Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Azerbaijan, this article examines the civics education program that existed in Azerbaijan in the 1990s and the early 2000s, prior to its incorporation into a newly created "life skills" ("h[schwa]yat bilgisi" in Azerbaijani) course. It is argued that a disconnect between curriculum reform and classroom practice resulted in a missed opportunity for the "first cohort of post-Soviet Azerbaijanis" to benefit from a civics education program that could have had the capacity to impart a meaningful understanding of democracy and thereby useful democracy building skills.