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The Untold Story of Chechen Resistance
From 19th Century Resistance to Genocide to the Boston Marathon Bombing
When the Boston bombing trial dominated the media, its perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, were associated with a geography scarcely known by Americans: Chechnya. If there was any examination in Chechnya’s history, rarely did it go beyond this: the bombers hailed from a Republic whose leader, Dudaev, had briefly made a bid for independence in 1992, the upshot of which was a catastrophic twenty-year-long war that decimated the local population.
When that war was launched, Dzhokhar (pronounced “Johar”) Tsarnaev was merely two years old. He was born in Kazakhstan, where his family had been forcibly relocated in 1944. This deportation, ordered by Joseph Stalin, was directed against every single Chechen living in Chechnya at that time. All were deported, without exception, and many Chechens died along the way while America, Great Britain, and France embraced the Soviet Union as an ally in their fight against the Third Reich.
The 1944 deportation is only one of the many important details that have been left out of most English-language coverage of…
