Intro: The real threat to the Sochi Games is not a Western boycott but an Islamist terror attack

The run-up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, which start in February, has been mired in controversy for months. Increasing the minds of politicians and athletes has been on whether they should boycott the Games in protest over Russia’s increasingly harsh treatment against homosexuals and lesbians.

The devastating suicide bombing over the weekend in Volograd, in southern Russia, is an instant reminder that the real threat to the Sochi Games is not a Western boycott but an Islamist terror attack. The blast at a railway station, which has killed at least 18 people, was not the first in Volgograd. In October, Russia identified a woman bomber from Dagestan as being responsible for a bus bombing in which five people were killed. Dagestan is one of a patchwork of small, mainly Islamic, autonomous republics in the Caucasus.

Russia has reason to be concerned for Dagestan is almost as unstable now as neighbouring Chechnya was in the 1990s. Although Russia battled a separatist insurgency there, Chechnya has never been entirely pacified. To add to the charge that Sochi is more of a threat from radical Islamists, rather than matters to do with sexuality, the leader of the Chechen rebel Islamists vowed in July to stop the Games from proceeding over the bones of its ancestors, or over the bones of many dead Muslims. The language used by the Chechen rebels is disturbing for athletes simply wishing to compete in the Games for medals.

So far, though, nothing has happened in Sochi, and the militants seem to have selected Volgograd as an alternative – maybe, because it is the nearest largest urban location north of the Caucasus.

For Vladimir Putin, he will deal with the terrorist threat by tightening a formidable range of security measures already in place around the Olympic village and event locations. Mr Putin will want to honour his previous pledge when he proclaimed in advance that the Sochi Games would be ‘the safest Olympics ever’.

Politically, whether Moscow can ever restore a lasting peace in the North Caucasus is highly doubtful. Russia simply does not have the manpower to keep all the republics in lockdown at the same time. Nor is the policy of periodically replacing stubborn local leaders with more adaptable ones necessarily an effective one.

Was Tolstoy right when he wrote that Russia is paying a delayed price for those colonial 19th-century wars which have saddled Russia with lands that it can neither absorb nor relinquish? Violence now seems par the course for radical Islamists in the Caucuses, if not in Sochi, then elsewhere.