When the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston, the two doctors’ families—the Mazaevs and the Baievs—were already there, as was Hamzat Umarov’s large family in Chelsea. The others had not yet arrived. The Tsarnaevs’ timing was as bad as it had ever been: they landed in America precisely at the moment when they and their kind were seen as most suspect.
AMERICAN SOCIETY, perhaps more than some others, goes through distinct cycles, separated by shifts in the national psyche. But to a new immigrant, nothing was here before—and there is no inkling that things will be different after. There is only the mood of the present moment, and this mood becomes what America feels like. The Tsarnaevs arrived a few months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington had united Americans in fear.
The family had plenty of experience with the power of tragedy to bring a nation together. They had seen this most recently in Russia, in August and September 1999. On three nights bombs had gone off in apartment buildings, burying people under the rubble in their sleep. More than three hundred people died, and Russia, gripped by terror, quickly turned against the Chechens, who were blamed for the attacks. Chechen men throughout Russia were rounded up, Chechen children were hounded out of school, Chechen families were chased out of their homes. The war in Dagestan started. What was now happening in the United States did not look very different: there were the witch hunts, and there was the punitive war in a faraway abstraction of a land. It was called, tellingly and absurdly, the War on Terror, an emotion all nations would like to declare war against if only that were possible. Instead, they waged war on the Muslims. It was always the Muslims.
The Tsarnaevs came to this land, terrorized by the specter of terrorism, from a land and a moment where terrorism looked markedly different. For Americans, terrorism seemed to come from nowhere and to attack them for no reason. In Russia, the first terrorist act that shook the country in the 1990s had been a direct consequence of the war in Chechnya. In June 1995 rebel field commander Shamil Basayev led his troops across the Chechen border into the predominantly ethnic-Russian Stavropol region and seized over six hundred hostages in a civilian hospital and in the surrounding area. This hostage-taking is almost certainly unique in modern terrorist history: first, because most of the hostages survived but were not freed by force; second, and most incredible, because this act of terrorism accomplished its avowed goal.
Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin negotiated with Basayev over the phone, and some of the negotiations were caught on tape by Russian television reporters. Chernomyrdin sounded desperate. In the end he negotiated the release of most of the hostages—except for a busload of volunteers, most of them journalists and human rights activists, whom Basayev would take to Chechnya. They were to be released once Russia pulled back its troops and sat down to negotiate with the rebels. This happened.
The second major act of terrorism that originated in Chechnya (not counting the apartment bombings in 1999 that had almost certainly been falsely blamed on the Chechens) occurred less than a year after the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston. On October 23, 2002, a group of men and women led by a twenty-three-year-old Chechen commander named Movsar Barayev seized a large Moscow theater during a musical performance, taking about eight hundred hostages. The standoff lasted three days. On Day Two, Khassan Baiev, the plastic surgeon now living in Boston, was called upon to negotiate with the hostage-takers over the phone, to try to secure the release of some of the hostages. He tried and failed. Earlier, a number of other people, including several journalists, had also talked with the hostage-takers, and some even managed to enter the theater; young children and non-Russian citizens had been released as a result.
The standoff ended on Day Three with a military operation that was as well conceived as it was spectacularly botched in execution. First, sleeping gas was pumped into the building through its plumbing system, knocking out everyone inside. Russian armed personnel rushed in. They shot dead all the sleeping hostage-takers, making a subsequent investigation impossible. Then they carried the unconscious hostages out and laid them on the porch of the theater, where none of them received prompt medical help. One hundred twenty-nine people died, most of them choking on their own vomit or asphyxiating because they were placed in a way that blocked their breathing.
The tragedy, so clearly created through negligence and, on a more basic level, so clearly a result of the continuing war in Chechnya, drew comparatively little media coverage and virtually no political attention in the United States. After September 11, America had stopped criticizing Russia for waging war in Chechnya. In the post-9/11 era, Russia got to reframe Chechnya, and the continuing bloodshed in Dagestan, as part of a war it was now fighting alongside the United States—the war against radical Islamist terrorists. The United States and Russia agreed to share information on the Islamist threat. Tokmok appeared on the map of the world, and of American–Russian relations: for eight years starting in December 2001, United States military planes would be taking off from Manas Air Base just outside Tokmok—by agreement with Kyrgyzstan and with Moscow’s acquiescence.
In this new era, when the United States stopped viewing Chechen rebels as freedom fighters and started seeing them through Russian optics, as likely Islamic terrorists, a new regulation blocked anyone who had provided “material support” to any of the extralegal fighters from receiving refugee status and a green card.
Musa Khadzhimuratov, though he came over as a refugee, would never be issued his green card. Had this regulation been in effect earlier, it could also have applied to Ruslan Tsarnaev, who at one point after moving to the United States started a group of Chechen exiles who may or may not have had ties to the pro-independence forces. Fortunately for Ruslan, by the time the new regulation went into effect, he was a full United States citizen.
RUSLAN’S AMERICANNESS had cost him a great deal. When he first moved to the United States with his wife, they lived in her parents’ house in Washington state. Graham Fuller, a former high-level CIA official, was a onetime Russia scholar, an expert on Islam, and a charming, enthusiastic talker. He and Ruslan spoke Russian with each other. But other than talking with his father-in-law while Samantha worked on her business-school applications, Ruslan did one of two things: he tried to master English by memorizing his way through a Russian–English dictionary, ignoring Graham Fuller’s counsel that this was no way to learn a language, and he sat on a couch in the basement, watching, over and over again, the same videotape of a Chechen celebration with Lezghinka, which they used to dance every night back in Bishkek. Eventually he began making contact with other Chechens in America, and he even registered his new organization at Fuller’s address. This activity brought him back to life, but by this time his marriage had collapsed.