In preparation, James Madison set about studying the mistakes previous republics had made so that America might avoid the same fate. He found history was littered with examples of republics losing their sovereignty through destabilization by foreign powers who wormed their way into domestic politics through pretend friendships and partisan alliances.

One prominent case was the ancient Greek city-states that banded together to beat back a foreign invasion from Persia. But the Greeks then continued to place their loyalties in their cities, not in Greece as a whole. Athens and Sparta, Madison noted in Federalist #18, “became first rivals and then enemies; and did each other infinitely more mischief than they had suffered from Xerxes,” the Persian king. The final blow to their freedom occurred when King Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, infiltrated select cities with bribes dressed up as foreign aid and splintered the alliance in order to ultimately conquer it. As Hamilton later explained, “ambitious Philip, under the mask of an ally to one, invaded the liberties of each, and finally subverted the whole.”

This lesson was reinforced during Washington’s presidency, when Poland ratified the first written constitution in Europe, attempting to press past the polarization and paralysis of its parliamentary monarchy. But squeezed between Russia and Prussia, Poland found its sovereignty systematically undermined by senate candidates who secretly served those neighboring states. With a weakened military, a series of forced partitions reduced Poland to a skeletal state.

So Russia’s got experience in this kind of thing, even before Stalin and his admirer Putin.