Meanwhile, Putin has brought back the Stalin-era national anthem. He’s restored a statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky—the founder of the dreaded Cheka and forerunner of the KGB. And he’s not even talking about burying the heavily embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin in Red Square.

They say nature abhors a vacuum. So does history. Miss Applebaum notes that U.S. planners today “have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously and increasingly don’t mind demonstrating the fact.” We are in danger of repealing Reagan’s greatest achievement. Hundreds of millions of people in eastern and central Europe owe their freedom to Reagan’s inspired leadership in the eighties. Today, seventy years after the war that brought death and despotism to this vast region, their freedoms are increasingly threatened.