Arbor THE NATIONAL COUNCI L FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEA

-Executive Summary Historical and sociological explanations of attitudinal and evaluative dispositions woul d lead us to be exceedingly skeptical of the notion that Ukraine constitutes any kind of politica l community . (Political community we operationalize as the existence of a range of politica l dispositions and evaluations entertained by a collectivity and separating that collectivity attitudinally from a corresponding range of views and perspectives among others elsewhere . ) The effects of enormously divergent historical experiences, of differential exposure to th e world outside the former Soviet Union, and of divergent industrial structures--all point in th e direction of enormous attitudinal and evaluative divergences across the regions of Ukraine . These cleavages are incompatible with the kind of shared normative and evaluative parameter s which set off one political community from another . Examination of survey data from Ukrain e and European Russia reveal that Ukrainian attitudes toward the political economy domesticall y and internationally and discrepant judgments about the desirability of Ukrainian independenc e are consonant with the cleavages historical and sociological explanations would lead us t o