( CNN ) -- It 's not easy being a Chechen . The family of Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev , the alleged Boston bombers , have , like all their ethnic kin , led lives marked by violence and deportation . Chechnya is a small land in the Caucasus mountains that was one of the last places to be conquered by the Russian empire in the 19th century . Chechens are also Muslims . In February 1944 , Joseph Stalin added them to his list of `` punished peoples , '' whole ethnic groups who were deemed disloyal to the Soviet Union and subjected to wholesale deportation . Every Chechen -- man , woman and child -- was packed into freight cars and shipped to the freezing steppe of Soviet Central Asia . The republic of Chechnya was erased from the map . Around a quarter of the 400,000 deported Chechens died in the process . It was only 13 years later , after Stalin 's death , that they were miraculously forgiven and allowed to return home . But some , including members of the Tsarnaev family , stayed on in places like the republic of Kyrgyzstan . Fifty years later , in 1994 , the year after Dzhokar Tsarnaev was born , the Russian government unleashed a new wave of violence , sending in the army to crush a turbulent independence movement in Chechnya . The Russian defense minister of the time predicted it all would be over in 24 hours . Ten years later , after two savage wars , the Chechen city of Grozny was in ruins , tens of thousands of Chechens were dead and many more in exile once again . From 2002 , Chechen extremists began to wage terrorist acts against Russian civilian targets , most horrifically against a school in the town of Beslan , where nearly 300 people were killed . The region is outwardly much more quiet now , but a low-level Islamist insurgency continues in and around Chechnya that takes dozens of lives each year and is mostly out of the headlines . The two young Tsarnaev boys were the children of the war generation , displaced from their homeland , growing up as a reviled Muslim minority . In their biographies we can see some typical characteristics of Chechen life . Where are Chechens from ? Not the Czech Republic . The first is the migrant life . Maybe one-fifth of Chechnya 's pre-1994 population of 1 million has fled to different parts of the world , the vast majority of them to various European countries . A second is an aggressively macho culture . Chechnya has a warrior tradition and many Chechen males and their fellow Muslims from the Caucasus seek to compensate for discrimination by excelling in martial arts . Tamerlan and Dzhokar took up boxing and wrestling respectively . A third characteristic is that , as refugees from a misunderstood minority group associated with `` terrorism , '' they apparently found solace in the Islamic Internet , the multiplicity of devout or jihadist websites that linked them with similarly alienated Muslims around the world . What makes these two different is that their alienation turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy . Resentful of being labeled terrorists , they apparently turned to terrorism . What also differentiates the two brothers is that , unlike most Chechen migrants , they ended up in the United States . Most of the refugees who end up in this country see it as a safe haven . But in this case , a virulently anti-Western streak appears to have followed the two into exile , or caught up with them here . Opinion : What we know about Chechnya . In Chechnya , Russian Cold War suspicions fused with militant Islamic rhetoric . Chechnya 's first pro-independence president Dzhokhar ( or Jokhar ) Dudayev was a Soviet general turned Chechen nationalist who hated NATO as much as he did the government in Moscow . In the 1990s , at the height of post-Cold War rapprochement , ordinary Chechens blamed Washington for turning a blind eye to President Boris Yeltsin 's war against them . More recently , the local warlord Ramzan Kadyrov , whom Moscow has installed as leader of Chechnya , implausibly blames the West for backing the jihad against Russia . Members of a wandering wounded generation , the Tsarnaevs seem to have been all-too-typical Chechens in the tribulations of their lives , but one-offs in the way their journeys ended . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Thomas de Waal .
Tom de Waal : « De Waal : Their parents were in two savage wars with Russia and displaced from homeland . Suspects lived a typical Chechen life of migration , he says , part of a macho culture . Chechens resent the label `` terrorists , '' he says ; suspects seem to have embraced it .