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These German influences and contributions, whichwere accompanied from about 1850 by increasingly closeeconomic relations with Germany, were accepted orabsorbed without a corresponding friendliness of feelingtowards Germans themselves. Large sections of theeducated minority resented or girded at German civilservants and officers and often attacked the foreign policyconducted from St Petersburg on the score of its control byforeigners who thought in terms of European equilibriumor German interests instead of the true needs and aspirationsof Russia. The mass of the people knew Germansmore than any other foreigners, but they knew them onlyas the overseers of their masters, whether in field orfactory, or as meticulous, flint-skinned officials. Thevery virtues of the Germans appeared in Russian eyes tobe turned by excess or inadaptability into the vices ofpedantic routine and cold-blooded or cruel superiority.Europe through the Germans gave Russia much, but fartoo often as the exacting and inhuman schoolmaster orthe rigid and alien disciplinarian.These diverse and widespread feelings against Germanshelped to give powerful, if incoherent, backing to thegrowth of a new Russian nationalism in the forty yearsbefore 1914. They also gave backing to the political,diplomatic combination which linked up Russia withFrance and eventually Great Britain, and to thepatriotism initially evoked by the war of 1914 as aretributive contest of the Slavs against the Germantaskmaster or overlord. These feelings were stronglyreinforced by Russian experience of German occupation,above all in the Ukraine in 1918. Now in the present warthey have been surcharged with the far greater waves ofpopular hatred loosed by the Nazi outrages; now thewatchword is " execration and death to the GermanFascist invaders, their state, their army, their ' New Orderin Europe"' (Stalin).The second greatest, and a very different, agent ofEurope in Russia has been France. Peter the Great hadvery strongly reinforced the connexions of Russia withthe non-Catholic, northern European lands. As a resultthe predominance of French culture was delayed until343