As Europe plunges into its first major armed conflict in 75 years, one of the most unsettling elements has been the calls from otherwise sensible people to give Russia’s Vladimir Putin at least some (or all) of what he wants, including a new cordon sanitaire of neutral, non-NATO states on his western border.

Although most of the commentariat is now firmly behind Ukraine in its struggle to defend its sovereignty, it is not hard to imagine a point in the not-too-distant future when Putin will dangle an end to hostilities in exchange for guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality — and Russia’s implicit suzerainty over its neighbor.

Putin’s demands will be backed up by the sight of demoralized, dispossessed Ukrainians, while he leverages the political divisions in the U.S., Germany and Italy’s addiction to Russian gas, and the world’s need for Ukraine’s grain exports.

We will then hear again a refrain of the post-WWII argument that it is necessary to understand and placate Russia’s paranoia about its security needs. After VE Day, the peoples on the Soviet Union’s western border were abandoned to their fate by the United States, Britain and France, all of which were too exhausted to try to push Stalin back behind the pre-1939 borders of the USSR.

As a result, for the next 45 years we left tens of millions of people — who had suffered just as much as Soviet citizens in the struggle to defeat Hitler — to the predations of a country suffused with an historic sense of grievance and an insatiable thirst for vengeance.

Stalin, Putin’s hero, imposed on his new empire a method of governance, Marxism-Leninism, that relied on a few dried-up carrots and a lot of very large sticks to keep the populace in line. An insured supply of life’s basic needs — food, housing, medical care — coupled with the threat of imprisonment, loss of work and the basic benefits that only came with a state job, made it possible to enforce an atomization of society in which even good friends feared sharing their inner thoughts.

The strategy largely succeeded in repressing these societies, but from time to time the degradations imposed resulted in violent eruptions through the first 30 years of Soviet rule — East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1970 and 1980.

Eventually the gross inefficiencies of the system meant that the state was increasingly unable to provide even a few crummy carrots. The quality and quantity of food, clothing, housing and transport stagnated, and then began to slip backward. Over time, regimes in Poland and Hungary realized a new social contract was needed that would allow for more public participation, and by 1989 even the codgers in the Kremlin could see the writing on the wall.

The demise of the Soviet Union and its empire quickly brought an end to the subjugation of the peoples of Eastern Europe, and over the next decade, the European Union and the United States worked to welcome them into a prosperous, stable community of democratic nations. In some ways, that seemingly seamless success has paved the way for today’s blasé view of those bad ole days. Over the past decades the world has lost sight of just how awful life under Russian rule had been, though simply looking at Russia today should provide sufficient reminders of the costs of corrupt authoritarianism.

It seems that today, too many people in the West have no recollection at all of that horrible time and hence may be more than happy to once again consign Ukrainians — and possibly Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and even Poles and Moldovans — to a life of penury and political persecution all in the name of peace and security for the rest of us.

If you lived behind the Iron Curtain before it fell — or covered that region as a western journalist, as I did — you know just how high a price that is. And you also know that the only ones who will pay that price are the people who will serve as our “buffers” against Putin’s thugocracy. So before anyone decides that Ukrainians should simply accept their fate, please take the time to reflect on what that fate would look like.

Richard Hornik, who has a master’s degree in Russian studies, covered Eastern Europe for TIME and other publications for more than 20 years, and is now an adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center. The views expressed here are his own.