One clue to the motivations behind the suspected terrorist acts by the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston may lie half a world away, in their membership in the marginalized Chechen minority population that lives in the post-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, located in Central Asia just a few hundred miles north of Afghanistan. Chechens have lived in small numbers in Kyrgyzstan since World War II, when approximately 70,000 people were deported to what was then known as the Kirgiz Republic of the USSR. Like other deported Caucasian peoples, including the Ingush and Meshkhetian Turks, the Chechens were regarded by Stalin as unreliable citizens in the Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany.
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The fate of Chechens in the late Soviet period lacked the tragedy of earlier decades and centuries. It was an era of relative stability where an official policy of "friendship of the peoples of the USSR" minimized tension between ethnic groups. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were born and raised in the far more troubled era that followed, when the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a new emphasis on nationalism, and ethnic minorities such as the Chechens found themselves uninvited guests in new post-communist states, like Kyrgyzstan, that were trying to reassert a new national identity based in good measure on the core ethnic group, the Kyrgyz.
In the 1990s, most of the Russians and other ethnic minorities -- including the Chechens -- left Kyrgyzstan, but a second, and far smaller, wave of wartime Chechen refugees arrived in Kyrgyzstan. These were wounded Chechen rebels who had fought against Russian federal authorities in the First Chechen War (1994-1996). They came to this small Central Asian country to seek treatment in health sanatoriums on Lake Issyk-Kul in northern Kyrgyzstan. Despite this new influx of refugees, the Chechen population continued to dwindle, to the point that today there are less than 2,000 Chechens in Kyrgyzstan.
Before their family's departure from Kyrgyzstan in 2001, the Tsarnaev brothers reportedly lived in the small northern Kyrgyzstani city of Tokmok, about 20 miles east of the capital of Bishkek. This city, like most others cities in the north, was populated by Russians and ethnic Kyrgyz; it sits in one of the most Russified and least religious areas of the country. The biographical information provided by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on his Vkonkate page (the Russian-language equivalent of Facebook) indicates that he spoke Chechen, as well as Russian and English. And in this facility in Chechen and Russian he was typical of his generation. The Chechens in Kyrgyzstan did not lose their own traditions or language, which were transmitted by the family in the absence of Chechen-language schools. The Chechens in Kyrgyzstan were also more observant Muslims than their Kyrgyz neighbors, a nomadic people to whom Islam came late. Although recent years have brought reports of radical Islamist groups operating on a small scale in the south of Kyrgyzstan, they were virtually unknown in any region of Kyrgyzstan when the Tsarnaev family was in the country. They were not raised, therefore, in a community where radical Islam was in the air.
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