Football across Russia put on a united front last weekend. In the wake of a series of terrorist attacks in the unstable North Caucasus region - the worst of which, a bomb blast in a Vladikavkaz market, killed 19 and injured over 100 - Russia’s football authorities decided to make a statement.

As a result, footballers and officials at all of last weekend’s Russian Premier League matches took to the field wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Football Against Terror”. It would be nice if the Russian Football Union organised a similar campaign concerning racism, but it’s a respectable gesture nonetheless.

What’s interesting is that Russia has been actively using football as a weapon against terrorism in the North Caucasus for some time.

The North Caucasus is one of the Russian Federation’s biggest domestic security headaches. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union separatist movements have mounted a concerted and often violent campaign to loosen Moscow’s administrative hold on the region.

In a complex and bloody conflict guerillas - often radicalised Muslims - face off against young, poorly-trained Russian troops, with both sides committing atrocities and suffering casualties. Despite an official end to the war being called in 2009, terrorist attacks and government reprisals continue.

When Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia in January 2000 one of his primary stated aims was to bring to an end the conflict in the North Caucasus.

And while military solutions have formed the backbone to the post-2000 Caucasus strategy, football has also proven a somewhat unlikely contributor in attempting to return the region to normality.

In 2000 there were two Premier League sides from the North Caucasus. They were Anzhi Makhachkala, from the capital of the Muslim-majority Republic of Dagestan, and Alaniya Vladikavkaz, representing the main city of the majority Orthodox Christian Republic of North Ossetia-Alaniya.

Since then that number has grown to four as, along with Anzhi and Alaniya, Chechens Terek Grozny and Kabardino-Balkars Spartak Nalchik have taken their place among Russia’s elite.

In their success these teams have been helped as much by the game’s power-brokers as by their own playing staff. For instance, Alaniya were playing First Division football last year, finishing the season third and missing out on promotion. But after FK Moskva went bankrupt and pulled out of the Premier League, the decision was taken to promote Alaniya - rather than save Kuban Krasnodar, who finished second-bottom of the Premier League - thus rather artificially boosting the North Caucasian contingent.

As Marc Bennetts alludes to in his wonderful book profiling the Russian game, Football Dynamo, the rise of teams in the North Caucasus is underpinned by political will.

Provided with successful football clubs, so the theory goes, inhabitants of the breakaway regions will be more open to peaceful social integration; by the same token, successful teams also demonstrate to the outside world that normality reigns in these formerly war-torn republics.

In practice, however, the attempt to “normalise” the North Caucasus through football is proving rather difficult. Put simply, Russian Premier League teams hate playing there, and it’s largely the lawless, volatile atmosphere at stadiums in the region which is to blame.

A spate of incidents - bricks, coins and rocks being thrown into the away end in Makhachkala, inhabitants of Nalchik attacking a hostel where visiting Spartak Moscow fans were staying - have made life tough for visiting fans.

And on the field players have been subject to intimidation, sometimes involving physical threat.

This weekend unbeaten league leaders Zenit St Petersburg travelled to Grozny to face Terek, who lay seventh in the standings. Terek, however, went into the game off the back of a home unbeaten record which stretches back to last November.

If Zenit are to lose a game this season - and it’s looking increasingly likely that they won’t - this was one of the possible scenes for a defeat. Terek were cheered on by raucous home support, including the President of the Republic of Chechnya, former separatist rebel warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov, incidentally, loves Terek and makes every effort to involve himself in team affairs. He has a habit of giving presents to footballers who perform well in Terek’s matches, including one example in 2008 when he presented midfielder Timur Dzhabrailov with a Toyota Land Cruiser. Hours later Dzhabrailov was involved in a crash which wrote off the vehicle - so Kadyrov simply gave him the keys to another one. It’s fair to say, judging by the convoy which follows Kadyrov round the Chechen capital, that he’s not short of a motor or two (that video freaks me out).

In any case, the match in Grozny passed without incident, and both Zenit’s unbeaten league record and Terek’s unbeaten home run remained intact as the game ended 0-0.

But if this was to be a demonstration of Grozny’s continuing recovery from the wars of the post-Soviet era, Zenit winger Vladimir Bystrov put a bit of a spanner in the works.

“Everything went well in Grozny, without excesses or negative moments,” Bystrov said after the game. “Though you could say the atmosphere was a bit unusual. People walk around the streets carrying fire-arms. There’s always a gun barrel pointing at you in your car!”

So much for keeping up appearances - the Kremlin’s North Caucasus policy clearly still has a long way to go.