The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy - Couverture souple

Gessen, Masha

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1594634009 ISBN 13 : 9781594634000

Editeur : Riverhead Books, 2016

A propos du livre

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CAST OF CHARACTERS

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THE TSARNAEV FAMILY

The Brothers: Tamerlan, wife Karima (formerly Katherine Russell), daughter Zahira; and Dzhokhar (later Jahar)

Parents: Anzor and Zubeidat

Paternal grandparents: Zayndy and Liza

Paternal uncles, aunts, and cousins: Ayndy; Malkan and son Husein; Maret; Alvi, wife Zhanar, children Aindy and Luiza; Ruslan, first wife Samantha Fuller, father-in-law Graham Fuller

Sisters: Bella, husband Rizvan, son Ramzan; Ailina, husband Elmirza, son Ziaudy

Cousin: Jamal Tsarnaev

KYRGYZSTAN

Friends and neighbors: Semyon and Alladin Abaev, Anzor’s closest friends; Badrudi and Zina Tsokaev, neighbors and advisors; Alaudin and Aziz Batukaev, organized-crime bosses; Raisa Batukaeva, next-door neighbor and unofficial Chechen community leader; Ruslan Zakriev, owner of amusement park and official leader of Chechen community; Yakha Tsokaeva and Madina, friends in Bishkek, the capital

School personnel: Lubov Shulzhenko, Tamerlan’s principal; Natalya Kurochkina, Tamerlan’s grade-school teacher

DAGESTAN

Gasan Gasanaliyev, imam of Makhachkala’s Kotrov Street mosque

Magomed Kartashov, Tamerlan’s second cousin, head of Union of the Just

Mohammed Gadzhiev, Kartashov’s deputy

Kheda Saratova, human rights advocate

BOSTON AREA

Other Chechen immigrant families: Khassan Baiev (sambo champion, plastic surgeon, author), wife Zara Tokaeva, children Islam and Maryam; Makhmud (Max) Mazaev (owner of an elder-care center), wife Anna, son Baudy (Boston University student); Hamzat Umarov, wife Raisa

Joanna Herlihy, the Tsarnaevs’ landlady

Nadine Ascencao, Tamerlan’s girlfriend

Brendan Mess, Tamerlan’s best friend, murdered in 2011 along with Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken

Donald Larking, home-care client of Zubeidat and later Karima

Norfolk Street neighbors: Rinat Harel, Chris LaRoche

At Cambridge Rindge and Latin: Larry Aaronson, retired history teacher and photographer; Steve Matteo, English teacher; Lulu Emmons, former classmate of Jahar’s; Luis Vasquez, Tamerlan’s friend

Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, marathon bombing victim who was an early suspect

Other early suspects: Sunil Tripathi, Salaheddin Barhoum, Yassine Zaimi

Boston-area law enforcement: Sean Collier, murdered MIT campus security officer; Richard Donohue, wounded transit cop; Jeff Pugliese, Watertown policeman; David Earle, Essex County police detective also on the Joint Terrorism Task Force; Timothy Alben, Massachusetts State Police superintendent; Farbod Azad, Kenneth Benton, Scott Cieplik, Michael Delapena, Richard DesLauriers, Dwight Schwader, John Walker, Sara Wood, all FBI; Douglas Woodlock, federal judge; Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney; Scott Riley and Stephanie Siegmann, Assistant U.S. Attorneys

“Danny,” owner of the SUV hijacked by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar

Khairullozhon “Kair” Matanov, taxi driver, refugee from Kyrgyzstan, friend of Tamerlan; attorney Edward Hayden

Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS DARTMOUTH AND NEW BEDFORD

Robel Phillipos, Jahar’s friend, also from Cambridge Rindge and Latin; friend Elohe Dereje (Maryland); attorney Derege Demissie

Dias Kadyrbayev, from Kazakhstan; girlfriend Bayan Kumiskali

Azamat Tazhayakov, from Kazakhstan; father Amir Ismagulov; attorneys Nicholas Wooldridge and Arkady Bukh (New York)

Andrew Dwinells, Jahar’s roommate

Other friends and classmates of Jahar’s: Pamela Rolon; Alexa Guevara; Tiffany Evora; Lino Rosas; Quan Le Phan, Robel’s former roommate; Jim Li, Quan’s roommate

Brian Williams, teacher of class on Chechnya

OTHERS

Almut Rochowanski, founder of legal aid organization for Chechen refugees (New York)

Musa Khadzhimuratov, Max Mazaev’s paralyzed cousin; wife Madina, son Ibragim (later Abraham), daughter Malika (Manchester, New Hampshire)

Ibragim Todashev, Chechen immigrant killed during questioning by FBI agents and Boston police in 2013 (Orlando, Florida); wife Reni Manukyan, born Evgenia (Nyusha) Nazarenko (Atlanta), her mother, Elena Teyer (Savannah, Georgia), and her brother, Alex (Atlanta); girlfriend Tatiana Gruzdeva (Orlando); father Abdulbaki Todashev (Chechnya); best friend Khusein Taramov (Orlando; later Russia); lawyer Zuarbek Sadokhanov

Yerlan Kubashev, with the consulate of Kazakhstan in New York

PART ONE

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Visit http://bit.ly/brothersmap1 for a larger version of this map.

One

YOU CAN BE PROUD OF BEING A DAGESTANI, proclaim the billboards lining the highway from the airport to Makhachkala. It is the spring of 2013. The billboards picture, by way of argument, the recently appointed head of Dagestan, Ramazan Abdulatipov, speaking with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Both look unhappy, but the photo op, apparently a one-time occurrence, seems not to have generated a better option.

The highway to the capital, like so much of Dagestan, is an object of pride and an embarrassment at the same time. It was built recently, and well; it is by far the best road in Dagestan, so good that at night young men race their souped-up Lada Priora sedans here. The Lada Priora is a bad, Russian-made car, but its twentieth-century technology lends itself to quick fixes. Which is a good thing, because as the road enters the city, turning into the main avenue, the smooth surface gives way to potholes that can cost you your tire or your life.

Outside the city, the highway is lined with unfinished houses, scores of them. They betray modest ambition—small two-story structures along a highway—and yet even this dream has gone unfulfilled. Rectangular openings stare at the highway where windows should be. Cows graze in between these carcasses and wander lazily onto the highway.

People you meet in Dagestan will tell you where else they have been. They have rarely ventured very far, but they have invariably found any other place to be remarkably different. Several drivers tell me that in Moscow or Saint Petersburg or even provincial Astrakhan, three hundred miles to the north of Makhachkala, people do not drive into natural-gas fueling stations (almost everyone in Dagestan seems to drive a car retrofitted for natural gas) with a lit cigarette in their mouths. In Astrakhan, one man tells me, they get all the passengers out of the car before refueling. This kind of regard for human life awes and baffles him. Astrakhan is no hub of bourgeois humanitarianism, but then, compared with Dagestan, almost anyplace is.

The Russian Federation includes eighty-three nominally self-governing regions, districts, autonomies, and republics; the republics differ from the rest of the convoluted federation’s members in that they have the right to choose their own state language—mostly because the republics are, by and large, populated by non-Russian ethnic groups. Dagestan, a republic, sits on the edge of the Russian empire, a mere two and a half hours by plane south-southeast from Moscow but as culturally remote as the far northeast, where Russia borders the United States, or the far east, where it seeps into China. Dagestan borders Azerbaijan and Georgia to the south and war-torn Chechnya to the north. Throughout its history as a part of Russia, Dagestan has been one of the poorest parts of the empire, and one of the most embattled. It has also always been the most diverse, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups living in various states of war and peace. Each group has a fiercely defined identity, but no single ethnic group claims the region as an ersatz nation-state, and a Dagestani identity per se can hardly be said to exist. So the billboards seem to be calling on people to take pride simply in living in Dagestan. But why would anyone want to live here?

This is where the story begins.

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FIRST, Zubeidat ran from Makhachkala. In May 1985, she was walking in the outskirts of Novosibirsk, terrified of getting into trouble, though most people back home would have said she was asking for trouble just by being in Novosibirsk. She had graduated from high school in Makhachkala a year earlier, and she wanted to go to college. Worse, she wanted to go to Moscow. One of her older brothers lived there, and from what she could tell, this brother was an important person. He worked in retail, which in the Soviet Union meant access to all sorts of nice things and influential people, and she had kept calling him, begging him to take her out of Makhachkala.

Makhachkala is a hard place to love. In the 2010s, a pair of journalists who set out to compile an oral history of the city, a coffee-table book with lots of nostalgic sepia-colored photographs, were repeatedly told by the residents they interviewed how unlivable Makhachkala had always been, what a misunderstanding of a city it was. A locally prominent artist called it “a town without a legend” that was “unsuited for normal life.” A fort reconstituted as a town in the mid–nineteenth century, it felt like a haphazard and temporary agglomeration of more than a hundred ethnic groups, each of which maintained its own language and used variously simplified and mangled Russian to communicate with one another and the outside world. Streets bore the names of the ethnic groups that had originally settled there: Armenian Street crossed Persian Street. Soviet authorities renamed the streets in the spirit of internationalism and Communist ideology, but the old designations remained in the vernacular. Each group made its own living arrangements, usually unaided by the Communist state that had assumed the obligation for sheltering and feeding all citizens but failed consistently, and failed worse the farther from the center the citizens resided. People lived in barracks, in rehabbed fort structures, in sheds and other temporary dwellings, and well into the late twentieth century, indoor plumbing and cooking facilities remained the stuff of dreams.

Neighborhood borders were inviolate: a male outsider who tried to date a neighborhood girl would be knifed. The single unifying culture of the city was that of the prison. There were eight prison camps within the city limits before Stalin’s death in 1953; once released, many of the inmates stayed on in the city. In at least one case, a camp was abolished and the barbed-wire fence removed, but the barracks were simply renamed “dormitories” and everybody stayed. The city jail, which never stopped functioning, sat up on a hill, a major landmark and the center of the switchblade-making industry. Every Makhachkala-born male past the age of puberty had to own a switchblade that had been smuggled out of the jail and sold on the black market.

Not that there was much of a legal economy: centrally distributed consumer goods rarely reached Russia’s southern edge. Makhachkalinians wore clothes and shoes made by local tailors and cobblers—there was one of each on nearly every block—and ate fish caught in the Caspian Sea by local poachers, who went door-to-door every day hawking sturgeon and black-backed herring so fatty it could be tossed into a skillet with no oil. Yet the Caspian itself seemed to have no place in the city, or in any story about it. A gentle, light blue sea that is actually the world’s largest lake, the Caspian was cut off from Makhachkala by a railroad constructed at the turn of the twentieth century. Only a thin strip of sand, barely a hundred yards at its narrowest, separated the water from the rails. The sounds of the railroad drowned out the murmur of the sea, and the bitter smell of tar, the metallic smell of hot rails, and the smoke of the engines overwhelmed the Caspian’s softly salty air.

Whether people lived in nineteenth-century stone buildings or twentieth-century wooden barracks, they dwelled a family to a room if they were lucky, and used the courtyards for all their daily needs: wood-burning stoves for cooking, wooden outhouses never far away. At night young men went yard to yard, scooping human waste into large barrels mounted on their horse-driven carts, nicknamed “stinkies.” Household waste flowed in open trenches along city streets until the 1960s, when, legend has it, old gravestones were used to enclose the trenches in the city center—there are still residents who claim to have seen Arabic writing beneath their feet.

Dwellings with indoor conveniences came in the 1960s, too, but in 1970 an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale shook Dagestan. The epicenter was less than twenty miles west of Makhachkala. Thirty-one people died and half the city’s population was left homeless. Twenty-two villages outside the city were completely destroyed, and their residents, too, flooded into Makhachkala even as more than a thousand aftershocks, some of them nearly as strong as the original quake, shook the city over the following six weeks. Makhachkala returned to the premodern state to which it seemed doomed.

A year later, the newly underequipped and overcrowded city was hit by a cholera epidemic. Moscow shut Makhachkala down: anyone who wanted to leave the city had to be tested for the germ and was not allowed to travel until cleared. The city’s population swelled further with those waiting to travel out of Dagestan.

·   ·   ·

ZUBEIDAT WAS BORN in Makhachkala three years before the earthquake. By the time she was a teenager, she was acutely and painfully aware of living in a backwater. Even the Chechens, who lived right next door and had been decimated by forced exile, had a real city: Grozny had fashion and music. It was from Grozny that young men would bring records and reel-to-reel tapes for Makhachkala’s first diskotekas—a fancy word for dances—in the early 1980s. To create disco lighting, the young men stole colored glass from traffic lights and, at great peril to themselves, flashing lights off police cars. In Grozny, young men were not too timid to wear pointy cowboy boots, which had roared into fashion; Makhachkalinians, who did not dare wear them, called them nokhchi-boots, or Chechen-boots. Men in Makhachkala still wore visored hats nicknamed “airport caps” for the exceedingly large flat surface they created on the wearer’s head. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union these caps marked men as hailing from the remote Caucasian provinces, but in Dagestan they were privileged as city wear: country folk wore fluffy white sheepskin hats. The possession most coveted by any young person who wanted to escape Makhachkala’s provincial uniformity was a white plastic bag printed with a full-color photograph of a man’s behind in Wrangler jeans. These cost up to five rubles on the black market; a loaf of bread ran sixteen kopecks, or just over three percent of the price of the plastic bag.

Everyone in Makhachkala knew everything about everyone else. There was o...

Revue de presse :

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time Magazine

Praise for The Brothers:

“Remarkable... reminiscent of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower... Rather than the story of two lone-wolf jihadists, determined to wage war on their adopted country, the marathon bombing becomes a saga of both the Tsarnaev family and contemporary U.S. culture, in which all too often terror provokes an unreasonable response...For Gessen, the issue is not guilt or innocence...more essential is what the Tsarnaevs and their story tells us about who we have become. That she makes the case with grace and passion, while also basing it on rigorous reporting, is the triumph of the book” —Los Angeles Times

"Straightforward and captivating." —Janet Napolitano, The New York Times Book Review

“Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen’s passionate, opinionated, deeply reported exploration of the long road that led the Tsarnaev brothers to commit the Boston Marathon bombing. She traces the family’s history from Chechnya to a precarious Boston-area immigrant demi-monde, asking urgent questions and avoiding simple answers.” —Time

“For American readers, most of whom know little of the Chechen story, the gut-wrenching clarity of Gessen’s account is a gift. Her prose is spare and highly polished, evoking the melancholy of the Tsarnaevs’s homeland...Gessen demonstrates the fragmentation within communities when fear and suspicion take root, and she shows how tactics used to fight terrorism risk degrading the ideals we aim to protect...[Her] tenacious reporting commands our attention and makes “The Brothers” essential to understanding how the heartbreak here in Boston fits into the endless heartache of this world.” —The Boston Globe

“A powerfully compelling portrait... Gessen is uniquely suited to tell the Tsarnaev story: She moved to Boston as a teenage Russian immigrant herself, and, as a result, her observations about what immigrants experience carry specific gravity...No book could ever fully explain why someone would choose to murder innocent people, but Gessen comes as close as we'll ever get. Much as Truman Capote did in his classic "In Cold Blood," Gessen offers compassion for those whose acts are most contemptible, and her explanation of what happened is as complex and as simple as it is to be human. And that is truly frightening.”  —Chicago Tribune 

"Stunning piece of reporting. An instant classic." —Lev Grossman (via Twitter) 

“A Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston, journalist Masha Gessen might be uniquely qualified to investigate Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In The Brothers, she writes with sophistication and nuance about their family’s complicated, nomadic existence... an enthralling and illuminating read.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune, Fave of the Week  

“Extraordinary... Gessen, who traveled the globe in search of the secrets of the Tsarnaev family, has produced both a gripping narrative and a stunning piece of investigative journalism... [She] gives us the human side to the story of two young men who must be understood as more than monsters.” —Christian Science Monitor

“This is a story that no one wanted to hear in the days and months after the bombing...Many Americans still may not care to hear it, but that would be too bad, because [The Brothers] is one of the best books I’ve ever read about terrorism and the immigrant experience in America... part social history, part travelog (she traversed the Caucasus and Central Asia while reporting it), and part forensic on family and cultural dysfunction...Gessen wanders among these people, and approaches them with empathy and dark wit... a student of state and stateless terror, [she] is excellent on the varieties of fear it engenders.”  —Newsweek 

“[Gessen] uses facts and plausible conjecture to dispel the misconceptions and rumors that have accrued to the Tsarnaevs. No slouch in the sleuth department...this Russian-born journalist assembles a challenging jigsaw puzzle that spans two continents. Her goal is to elucidate and contextualize the brothers’ principled savagery, not to exonerate or mitigate their actions. While several questions remain, the most important being motive, we at least learn the socio-cultural forces that shaped these lone-wolf terrorists.” —Miami Herald

“Gessen...compels us to see the story as part of a much bigger global conflict...[and] is an ideal person to contextualize much of this story, even if her conclusions make us uncomfortable...Most importantly...The Brothers relentlessly observes an overreach of power in response to the bombings...an often painful account of our system’s moral failings, the ways in which we’re inhospitable to those seeking asylum on our shores, and the ways our law enforcement acts in a manner as draconian as law enforcement was in the strife-torn places they fled. That may not be the story we’re looking for, but it is a story we very much need.” —Flavorwire, "A Must Read Book" 

“Two parts forensic anthropology, one part activism, The Brothers is a forceful...passionate exploration of the events that preceded and followed the [Boston Marathon bombing]... Gessen is at her best when she takes the reader through the Tsarnaevs’ wildly complicated social history... The origins of their story, itself dizzyingly complex, sets the stage for our understanding of the permanent state of exile and cultural confusion the Tsarnaev clan seemed to endure.” —San Francisco Chronicle 

“[Gessen’s] own background...make[s] her an ideal author for this story...her knowledge of Soviet and Russian history, and her reporting on the ground in Dagestan, Kyrgyzstan and Chechnya, lend a resonance and weight ... to the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations in that region...Gessen explains how the history of Chechnya — and the radicalism that took root there — might have affected family members, and she also brings an understanding of the dislocations often faced by immigrants to her account." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“[The Brothers] is an antidote to prevailing narratives surrounding the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston Marathon bombing. It is the kind of book that reminds us that there are two sides to every story... With all the context Gessen provides—the history of upheaval in Chechnya, the constant terror of life in Dagestan, the family’s inability to find happiness and steady work in America—it’s hard not to feel as if the Tsarnaev brothers’ decision to bomb the marathon was at least in part the product of historical and cultural forces bearing down on two disenfranchised young men. It’s an unsettling feeling...to find oneself, one hundred and fifty pages in, rooting for Dzhokhar to escape from law enforcement. But that’s the magic of this book: it turns two antagonists of American society into protagonists.” —The Rumpus

“The fearless Russian-American journalist brings equal parts sympathy and skepticism to...the Tsarnaev family...fascinating and illuminating.” —Vulture

“With a cool, clear voice, [Gessen] examines how America’s tremendous dread of terrorism has marred our once-lauded justice system and distorted the legal rights of immigrants in this country... [a] compelling study of Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev” – Barnes & Noble Review

“Gessen has done valuable work, shoe-leather reporting rather than the reflexive condemnation that flows after any murder, any attack...she is to be commended for humanizing rather than demonizing the brothers.” —Newsday

“Meticulously documented and detailed...Gessen... crafts a dark tapestry, woven of war and loss in Chechnya, Dagestan and the Tsarnaev’s own brutal history" —Providence Journal

“Gessen...paint[s] an evocative picture of the impoverished and strife-torn region the Tsarnaevs left behind, and...the Boston area community that they joined when they immigrated in the early 2000s.” —Kansas City Star

“[Gessen’s] background facilitates a much deeper than usual engagement with the context of the Boston atrocity...We'd prefer, she suggests, to think of terrorism in terms of ideological fanatics carrying out an elaborate and well-thought out plot, because that allows us to externalise the evil. But the Boston bombings actually resulted from a tangled web of frustrations and unhappinesses, in which the personal, the political and the religious were inextricably entwined.” —Sydney Morning Herald

"The Brothers is certainly among the best journalism produced about the bombings." —Pacific Standard

“Meticulously researched and provocative ... Gessen asks courageous questions about the dark side of the justice system, providing a vital counternarrative to the account of the bombing given by mainstream media.”  —Publisher’s Weekly

"Gessen makes it eerily plain to see how simply an atrocity can manifest." —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Words Will Break Cement

“Urgent . . . damning.” —The New York Times

Praise for The Man Without a Face
 
“[An] unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Fascinating, hard-hitting reading.” —Foreign Affairs

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Riverhead Books
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1594634009
• ISBN 13: 9781594634000
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 320