He simply does not think of nationality in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia

From The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds.  Page 8.

During the Great War, people from the borderlands of Europe—Poles, Czechs, and Croats, even Serbs and Italians—fought on both sides. As conscripts, they had little choice. Discipline was harsh and brutal, propaganda played up the threat from the enemy, and there were significant inducements for continued service. In the Russian Army, for instance, a soldier’s family would lose their allowance from the state if he deserted or “voluntarily” entered captivity. In any case, most troops from rural eastern Europe, where literacy was limited, did not conceive of their identity in clear-cut national terms. “Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality,” scoffed a British diplomat in 1918, “he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked ‘the local tongue’ . . . he simply does not think of nationality in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia.