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Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova, Ivan Katchanovski (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006), 286 pp.+maps, illustrations.

The impact of historical legacies on the different trajectories of post-communist transition in countries of Central and Eastern Europe has recently received a considerable amount of attention in the academic literature. The growing attention to the role of legacies could be seen as a reaction to much of the earlier "transitology" literature's preoccupation with more immediate and proximate causes of divergent outcomes. The debates about the role of legacies have been especially prominent in discussions of political and economic changes in countries that joined the EU in the recent waves of accession. Katchanovski' s book takes these debates further east. The book provides a genuinely comparative perspective on regional divisions in countries that, although they are neighbors and share much of the past, are not often subjects of a focused cross-country comparison. The book's key argument is that historically based cultural differences explain a significant part of the cross-regional variation in political attitudes and behavior. The specific attitudinal and behavioral characteristics on which the author focuses concern popular support for nationalist/ communist and pro-Western/pro-Russian ideological alternatives. In the author's view, these two ideological dimensions have a very significant overlap in both countries, which allows him to treat these dimensions in a combined manner. The book provides a considerable amount of evidence that much of the political conflict in the two states is structured along these dimensions. The book is explicit in providing its version of the answer to what could be labeled as Putnam's question. How far back in history one should go to identify the causes of some contemporary outcomes is a question often raised with respect to Putnam's study of Italy. 1 In explaining regional differences in political attitudes in Moldova and Ukraine, Katchanovski implies that one should not go too far. In his view, one should start with examining the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century experiences. The book identifies the pre-World War I and pre-World War II divisions as critical junctures in the formation of regional political cultures in Ukraine and Moldova. These historical time periods were crucial to regional political culture because they coincided with the birth of national identity and the mass education of the population. Katchanovski succeeds in explicating the mechanisms that underline the evolution of regional differences in both countries. Regional identities are described as products of distinct policies and institutions imposed by the authorities of states that gained control over specific regions. The book provides a good overview of the historical literature that catalogues these policies and institutions; it also discusses historical sequences of institutional practices and the effects of these sequences on cultural development. Political culture, which remains an embattled term for many practitioners of social science research, is defined in the book with reference to lasting values and norms and by contrasting those with attitudes, which are conceptualized