Why does history in books seem so far away, while history you’ve lived through seems like yesterday?
That question hit me when I realized that it’s now been more than 26 years since the Soviet Union dissolved. I was in college then; it doesn’t seem that long ago.
Yet when I sat in college classrooms in the early 1990s, we were closer in time to the height of the civil rights movement and the peak of the Vietnam War than we are now to the end of the Cold War.
When I say things like that out loud, my wife laments that I’m just reinforcing how old I’ve become. But it also makes one pause and consider that word “history.”
Which all is rattling around my brain because my favorite history professor died earlier this month. I hadn’t seen him in years, but Vince Jacobs (seen in the photo above, an image recently posted on Linfield College's Twitter feed) will be missed by me and many others.
I would have majored in history had I seen a clear career path without going to graduate school for an advanced history degree. Instead, I pursued a minor in history. That freed me up to take more history classes that I knew I’d like rather than following a prescribed course list.
I ended up in History of the Soviet Union during the spring of my senior year at Linfield College. The course was led by Prof. Jacobs on the ground floor of Pioneer Hall, the oldest building on campus. Jacobs looked like a classic old-school professor, but it turned out he essentially started the college’s study abroad program and also pushed for reforms in the private college’s governance during his 40 years there.
And he was wicked smart with a sense of humor to match. He’d often go off-script during lectures to crack jokes or a humorous comment. But they were enough to elicit laughs even from the back row, where I almost always sat during class.
Sitting there, he put human faces on leaders whose names will live on—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev—without shying away from the horrors of their various eras. Stalin’s regime alone killed somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people, depending on which historian’s estimate one believes. I came to appreciate Khrushchev as a leader who seemed to be leaning toward liberalization and reforms when he was removed from power in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev and his supporters. Khrushchev also “blinked” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, potentially saving the world from nuclear war.
I took Jacobs’ class in 1993, two years after the official end of the Soviet Union. The “evil empire” that scared me as a child of the 1970s and ‘80s with the threat of nuclear annihilation was a failed experiment by that point. Between that and my love of spy thrillers, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union was a fascinating subject in terms of both world history and politics.
Jacobs retired from full-time teaching in 2002, nearly a decade after I took his class. He later taught online classes for Linfield and in-person classes aboard U.S. Navy ships, including two based at the naval station in nearby Everett. When I first dated the woman who is now my wife the year after I graduated, she lived in Pioneer Hall, upstairs from Jacobs’ office and classroom. I often thought of him fondly as I passed his office door there.
Meanwhile, that history I learned about and studied in Jacob’s class is creeping back during the Putin era in Russia. History doesn’t
quite repeat itself, but it rhymes, according to an oft-used saying. With both the U.S. and Russia talking about adding to their nuclear stockpiles again, testy-at-best relations between the two nations and alleged Russian meddling in a number of Western democracies, including this one, those fears of the Cold War era don’t seem like ghosts of the last century anymore.