of Slavic peoples was to be united in a Pan-Slavic and Orthodox Christian Russian Empire to preserve their Slavic identity and avoid cultural assimilation; in his lyrics Poland, a Slavic yet Catholic country, was poetically referred to as Judas among the Slavs. World War II According to the racial policy of Nazi Germany, Russians like other Slavs were classified as Untermenschen (subhumans, inferior to Germanic superhumans or Übermenschen). In Nazi Generalplan Ost, territories populated by nations such as Russians, Byelorussians and Poles were designated as future Lebensraum (living space) for settlement by German Wehrbauer ("warrior farmers"), with existing cities and industry to be destroyed, while the local population, regarded as unsuitable for Germanisation, was to be exterminated, enslaved or resettled beyond the Ural mountains. Because of the destiny planned for these people, the willingness of the German occupation forces to compromise with these nations was more limited than in the case of some other Slavs such as Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Sorbs and Ukrainians, or in the case of the Balts, occasionally seen as a source of "worthy blood" and inconsistently considered to be suitable for assimilation. On 13 July 1941, three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler told the group of Waffen SS men: Heinrich Himmler's speech at Posen on 4 October 1943: Nevertheless, the stance of German occupation forces towards Russians later softened amid increasing demand for manpower in the Wehrmacht, leading to formation of Russian collaborationist military formations such as the Russian Liberation Army and the Waffen-Sturm-Brigade der SS - Russian National Liberation Army. Cold War An extreme interpretation of George F. Kennan's "X Article" was exploited by American politicians in the Cold War to advance aggressive "containment" policy towards Russia (in spite of Kennan later denouncing this interpretation). Russophobic stereotypes of an illiberal tradition were also favored by Cold War historiographers, even as scholars of early Russia debunked such essentialist notions. Widely criticized for being antisemitic and extremist nationalistic, Igor Shafarevich's 1981 work Russophobia blamed "Jews seeking world rule" for alleged "vast conspiracy against Russia and all mankind" and seeking destruction of Russia through adoption of a Western-style democracy. After 1989 Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the collapse of Communism, anti-Russian sentiment has been steadily increasing in the United States during the 1990s. According to a Gallup poll, 59% of surveyed Americans viewed Russia