MASHA Gessen, LGBT activist and political journalist, focuses her considerable writing talent on providing us with a 360-degree portrait of the Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar ‘Jahar’ Tsarnaev, in her recent book The Brothers. The choice of topic is a not surprising one for Gessen, who was honoured in 2015 by the University of Michigan with the Wallenberg medal for outstanding humanitarianism. Originally hailing from Russia herself, Gessen fled the allegedly homophobic regime there in 2013, and is now based in New York City. Possessing an admirable command over both her native Russian as well as English, she has authored numerous books on topics ranging in diversity from the life of Vladimir Putin to LGBT issues in Russian society.

Gessen commences her text by providing an account of how the brothers’ parents met and married. Zubeidat and Anzor Tsarnaev had a marriage of affection, which was relatively uncommon in conservative Chechen society in the ’80s. Gessen recounts that Zubeidat was beautiful and confident, impressing Anzor with her verve and ambition. In order to provide a better life for their two boys and two girls (Tamerlan, Ailina, Bella and Jahar) the couple moved from place to place in Russia, residing in Tokmok, Kalmykia, Chechnya and Makhachkala, finally relocating to Cambridge, US, in 2002. They faced many of the challenges that Muslim immigrants have had to cope with post 9/11.

Eventually, with the help and support of a Caucasian American woman with good intentions, Joanna Herlihy, they established themselves in her cheaply-rented house on the Cambridge-Somerville line. To Zubeidat’s credit she was as dauntlessly social in a racist and difficult Massachusetts milieu as she had been in conservative Russia. Befriending the ever-helpful Herlihy, she eventually became a beautician and was able to help her husband financially. This was absolutely necessary because, being qualified only for menial and mechanical jobs, Anzor was always struggling with debt.

The sisters made early (though disastrous) marriages, but while Tamerlan also married early his wife, a convert to Islam named Karima, made a relative success of their union. Jahar was the blue-eyed boy of the family, achieving enough academic success at their public school Cambridge Rindge and Latin to be able to win a city scholarship to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Both brothers were involved with petty drug dealing, though those who knew Jahar at school never suspected the fact; Tamerlan, whose father encouraged to develop aggressively and take up boxing and martial arts, was far more macho than his ostensibly gentler and far more academic brother. But appearances can be tremendously deceptive, and Jahar was often seriously stoned on marijuana even while at school.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the company kept by the boys tended towards the delinquent and occasionally aggressive. Even once they graduated, some of Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s alumnae persisted in lives of crime that progressed from petty to capital in nature. The brothers’ former schoolfriend Brendan Mess was found brutally murdered in Waltham in 2011 along with a couple of other drug dealers; the victims’ throats were dramatically slashed, and thousands of dollars strewn around them. The FBI got involved in re-investigating this crime after the 2013 bombing, a move that resulted in the violent death of another Chechen immigrant at the hands of the FBI, Ibragim Todashev. Gessen painstakingly documents the details of all salient aspects of these investigations.

Regarding the details of the actual bombing itself, Gessen is surprisingly silent. Only a couple of pages are devoted to the terrorist horror itself, in spite of the fact that three individuals were killed and over 200 injured. Though she never disputes that the brothers were the actual terrorists, she devotes considerable time to critiquing the role of the FBI in the matter.

Indeed, given Todashev’s mysterious death, and the fact that Tamerlan spent a year in Dagestan before he returned to the US and was involved in the bombing, the affair acquired considerable murkiness from the start. Yet it comes as no surprise that the FBI and police were thorough and brutal in their tracking down of Tamerlan who was shot and killed shortly after the tragedy.

Fleeing the scene of the bombing, Jahar holed up in a boat (reminiscent of what Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, did in order to evade the authorities) in Watertown, Massachusetts. Four days after the tragedy he was captured by the FBI, anti-climactically and childishly exclaiming that getting down from the boat might hurt. Legal battles then commenced: those hit hardest were Jahar’s college mates, who had been instructed by him to take whatever they wished from his room once he escaped. Foolishly they rummaged around his private space and discovered his backpack containing Vaseline, firework containers, and a laptop etc. Given the seriousness of the case, their connection proved to be hellish for most of them to varying degrees — except for one of the women, all of them received prison sentences of varying degrees of strictness.

Gessen is a balanced and gifted writer who tries hard to maintain a fair-minded tone throughout her work. Her personal frustration with the establishment is rarely allowed to break through, but she exhibits a fair amount of sympathy in underscoring how the unfortunate and the oppressed are often crushed by systems and forces beyond their control. Even less perceptive readers will note that the book begs the question of whether Tamerlan, a genuinely family-loving man, and Jahar, a well-liked student, would have taken the specifically violent path that they did had they had more benevolent social influences in their teen years.

Conversely, it can be argued that US immigration in spite of all of Homeland Security’s strictures can only be effective to a certain extent, and sometimes the most unlikely individuals can end up becoming terrorists. Those sections of the book that display Gessen’s familiarity with the psychology of terrorists and her knowledge of the field of terrorist studies are the finest portions of the text. On more than one occasion she cites experts (such as formidable and erudite terrorism scholar, Louise Richardson) who often note that terrorists never conform to a set or fixed psychological profile — many are close to their families, and several are not necessarily a product of radicalisation.

This frightening randomness and Gessen’s frequent allusion to it gives the book a far more foreboding undercurrent than repeated commentary on violence might have. In aggregate, what Gessen tries to underscore gracefully and empathetically is that any family can go astray in spite of the best intentions and efforts of the parents concerned. This is a sobering thought, not simply insofar as it relates to the precincts of the book, but also from a greater, global perspective.

The reviewer is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration.

The Brothers: The Road to An American Tragedy

(TERRORISM)

By Masha Gessen

Riverhead Press, US

978-1594632648

273pp.