reviews 749 in Polish internal affairs with the elevation of John Paul II, was another exogenous factor that certainly contributed to the unwillingness of Polish intellectuals to engage in the dialogue of compromise. These quibbles not withstanding, Seleny's book has much to offer,particu larly on the evolution of theHungarian economic, political and economic system. She points out in the end that the reformist project was always a closely run thing. No one expected the collapse of the system when it hap pened. For insiders, like the entrepreneurs she interviewed inHungary, there was always a judicious willingness not to push too far and to gain as much cover as possible from the regime's sources of power and resources. Even in Poland, the Solidarity leadership's claims were always, rightup untilMartial Law, limited to a worker's voice in economic decision making. Thus, ulti mately, itwas the sudden removal of the external Soviet pressure to conform that produced the collapse of the Communist system in Poland, Hungary and everywhere else in the European Communist world. The 'agents' in this process of dissolution were located at the very apex of the system. Transformation ofCommunistSystems Project,RSPAS Robert F. Miller The Australian National University Arel, Dominique and Ruble, Blair A. (eds). ReboundingIdentities: The Politics of IdentityinRussia and Ukraine.Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press,Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, 2006. xii + 365 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. ?36.50. This excellent collection by a formidable team of scholars derives from threeworkshops on 'multi-cultural legacies' held at theKennan Institute in Washington in 2002 to 2003. Its ten essays provide analysis of a consistently high standard, and the reader also gets thebonus ofArel's and Ruble's cogent analysis in theirbook-end chapters. Three chapters are historical. Steven Seegal looks at the politics ofmap making in nineteenth-century Ukraine. The chapter provides an impressive catalogue, but only skims what could have been a very interesting analysis. An argument is implicit thatwhat Dominique Arel calls 'attributes' (p. 3) ? supposedly objective factors like language ? often came first in the map making process. Cartographers then mapped the attribute, so that their putative 'nation' actually came last in the chain of creation. Secondly, reproduction can be difficult,but Iwould like to have seen more maps. Paul Werth provides a fascinating analysis of the (partial) shift from religious to ethnic ascription in the late tsaristperiod, and the reluctance of the state to facilitate this process, even after 1905. Dmitry Gorenberg's theme is 'Soviet nationality policy and assimilation'. If,he argues, 'in the 1970s and 1980s,most scholars believed that the Soviet government was engaged in an extensive and deliberate program of Russifica tion thatwas aimed at destroyingminority languages and cultures' (p. 275), in recent years the academic fashion has swung too far in the direction of talk of 'affirmativeaction' (TerryMartin) and institutional nativization (Ronald 750 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 Sumy and Rogers Brubaker). Gorenberg revisits thework of Brian Silver and others to argue that 'the extent of assimilation in the Soviet Union has been understated in recentworks' (p. 277). In fact, 'by the early 1980s, both linguis tic assimilation and linguistic re-identification in the Soviet Union were on an accelerating trajectory, and it seems quite likely that had Soviet nationality policies remained in place for another twenty to thirtyyears, many of the Soviet Union's minority groups would have become almost entirelyRusso phone, while a large number of theirmembers would have reidentified as Russians' (p. 298). Otherwise, argues Gorenberg, it is impossible to explain the intensityof language disputes in theGorbachev era. The other seven essays cover the period since 1991. Catherine Wanner shows just how far contemporary Ukraine has moved from the state ascription of religion. New evangelical communities (her analysis focuses on Baptists and Pentecostals) have been able to 'challenge ideological categories that symboli cally link religion and nation-state as an organic unity' (p. 245). Unlike Russia, no one Church is dominant, and theOrthodox Church is complacent. 'In the eyes of Orthodox clergy, there is no need formissionizing because all Ukrainians [are assumed to] have a religious identity,whether or not they chose to act on it...