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Health & Fitness

Panel: Chechnya, Russia and the Marathon Bombing

Wellesley College presents a free, public talk about the Caucasus region on Thursday, April 25 at 8 PM in the Pendleton Atrium.

The Boston Marathon Bombing suspects are ethnic Chechens who have been linked to Dagestan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. This Thursday, Wellesley College Russian Area Studies faculty members will host a panel discussion addressing the complex political, historical, and religious context of the Caucasus region.

The talk, “Chechnya, Russia and the Marathon Bombing,” will take place on Thursday, April 25 at 8 PM in the Pendleton Atrium. It is free and open to the public, parking on campus is also free. 

Panelists include: Philip Kohl, Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies and Professor of Anthropology; Nina Tumarkin, Professor of History; and former Ambassador Thomas Simons. Thomas Hodge, Professor of Russian, will serve as moderator.

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The panel will touch on some of the publicly available facts of the Boston Marathon case, but the subject of the talk is the native region of the Tsarnaev family, chiefly Chechnya and Dagestan. The Caucasus region, and Chechnya in particular, is an area that has a very troubled history

“Radical Islam has become progressively more prevalent among the Chechens in recent decades,” Hodge said. “The violence-ridden North Caucasus is packed with small ethnic groups, predominantly Sunni Muslims, who have struggled against each other as well as with Russia.” 

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Hodge continued, “If the hypothesis is correct that the Marathon Bombings were somehow linked with religious or ethnically based extremism or Chechen separatism, then the better we understand the complicated Caucasus region, the more chance we have of grasping the motive for the atrocity of 15 April and possibly preventing such attacks in the future.”

The panelists, according to Hodge, hope to illuminate the history of Chechnya, recent terrorist acts committed in the name of Chechen independence including the Moscow theater hostage crisis (2002); Beslan school hostage crisis (2004); and the ideologies and religious convictions of the relevant ethnic groups in the Caucasus (Chechens, Avars, Ingush, Ossetians).

“The complexity of the region is not easily conveyed by the mass media,” Hodge said, “so our hope is to draw on the considerable expertise of [the panelists] to give our community a deeper understanding of what may lie behind the Marathon Bombings.”

Other Wellesley professors have also been called upon to participate in the conversation about last week’s events in various forums, including Psychology Professor Julie Norem who spoke with WCVB’s Chronicle on Monday evening about the #BostonStrong movement.

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