THE USES AND DISADVANTAGES OF SOVIET HISTORY FOR LIFE.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: INTRODUCTION

"WELP, THIS IS all wrong now." The collapse of the Soviet Union is marked for me by a single flickering recollection from sixth-grade homeroom. My classroom had one of those world maps that pulls down like a roller shade, and in the winter of 1991 my teacher seemed vaguely put out that it would now have to be replaced.

In retrospect, I realized his weariness was less about geopolitics and more about the difficulty of requisitioning new teaching aids in the public school system. But at the time it felt appropriately anticlimactic.

I was not raised on duck-and-cover nuclear drills, nor was I terribly aware of the Cold War in my daily life, despite growing up inside the D.C. Beltway. The final days of the Soviet Union were well underway before I had enough brain cells to process the real implications. Red Dawn, with its anti-communist guerrilla kids in letter jackets, was already a kitschy period piece when I saw it for the first time. I was vaguely aware that the Doomsday Clock was at a few minutes to midnight, but as far as I knew it always had been.

And then, suddenly, the end wasn't near. Instead of the end times, I spent my formative teen years at the end of history. For the most part, my political and economic sensibilities were formed after the collapse of Soviet communism and before 9/11. The conflict of global superpowers had ended and nothing had yet taken its place. Each year in September, elder pundits fret that the Kids These Days are forgetting the day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the war on terror is a mere blip--albeit a deadly and expensive one--compared to the other mostly metaphorical war of our recent past.

The temptation is to jam the relevant teachings down the throats of a new, amnesiac generation, on the theory that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. That temptation is greatly amplified by an uptick in disdain for capitalism and globalization among Generation Z. But as Friedrich Nietzsche noted, it is counterproductive to fill young brains with "knowledge, taken in excess without hunger, even contrary to need."

"Historical education is wholesome and promising for the future," he explained in "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," only in the service of a "powerful new life-giving influence." Learning about the legacy of communism in school is unlikely to do the trick; I certainly never felt powerful new life-giving influence in a history...