Broken dreams

As Masha Gessen herself admits — and as friends and journalist colleagues repeatedly told her — it was a strange choice to write this book. But you only have to get a few pages in to realise that Gessen, the author of a bestselling analysis of Putin, is ideally placed to take on the story behind the Boston marathon bombers. And she is the perfect person to situate it in the wider context of ‘the war on terror’ in a way that illuminates and inspires. This is quite simply a remarkable piece of old-school journalism.

On 15 April 2013 two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others. Two brothers, immediately identified as ‘Chechens’ (not strictly speaking true: they were American citizens), were implicated. In the ensuing manhunt, the eldest, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed. Last month Dzokhar was sentenced to death in a Boston court.

Gessen takes the story back a generation, travelling across the US and the former Soviet Union to interview family members, friends and colleagues. She draws a picture of an unavoidably fragmented group of people. The Tsarnaevs’ parents come from an eternally persecuted part of Soviet Russia: entire swathes of the Caucasus were deported during the Stalinist era. Gessen very carefully recounts the wider history of the area and the mentality of the people who had to live through all this during the 20th century in order to plant a seed in the reader’s mind: identity is extremely complicated.

Her purpose in doing this is to question whether the Tsarnaevs were ‘radicalised’ by some kind of Chechen branch of al-Qaeda or similar. Or it’s at the very least to introduce some shades of grey into that narrative. Gessen is meticulously objective, but she’s able to show that just as it is possible to paint the two brothers as ‘Muslim radicals’, it would also be possible to depict them as ‘ordinary American citizens’.