The idea was simple, beautifully clear. Gradually, all of the subtle dialects which were once spoken in the borderlands, all of the national variations and differences in costume and taste, all would be submerged in an onslaught of Russification. Difference would be destroyed: Stalin planned for the borderlands to disappear into Soviet Russia. Call it ethnic cleansing, to use a phrase coined later in another context, on a massive scale — or call it cultural genocide. Either way it was very successful. The West turned its face away, and did not notice while the crescent of land stretching from Konigsberg on the Baltic to Moldova and Odessa on the Black Sea was altered beyond recognition.

The region had been conquered before, but the Soviet empire cast a deeper shadow than any of its predecessors. Whole nations were forgotten; within a few decade, the West no longer remembered that anything other than «Russia» lay beyond the Polish border. Kiev was thought to be a Russian city, Lithuania was considered a Russian province; it was as if the many and various peoples of the region had simply dissolved into the colourless Pripet Marshes, the vast, muddy Belarusian swamp. The national identity of these lands could no longer be clearly defined, and in London and Paris, the history of the borderlands was consigned to dusty bookshops, the languages of the borderlands were banished to small magazines, the borderland emigres retreated into small clubs and churches. After forty years, even the memory of the many-coloured, multi-ethnic borderlands had faded away.

It was at the end of a hot summer, just at the end of what later came to be called the Soviet «years of stagnation», when I first saw the borderlands.