Book Review: The Brothers
It’s not often that the world demands a journalist to write a book. Usually the journalist, book in mind, has to scream in the hope the world might listen. It is refreshing then to find the fit between author and book so perfect to bring about the former.
Marsha Gessen, was contacted by her best friend who told her on no uncertain terms she must write a book about the Tsarnaev brothers - the terrorists responsible for the 2012 bombings at the Boston Marathon. That friend should be rewarded with a nice bottle of something for that bolt of inspiration - for the end result The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy is about as good a match between author’s lived experience and subject matter as exists.
Gessen is ideal because she has stood astride of the three worlds concerned - she was born in the Soviet Union, schooled in America and then emigrated again to Russia (as distinct from the dissolved USSR).
Usually, when American born journalists look beyond their shores and confront the one of the two major American postwar preoccupations (communism and terrorism) they must shake off their domestically imbued prejudices and penetrate the caricatures that haunt their machine-gun, wafer thin newscycle. It is a process that usually discards colour and texture. In a 2015 podcast, when Gessen spoke about returning to Russia she told about feeling at once at home. The dust, she said, smelt so familiar. Details like these come from experience not research.
So too do the brother’s story begin in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s exile of their ancestors, the Chechens and Ingush, from their ancient homeland to the Union’s fringes in the final bloody years of the Great Patriotic War. Gessen’s recounting is gripping and tragic as she recounts the Chechens as they are banished, then, after Stalin’s death, allowed to move anywhere within the USSR but their homeland and, once finally allowed to return, they are bombed to hell within it in the wake of the two bloody Chechen wars. The Tsarnaev family are victims of their people’s dislocation, the brothers are born in Kyrgyzstan then move to Dagestan and finally to the US as young refugees.
Gessen’s strength as a writer is exactly as her friend predicted. She evokes the fragmented immigrant reality - faultlines that run as much between generations as between the new and old worlds. Gessen is consummately qualified to discuss this subject, yet her normally marching prose lapses into wistful poetry, her steely eyed determination softens and what emerges is the person who became nostalgic about the smell of dust in a Russian cafeteria. It becomes clear that Gessen is putting herself into the Tsarnaev’s story - which is not a fault but adds the personal colour from her pallette to their story.
“Television news combined with their landlady’s conversation and Cambridge’s progressive civics and history lessons, never formed a coherent picture much less the kind of flow of information that allows immigrants…to inhabit the same story as the people among whom the live. Information continued to come in scraps as it does for newcomers. Each scrap is tried on for size as a theory of everything, the more crudely it simplifies reality the better it is suited for that purpose.”
As the book marches on, we learn about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a negative space within their struggling immigrant family’s constellation. Gessen sketches out their context by secondhand accounts - the family’s parents, their brothers’ teachers, their roommates and friends. Yet the brothers themselves are strangely absent. The more the author sketches out the perimeter of their silhouette the wider becomes the chasm between Gessen’s brothers and the men responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombings. Like the Chechen American community, Gessen appears supremely reticent to take any official version as given.
The reason for this becomes apparent after the bombing - in the final chapters of The Brothers, Gessen relays a series of byzantine conspiracy theories that explain why the brothers may not be responsible for the bombings. She explains that while the theories are probably not true they explain why within America’s Chechen community, traumatised by their oppression within Soviet and post-Soviet Russia then in America, have learned to distrust official explanations outright - always regarding power and authority as the real perpetrators of violence. Some of the conspiracy theories are quite convincing but you have the feeling that Gessen is trying to have her cake and eat it too - where conspiracies are offered without the scrutiny given to the official version.
Official oppression arrives in the form of the FBI, their investigation casts a wide net, rounding-up and questioning of members of the Chechen community in Boston and elsewhere. In numerous cases those interrogated, followed and intimidated are peripheral at best. The echo between Stalin’s deportation in 1944 and the FBI’s unofficial policy of deporting non-American citizens is subtle but also out of proportion to be considered equivalent. One wonders exactly what an investigation might entail if not questioning the closeknit community that surrounded the brothers. Far from racial profiling and intimidation the investigation seems to be earnest, more the product of a faulty model of terrorist cells than Soviet style collective punishment. You wonder if she would be writing about official incompetence instead had the FBI neglected to question them.
Conspicuous in it’s absence are stories about any of the five killed or the hundreds injured in the bombings. Perhaps Gessen is counting on an American audience - whose screens were saturated with image after image of the torn and the bloodied. She is happy to critique the FBI’s methods, their radicalisation theory and propose vague motives for Tamerlan as a critic of American foreign policy. Some description of the vicitims even one as cursory as I have provided would have provided a motive if not a justification to the FBI’s overreach - as they tried depserately to uncover a terrorist cell that simply didn’t exist, resorting to more and more extreme measures.
Of particular note is the September 11 2011 Waltham triple homicide in which three people were killed, their throats slit, the scene strewn with money and marijuana. One of those killed was very close to Tamerlan who left town immediately after and did not attend the funeral. For two years nothing happened, then after the bombings and the death of Tamerlan, another Chechen, Ibragim Todashev was interrogated and shot by an FBI agent whilst writing a confession about the killing. Many shapes can be made to join these dots - either Tamerlan and fellow Chechen ceremonially executed Americans on the tenth anniversary of September 11 or the FBI murdered the only living witness after forcing him to write a confession or something else entirely. We are left with a series of blanks and our own intuition and prejudices to fill them.
The final question remains: what right does a reader have to demand a journalist weave facts into an absolute and cohesive reality? It certainly is unsatisfying to arrive at the end of a book with more questions than when you began. Yet one must respect Gessen’s relentless honesty and discipline not to give in to the temptation to fabicate rather than present, to entertain every possible version and understand that theories themselves carry weight, no matter how incredible. More worrying, however, is her reluctance to apply the same condemnation and critical eye to the motives of the Tsarnaev brothers as to the FBI and the Watertown PD. Her willingness to omit the human cost of the bombings themselves, and explain them away as products of Chechen’s historical trauma, their dislocation within American society, or on failing that, as possibly a wider conspiracy, means all slack is afforded to the Tsarnaevs.
It’s interesting to note that the most credible explanation is FBI overreach was itself the product of institutional trauma wrought by September 11, their failure to yet again to prevent a major domestic terrorist act and the aftermath of immense pressure applied to create a story that matched their model. That The Brothers does not succumb to that same pressure testifies to Gessen’s immense strength as a journalist.