Notes on Caucasians

Caucus race. By ArtSpark Theatre.

Booman:

I have been somewhat amused by the discussion of their ethnicity. Before we knew that they were literally from the Caucuses, and therefore quintessentially caucasian, there was debate about whether they were white or not. 

ProPublica:

The brothers are ethnic Chechens whose family moved around the war-torn Caucuses region when the boys were young.

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David Trifunov in GlobalPost:

Chechnya is a restive Russian region that survived its most recent spate of bloody violence just a decade ago. It remains a simmering section of the Caucasuses, itself a swirling mix of ethnicities, cultures and language.

Let's get a grip on the spelling, people, it's not that hard:

Caucasus

Caucuses are those things they have in the Houses of Congress. They do admittedly roil, but their roiling is as the mewling of babes in comparison to the mighty roiling of the Caucasus, which is the mountainous isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas that forms the traditional bridge between Europe to the north and Asia to the south (the ancient Europeans didn't realize you could get to Asia without a bridge, just by proceeding northeast around the Caspian).

Caucasus, ethnic pluralities. University of Colorado at Boulder.

It may be the oldest profoundly multicultural place: in Hebrew legend, it is where the Ark landed with Noah and his three sons representing all the human races that the ancient Hebrews knew about. In any case it has been superdensely multicultural for a very long time, and still is, as you can see from the map.

In Greek legend it is where Prometheus the demiurge was chained to a mountaintop, while an eagle tore at his liver, to torture him into revealing the secret of who would dethrone Zeus, and hence a symbol of heroic defiance against tyranny. It is where corrupt Russian governments go to die: they manage most of the time to control the northern half, with the Circassians and Chechens and Ingush, while the southern half, Georgians and Armenians and Azeris, continually break away.

Chechen is the name of the group and their language, Chechnya is the name of the country or territory, "Chechnyan" is not used, and Czech has absolutely no relation ("We don't kill people, we only drink beer," tweeted some Bohemian by way of explanation—but in fact most Chechens don't kill people either, and many drink beer and adopt other recreations forbidden by the Prophet).

Stalin—a Georgian himself, as you'll remember—deported rebellious Chechens by the thousands to Central Asia in 1944 (not "around the region" but three time zones away), and that is where the Tsarnaev brothers were born and raised. Their parents brought them to Dagestan, Chechnya's eastern neighbor, for a year before the family went to the US, and that is where the parents are now.