Several months before the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin played history teacher for a class of Russian schoolchildren. For Putin, the answers were obvious. Peter’s armies were in Poltava, now located in northeast Ukraine, waging a great power struggle with the West, represented at the time by Swedish King Charles XII. Unfortunately for Putin, one student in the classroom was more hung up on details than grand narratives and replied: “Speaking generally, it wasn’t called the Seven Years War, it was called the Great Northern War.”
Putin of course, is famously obsessed with this history. But Putin’s comments on 18th-century history reveal that he doesn’t even always get the details right. His allusions to the era of...