The author, referring to his own research on the Polish-Lithuanian, Polish-Belarusian and Polish-Ukrainian borderland, formulates the thesis that after the collapse of the USSR individual nations began to develop their own national identity in opposition to other nations. The author poses the question of the civic loyalty with simultaneous loyalty to the culture of origin, national culture. He gives examples and attempts to answer in the context of the arising problems of identity in the emerging multicultural societies. Particular attention is paid to the problems of identity of Poles, as citizens of other countries created after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is of Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Buryatia.jerzyniki@wp.pl...