Postcommunist culture is constantly in the making and is always a work in progress.Merging Theories of Postcommunist ChangeNo one can prevent us from comparing apples and oranges;1 both are fruits, and it may be convenient for some to devise a theory of how similar or different they might be, but can these fruits turn out to be kangaroos under certain conditions? There is a potential danger that such comparison might be simplistic and fruitless: we know that apples and oranges are fruits that differ in several recognizable features. The question then arises: Is it not more challenging to better understand apples (or oranges or kangaroos for that matter), to discover what makes an apple an apple, and to explore why, in the natural world, an apple could hardly become an orange than it is to endlessly compare them? Many theorists of postcommunist transformation in and East-Central Europe (EE/ECE), namely, transitologists, insist that both apples and oranges are noticeably similar fruits and one can obtain a higher knowledge in comparing their suspected common features.2 Fortunately, following Bunce, students of the momentous change in the region started to grasp that the postcommunist transformations differ from most other cases of political transitions in at least two aspects. First, they are more complex than other transitions in question (i.e., Latin American and South transitions), as they contain efforts to completely overhaul the old economic system. Second, they possess specific sociocultural and normative dimensions, which include anything from the unique political, social, and cultural (both communist and traditional) legacies to the effects of the deep disruption of the old social, ideological, and normative systems. In other words, the past in the region had produced very specific characteristics that became firmly embedded in society, culture, and people's minds.In a sense, since human history consists of countless transformations of societies at each level, the postcommunist transformation offers an opportunity to be compared with other great transitions or transformations (i.e., the French Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, or England's Great Transformation), namely due to its broad sweep, uniquely national and historical features, grand combination of continuity and discontinuity, and complexity. Such comparisons might have a very limited value, however, unless they focus on general historical contours or on carefully selected individual (and comparable) features, but even here such comparisons might be more meaningful from the perspective of history than that of comparative politics.3But let comparatists have their piece of fruit pie. We assume that in the real political world, after the process of democratization and marketization reaches a certain critical mass, apples may be in the process of becoming oranges and comparisons may take place on a level field. We are not quite there yet, however. My question here is rather broad: To what extent can we still talk credibly of European and Eastern European politics after the nearly complete economic and strategic inclusion of most of Europe into the structures, or at least the orbit, of the Western world? I propose that the claims of those who believe that there is no autonomous field of comparative politics are perhaps somehow premature.The modes, expressions, and meanings of postcommunist change have been conceptualized in several different ways. Over the past dozen years, two patterns of explaining developments in the region have become dominant in comparative transformation studies, although their variations and combinations also abound. The first set of theories focuses on tracing divergent outcomes of institutional and policy choices to different strategies of transformation. The second general pattern in understanding the postcommunist change is associated with a more ambitious historical perspective, with emphasis either on the institutional-structural trajectories or on social, psychological, or political-cultural dynamics. …