There were the peasants: the Estonians and the Livonians who spoke Baltic tongues, the Mazurians and Kashubians who had Polish-German dialects all their own, the many descendants of the Slavic tribes — Volhinians, Podolians, Polesians, Galicians, Braclavians, now known as Ukrainians or Belarusians — who had similar words for sun, sky, and earth, but used the word «chai» for tea, if they lived in the east, and called the same beverage «herbata» if they lived in the west. In the cities and the villages there were Jews, more Jews than were found anywhere else in the world: Jewish merchants and tailors, poor Jews and rich Jews, Jews whose Yiddish dialects and religious customs differed from region to region along with those of their Slavic neighbors. Scattered among all of these peoples there were others, Armenians, Greeks and Hungarians, colonies of Tartars and Karaims, the descendants of war prisoners or merchants or heretics or criminals. For a thousand years, the peoples of the borderlands spoke their dialects, worshipped their gods, and let the waves of invaders wash over them, recede, and wash over them again.

With the nineteenth century came the first intimations of change. New ideas about nations and nationhood began filtering East, first from Napoleonic France, then from newly unified Germany, eroding older traditions, causing even those who were not noble to place themselves in national categories. In the eighteenth century, if a borderland peasant were asked about his nationality, he would probably have replied «Catholic» or «Orthodox,» or perhaps simply «tutejszy»: it means «one of the people from here.» But in the nineteenth century, the children of the tutejszy began moving to cities, where they became Polish, Russian, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian or Belarusian. The numbers of tutejszy, the people without a nation, began slowly to diminish.

This process might have gone on for quite some time, but for the unexpected collapse of three borderland empires — Czarist Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Prussia — in 1918, at the end of the First World War.