I WAS absolutely certain that ostracising South Africa from the global sporting community was the appropriate response to an appalling regime which denied basic human rights to the majority.

Boycotting sporting links with the Republic, which included exclusion from the Olympic Games after 1960, proved a potent weapon in effecting radical social engineering.

It was significantly instrumental in ending apartheid, though it took time. It was not until the Barcelona Olympics that South Africa was readmitted to the movement.

Among the compelling images of the 1992 Olympics was that of Ethiopia's 10,000 metres winner Derartu Tulu and runner-up Elana Meyer (South Africa's first Olympic medallist since 1960) together on their lap of honour: ebony and ivory.

I was equally certain that British sportsmen and women should refuse to accede to Margaret Thatcher's demand for a Moscow Olympic boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Athletes had invested their lives in pursuit of the Olympic dream. Yet she and US President Jimmy Carter expected them to do battle for governments which were not prepared to impose full-on economic sanctions. Sport was again being asked to go over the top first. I felt then this was wrong, and still do.

The Eastern bloc's tit-for-tat retaliation, boycotting Los Angeles four years later, was equally inappropriate. Though it did serve to demonstrate the difference between democracy and dictatorship. British competitors had a choice. Those in totalitarian Eastern Europe did not.

It's a painful truth that history forgets the absentees. The names of the medal-winners in Moscow, Los Angeles, and from the boycotted 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, are the ones inscribed in the record books. Not the identities of the no-shows.

Actor Stephen Fry suggested Russia's homophobic culture warranted a boycott of this year's Winter Olympics in Sochi.

He did not suggest the UK arts lobby shun links with the Kirov, Bolshoi, or orchestras and other Russian arts groups - or halt UK arts tours to Russia.

I shared his concern over this infraction of human rights, but not his apparent belief that sport should be in the vanguard of a campaign to overturn it.

Now we are once more faced with a similar moral dilemma. Russia's World Cup in 2018. To play or not to play? That is the question.

And I am surprised to be less sure of my feelings. How complicit was Russia in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17? Hard to tell.

I find it easier to form an opinion on the annexation of Crimea and of their intrusion in Ukraine's democratic process: deja vu, evoking memories of the bully-boy tactics typical of the former Soviet Union, a transparent attempt to recreate around Mother Russia the kind of buffer zone which obsessed the USSR. As politicians consider where this might lead - more territory annexed? A cold war on the gas export front? - sport must surely consider its position.

FIFA, predictably, has already made up its mind. Plagued by apparently well-substantiated corruption allegations around the 2018 World Cup in Russia and Qatar, FIFA hardly stands as a bastion of ethics. But UEFA, however, has considered its options and a boycott was in a "working document discussed by the member states," according to sources last week.

Richard Caborn, the former UK sports minister, reckons there is insufficient global consensus on a boycott of the 2018 World Cup for such a sanction to be anything other than an "empty gesture". He says the apartheid era and Russian World Cup issues are not comparable.

But do we sit and do nothing, or stand up for what we believe in?

The debate is incredibly complex.

Some years ago, The Herald's former defence correspondent, Ian Bruce, told me of meeting a colonel in the Soviet army during a Nato exercise in Norway. He noted the Russian's Afghan campaign medals, and the colonel remarked that he had been engaged in a war in Afghanistan "on everyone's behalf, and now we are fighting in the Caucasus, on the southern flank of Europe, against Muslim extremists. And it will come to your door."

This statement was made more than 20 years ago.

It's an indication of how dramatically the world can change. Of how relationships can become blurred. Russia has at least as big a problem with fundamentalism as the United Kingdom. Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? And what may they be in future?

As Scotland gives intense thought to the kind of country we want to be, there are many tough questions.

If Scotland were to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, should we go to Russia? Boycotting the finals would break a nation's heart. In the past there would have been the succour of discussion by the Home FA's. We soon may not be a part of that. Scotland may have to take such decisions in isolation.

My greatest wish for an independent Scotland - if such proves the democratic will - is for a fairer, more open and tolerant society, one without room for prejudice; a nation which upholds what is right and decent. If that means boycotting the 2018 World Cup, so be it.

Yaya Toure and Football Against Racism in Europe raised the possibility of an African-nation boycott on grounds of Russian racism. I would be proud of any nation that stood shoulder to shoulder with them.

Do we even need to consider Russia's appalling role in Ukraine?