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Chechnya to Boston: What Do we Really Know?


Chechnya is like a small Afghanistan, occupied and brutalized by the Russians for almost 200 years. The Chechens, and their neighbors, fought back with all the means at their disposal against an invader that outnumbered and outgunned them. The Chechens resorted to ambush, hit-and-run and other guerilla tactics. The most recent spike in violence was during the post-Soviet Russian-Chechen Wars, first in 1994-96 and again 1999-2000. The aftermath lingers, if we can judge by the Moscow subway bombing of 2010. The Chechens are angry and the Russians are their target.

Chechnya is a region in the Caucasus Mountains that form the southern border of the Russian Republic. The entire range stretches between Black and Caspian Seas, north of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Russia took this land in an early nineteenth-century war against Iran, securing the South Caucasus region (“Transcaucasia” to the Russians) while remaining unable to “pacify” the mountains until the 1850s. Russian goals in this drive were clear. Russia is big and flat, and mountains make good borders. Better to hold the high ground than leave it to your neighbors. So it is not the Chechens the Russians want but their mountains. And the Russians have shown since the first fort was built in 1818 that they are willing to kill or deport the inhabitants of those valuable peaks and passes—Chechens, Ingush, Lezghi, Avars, Circassians and others.

In 1944, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population and neighboring Ingush to Central Asia for alleged collaboration with Nazi forces seeking to take Baku’s oil fields. In fact, the Nazis never got near the Chechens or the Ingush. But their lands in the foothills and mountains included roads and passes that could allow Soviet troops to move against Turkey with whom the Soviets had territorial disputes. About a quarter of the Chechen and Ingush populations were killed in the deportations. Signs of their life there, from homes to gravestones were destroyed by Internal Affairs troops. In 2004, the European Parliament declared this an act of genocide.

It is possible that the family of accused bombers Tamerlan and Jokhar Tsarnaev were descendants of deported Chechens. Thousands remained in their places of exile in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan though they were exonerated en masse and allowed to return by Khrushchev in the 1950s. Perhaps the Tsarnaev brothers were from a family that had returned, but left Chechnya again when the post-Soviet fighting destroyed thousands of lives in the 1990s. So far, the media report conflicting stories. How much does it matter? Is it the place of a family’s origin or its history that turns boys into terrorists? If that were sufficient, the list would be long and not very helpful.

Active recruitment and formation of a terrorist is another matter. Many sources report that elder brother Tamerlan spent six months “in Russia,” apparently Daghestan, the region just to the east of Chechnya. Here, according to Russian media and government sources, various terrorist networks manage to operate. Most commonly, Russian sources refer to Islamic radicals, Salafi or Wahhabi groups who aim to take society back to a form and substance they consider pristine and truly Islamic. Perhaps Tamerlan was converted and trained by an extremist group. So far, we don’t have evidence. The problem with using Russian sources is that they refer to nearly all opposition groups in historically Muslim societies as Salafis or Wahhabis. A researcher, or an investigative journalist, cannot distinguish real religious extremists from political critics on this basis.

As in Soviet days, Russia presents two faces to the world vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims. On the one hand Russia has been, for centuries, a state with a large Muslim population along the Volga, the Caucasus and, since the 1860s, Central Asia. Putin has facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, and presented Russia as a protector of Muslims against decadent Western pseudo-culture. At the same time, opponents of Moscow’s policies or activists from historical, if not practicing, Muslim populations are labeled as terrorists—and Wahhabis. In 2002, Putin famously asserted that all Chechens want to kill non-Muslims and invited a skeptical French journalist to convert to Islam and “come to Moscow” for a circumcision. In the 2010 Moscow subway bombing, the declaration of Chechen responsibility was made within two hours of the blast, too soon to clear a path much less analyze blast patterns or surveillance videos. The Caucasus region is especially considered, by Moscow, a haven of Wahhabism.

In view of that context, it is not surprising that the Russian government asked for FBI vetting of a Chechen living in the US who requested a visa to visit Daghestan. Did the FBI drop the ball in clearing Tamerlan? We don’t know what precisely the FBI reported or why. Did Moscow grant the visa and probably keep tabs on this man? Certainly. And what reports did Russia send to the US when Tamerlan came back to Boston?

Russian leaders have in the past asserted that Russia and the US are partners against Islamic radicalism—this was Gorbachev’s justification for invading Azerbaijan in January 1990 to quash a pro-democracy popular front. And it worked. US President Bush said he understood the Kremlin’s need “to keep order.” Moscow is again hinting that Russia and America are victims of the same Chechen radicalism and could be partners in quashing it. Neither should complain about harsh methods by the other—theirs is a global struggle.

But we do not know more than we do know at this point, a week after the terrible bombing at the end of the Boston Marathon. Let's not fill the gaps in our puzzle with assumptions. When we do that we distort the final picture and make it look as if we have answers, so we stop trying to find the actual answers. Whether you are an academic researcher or an investigative journalist, that's just a bad idea.

Audrey L. Altstadt is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst


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