Their father and former neighbors from Kyrgyzstan - home to many Chechens who were deported from their native villages by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin - tell of a family often on the move in search of safety and a better life. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured alive, had moved to the United States about a decade ago with their parents and two sisters. By all accounts, the younger brother had many friends, but his older brother felt alienated from American society and in recent years had turned increasingly to Islam. Although neither spent much time in Chechnya, a province in southern Russia that has been torn apart by war and an Islamic insurgency, both strongly identified themselves as Chechens. They took up boxing and wrestling, two of the most popular sports in Chechnya, where people are proud of their warrior traditions.
The brothers' story begins in Tokmok, a town about 60 kilometers (35 miles) from the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia that was once part of the Soviet Union. Stalin rounded up the Chechens and shipped them east during World War II, seeing them as potentially disloyal. Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was born in Kyrgyzstan. "This was a very good family," Badrudi Tsokoev, a fellow Chechen who lived next door to the Tsarnaevs, said Saturday. "They all strove to get a higher education, to somehow set themselves up in life."
The brothers' grandfather had died tragically when a shell exploded as he was scavenging for metal that could be sold as scrap, neighbors said. After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the family moved to Chechnya, only to have war break out in 1994 between Russian troops and Chechen separatists fighting for an independent homeland. Dzhokhar was born in 1993 and shares the name of Chechnya's first separatist leader.
The fierce battles, which reduced much of Chechnya to rubble, sent the Tsarnaevs fleeing back to Kyrgyzstan with their two young sons, a daughter and another one on the way. "As soon as the war started they came back," said Nadezhda Nazarenko, another former neighbor in Tokmok. The children's mother "described how they were in clothes they would wear only around the house and fled the bombing, managing only to grab their documents and a few things." Neighbors said Anzor Tsarnaev, who had studied law and previously served in the prosecutor's office, worked hard to provide for his family. "Soon they began to live well and renovated their home," Nazarenko said. "The children did well in school and were well behaved."
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