CORRECTION: The name of the city where the recent bombing attacks took place is Volgograd, not Volograd.

The Olympics should go on, if only because it's way too late to find an alternative site for the Winter Games.

But old blood feuds die hard, Jeralyn, and the fact of the matter is that Russia's behavior with regard to Chechnya -- long considered to have been a wayward and renegade province, going back to the days of the czars -- over the previous seven decades has been lamentable, and during the past 20 years it's been nothing short of abominable. So this particular grudge is really not all that old.

In 1944 during the Second World War, Soviet leader Josef Stalin had the entire Chechen population deported to Siberia, in retaliation for alleged collaboration with the invading Germans in the summer of 1942. Axis Romanian forces briefly occupied the ancient Chechen capital of Grozny (also known as Jokhar) in early October 1942, but were withdrawn to reinforce German attacks upon Stalingrad, which is known today as Volgograd. The Chechens were only allowed to return to their homeland in 1957, once Nikita Khrushchev was able to finally consolidate his hold on the Kremlin, in the wake of the power struggle that followed Stalin's 1953 death.

The Chechens took advantage of the Soviet Union's collapse in the early 1990s to declare their independence from Russia, prompting then-President Boris Yeltsin to order the Russia Army to occupy the region and re-assert Russian hegemony.

This resulted in the First Chechen War (1994-96), as the Russians assaulted and then occupied the capital of Grozny in January 1995, a brutal action which roused the Chechen people to launch sustained counterattacks on the thinly stretched Russian supply lines from the surrounding mountains. The demoralized Russian Army soon found itself besieged and starving in Grozny, compelling a humiliated Yeltsin to seek a negotiated settlement that led to a complete withdrawal of forces in August 1996 and recognition of Chechnya's de facto independence.

Upon the succession of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in 1999, Chechnya had devolved into a lawless region controlled by various warlords, whose criminal raids on various Russian border towns prompted Putin to order the Russian military to re-establish Russian control over the region.

The Second Chechen War, which began with the second Russian invasion in 1999, was an even more brutal affair than the first. The capital of Grozny was essentially obliterated by prolonged Russian artillery and aerial bombardment, followed by a vicious ground assault. Untold thousands of Chechen fighters and civilians died in the Russian military onslaught.

It is worth noting that the population of Chechnya has been systematically reduced by some 40% during the Russian re-conquest, from 1.2 million in 1995 to less than 750,000 today. And that's the hard reality behind the recent terrorist strikes on Russian soil by Chechen fighters and suicide bombers.

For their part, our own media has done an abysmal job of informing the American people about the ongoing Russian aggressions and atrocities in the Caucacus region, crimes which have gone a long way toward incurring the undying enmity of its Muslim-majority population, and includes the recent military seizures of the Republic of Georgia's South Ossetia and Abkhazia provinces in August 2008. (Please note the uncomfortable proximity of the Olympic city of Sochi to the Caucasus region in the aforelinked map.)

That we should be repeatedly surprised by instances of Chechen / Muslim hostility toward the Russians speaks directly to our misinformed knowledge of the Caucasus and its troubled history. I'll be watching the Sochi Olympics like a lot of other people, but frankly, I think the IOC made a big mistake in awarding that city the 2014 Games seven years ago. Let's hope its restless neighbors don't give us cause to really regret that choice.