Yet Putin seems to have learned as little as he has forgotten. In August 1968, the Warsaw Pact forces entering Czechoslovakia were told by their political officers that they would be welcomed as liberators. They found themselves cursed, out of fuel, and hungry. Morale was shattered. Putin’s control of domestic media can hide the truth from most of the Russian population, but his conscripts, forced now to sign new contracts to turn them into volunteers, are all too aware of the reality.

His treatment of his own people is as pitiless as his treatment of his enemies. The army even brought a mobile crematorium to Ukraine to dispose of Russian casualties in order to reduce the body-bag count going home. Putin’s Soviet predecessors had a similar disregard for their troops’ feelings. In 1945, the Red Army faced a number of mutinies. Frequently treated with contempt by officers and political departments, soldiers were ordered out at night into no-man’s-land not to retrieve the bodies of fallen comrades, but to strip them of their uniforms for reuse by replacement troops.

Another old pattern repeating itself in Ukraine is the Russian army’s reliance on heavy guns. In World War II, the Red Army bragged about the power of its artillery, which it called “the god of war.” In the Berlin operation, Zhukov’s artillery fired more than 3 million shells, destroying more of the city than the Allies’ strategic air offensive had. The Soviets used Katyusha rocket launchers, which German troops nicknamed “Stalin’s organ” for their howling sound, to kill any remaining defenders. While Putin’s conventional artillery smashes Ukrainian buildings open in the same old way to eliminate potential sniper positions, thermobaric ordnance—the devastating “vacuum bombs” that create a fireball that sucks the oxygen away from their targets—takes the place of the old Katyushas.