belongs to the father’s family, and his mother is treated as merely an appendage; if there is conflict, she can leave or be kicked out, but the child stays in his paternal grandparents’ home. It might have helped that the Tsarnaev home was rapidly emptying out: the eldest daughter, Malkan, had married and moved to Chechnya; the next daughter, Maret, always Tokmok’s star student, was in nearby Frunze, studying law and supporting herself as a janitor; and now the youngest, Ruslan, had also been accepted to the law college in Frunze. Alvi, an older brother, was still in Tokmok, but unmarried. Tamerlan would be the first grandchild in the family home.

In 1988, when the baby was not yet two, the Tsarnaev family was changed irrevocably. A quarter-century later,
The Boston Globe
would report that Anzor’s father had “died in an explosion,” as though in a blast that foreshadowed the blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The Tokmok tragedy was more mundane than that account implies. Working at the city dump, Zayndy found a large metal canister of the kind usually used for natural gas. This object could be useful not just as scrap metal but also for parts. Canisters like these were used in retrofitting cars to run on natural gas, and like everything that went into cars, they were in short supply. Zayndy placed it in his own car in order to move it from the dump. The container must have been leaking gas: when Zayndy started the car, it blew up. It was later impossible to determine, from the scraps of the car, whether the container had been in the trunk or on the backseat.

Liza moved to Frunze to live with Maret, who had graduated with her law degree and was starting what would be a brilliant career. Alvi took over the dump but had little use for the family home. Anzor and Zubeidat were now in charge of the two-story house in Tokmok.

•   •   •

MEANWHILE,
the Soviet Union was imploding. Far away, in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev declared perestroika and glasnost. All over the vast empire, movements for independence and ethnic self-determination were taking shape. Some struggles were beginning to lead to bloodshed. In Tokmok, glasnost—the gradual softening of censorship—meant that video-screening salons started opening. They were not glamorous affairs, just plain rooms with a videocassette player and a screen no larger than those found in many American living rooms, but the movies they showed were more colorful, brighter, and faster than anything Tokmok had ever seen. Zubeidat and her friends liked the Bollywood films that were flooding Soviet television and the newly minted salons. Anzor and the other men might secretly have liked them as well; openly they acknowledged loving only
Police Academy
. In any case, whether or not they were ever dubbed “the Swans,” as Zubeidat would claim, the couple continued to be so dramatically affectionate with each other that once their friends were exposed to Bollywood sappiness, they started calling them “the Indians.” And whatever the men’s taste in movies, certainly they liked that they now had a place to gather outside their homes and backyards: they loitered outside the video salons before and in between the irregularly scheduled screenings, smoking and talking about their plans for the future, which was starting noticeably to change.

The Soviet Union was gradually opening its borders, and this meant that the Germans of Sakhzavod left. Kyrgyz families moved into their houses, cutting down their neat little orchards and making the Chechens nostalgic for their old neighbors’ fastidiousness. More of the Chechens were leaving, too. Anzor’s last remaining relative in Tokmok, Zayndy’s first cousin Jamal, who in accordance with custom had become the male authority figure for Alvi and Anzor after their father’s death, sold his house in Sakhzavod and moved to Grozny. He was becoming an entrepreneur, which was the thing to be now.

There was suddenly no limit to what you could do. One Chechen man, Ruslan Zakriev, bought a city park in the center of Tokmok. For about a year he thought about what to do with it. Then he bought some equipment from an unfinished amusement park and turned Tokmok’s city park into an amusement park with old-fashioned carousels and a creaky roller coaster. He took to wearing a white cowboy hat, belted jeans, and brown pointy-toed boots. Later, after the word “diaspora” had seeped into the Russian spoken here, he declared himself the head of the Chechen diaspora.

Public land was no longer public, it seemed, but was a source of private money. Alvi managed to convince somebody that the old quarry beneath the town dump was still full of copper or aluminum or both. Excavators came and found nothing, but by that time Alvi was gone with the money.

Two of Anzor’s closest friends, Semyon and Alladin Abaev, became long-haul truck drivers: now that the borders were open to imported goods and private businesses were allowed to buy and sell them, truckers were in high demand. Eventually each would buy his own German-made MAN truck, and a house with a yard large enough to park it.

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.