Despite the widespread notion of Ukraine being regionally diverse or even divided, almost no systematic study of Ukraine's regional heterogeneity has been done so far. Most publications either deal with specific regions or address particular regional cleavages (language preferences, voting behavior). This volume, edited by scholars Ulrich Schmid and Oksana Myshlovska, seeks to fill this gap by mapping regional differences in six fields: identity, memory, language, literature, religion, and entrepreneurial values (in particular, attitudes toward risk, envy, and perception of corruption). The book is far more than a collection of thematic contributions; it is united by a single research design and based on the results of the international collaborative project Region, Nation and Beyond: A Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Reconceptualization of Ukraine hosted by the University of St. Gallen in 2011–15.

Of the ten chapters (including the introduction and the conclusion) six address the above-mentioned fields. As noted by the editors, they are based on a survey of 6,000 respondents conducted at the beginning of 2013 in all regions of Ukraine and representative of the country profile with respect to age, education and size of residence; the survey is supplemented by focus groups, ethnographic interviews, and a managerial survey. While discussing the empirical findings, these chapters (each written by a group of authors) put them in a broader theoretical and historical context. The chapters on language and religion provide an extremely valuable historical introduction to the respective fields, thus shedding a new light on the confessional and linguistic diversity of Ukraine. In a similar way, the chapter on memory politics does not just discuss some rather illuminative results of the empirical research illustrating differences in regional commemorative cultures but also provides an overview of different (although often overlapping) historical legacies in Ukraine and of contemporary memory politics on the regional and local level. Especially innovative is the attempt to map the regional diversity of Ukrainian literature, supplemented by an analysis of local reading patterns. The volume thus does not only make an important contribution to the current academic discussion on regionalism in Ukraine heated up by the current crisis, but its separate chapters can be also used as introductory reading for teaching Ukrainian and east European studies.

The remaining two chapters address the issue of regional identities and divisions as reflected in the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14. Anna Chebotarova's contribution, looking at “grassroots” Ukrainian identity discourses is based on interviews with Euromaidan protesters collected by the L΄viv Center for Urban Studies in winter 2013–14. The contribution by Yaroslav Hrytsak is more a meta-reflection that puts the results of the project in the context of the ongoing Ukrainian intellectual debate on “two Ukraines.” Juxtaposing the results of the project with the outcomes of the World Values Survey in Ukraine, he claims that recent changes in social values rather than shifts in collective identities explain the new post-Maidan political geography of Ukraine.

Despite the attempt of these two chapters to bridge the rupture of 2013–14, the book is largely a snapshot of Ukrainian society in 2013, just a few months before the unfolding of dramatic events in a country that then embarked on a number of ambitious and often controversial reforms. On the one hand, the timing of the book is a bit unfortunate, as the reader cannot help asking herself if, for example, the results of the survey on collective memory would not have been different after the “decommunization”; or how the restrictions on the import of Russian books and the rather generous state support for Ukrainian cultural production affected reading patterns; or if Petro Poroshenko's efforts to create a national Orthodox church independent from Moscow have significantly changed the situation in the religious sphere. On the other hand, the main findings of the research project (probably one of the last ones that include Crimea and Donbas) sheds light on Ukrainian society on the eve of the Euromaidan and thus helps to relativize the deterministic discourse of Ukraine as a regionally-divided country deemed to be disintegrating. To quote some findings: “attitudes towards history demonstrate that, with some exceptions, dividing lines run within the regions rather than between them” (114); “in general, Ukraine remains united by the canon of Ukrainian writers who were popularized in the Soviet Ukrainian narrative” (243); “religion is not…a significant contributing factor in the creation of regionalism or regional identities” (248). The picture of Ukrainian society thus appears as much more complex, with regional patterns being complemented by generational, socio-economic, and gender differences.

It should be also noted that the subtitle of the book—Reconceptualizing Ukraine's Heterogeneity—actually captures the idea and the contents better than the catchy title—Regionalism without Regions. The book is not really about regionalism: it does not discuss the Soviet origins and post-Soviet problems of Ukrainian regionalism in the broader (east) European context; it does not address the genealogy and transformation of Ukraine's regional elites and does not thematize the diversity of the local political regimes. The notion “region” itself remains ambivalent, oscillating between historical regions and contemporary administrative units (oblasts).

Last but not least, the book is generously illustrated with highly instructive tables, diagrams, and maps (which might have profited from using colors instead of patterns as markers).