Schools in the Ruthenian language schools were established, Ruthenian political parties formed and attempts were begun to develop their national culture. That came as a surprise to some Poles, who until the revolution had believed, along with most politically-aware Ruthenians, that Ruthenians were part of the Polish nation, which, was then defined in political rather than ethnographic, terms). In the late 1890s and the first decades of the next century, the populist Ruthenian intelligentsia adopted the term Ukrainians to describe their nationality. Beginning with the 20th century, national consciousness reached a large number of Ruthenian peasants.