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Dmitri Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of Russia’s defense industry, pointed to similarities among the Soviet and Russian programs. “What happened to the Proton yesterday has already killed these missiles in 1988 and 2014,” he wrote in his blog. “The Soviet and Russian experts have rushed to conclusions and never found the reasons for the engines’ anomalous behaviour.”

If he’s right, the problems plaguing the Proton in recent years have been known since the dying days of the Soviet Union, but were never fixed. They now have a more damaging effect, because the system as a whole is more fragile. “In the U.S.S.R.,” Andrei Sinitsyn wrote in the business daily Vedomosti, “critically important dual-use industries such as aerospace worked under threat of reprisals and enjoyed unlimited resources. Now threats are ineffective and resources are limited, both objectively and subjectively (because of corruption).”

Then there are the setbacks in sports. On Sunday, the Russian national hockey team lost 6-1 to Canada in the final game of the world championship in Prague. This compounded Team Russia’s failure at the Sochi Winter Olympics, an event that Putin intended to use to showcase his country’s post-Soviet glory. Canada, often beaten by the formidable Soviet team in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, triumphed there, too.

The Canadian team that went to the championship in Prague was weakened, because some of its stars were kept at home by the National Hockey League play-offs. Russia had more of its top players available, but wilted disgracefully in the second period. Then, the Russian team did something no Soviet squad would ever have done: It skated off the ice before the Canadian national anthem was played to honour the winners. Only a handful of players remained, led by NHL star Alexander Ovechkin, who tried to stop his teammates but mostly failed.