As a Russian, I am alarmed at the amount of casual racism and vitriol towards both ethnic minorities in Russia (Caucasians, for example) and foreign nationalities, like Ukrainians. It is so bad that Central Asian immigrants are more often referred to by racial slurs than by their actual nationalities in everyday conversation.
Older people tell me it was not this bad in the Soviet Union. Was there truly less ethnic tension, or was it kept under wraps by imposed political correctness? Was there discrimination in politics and in the workforce? Also, did ethnic minorities in the USSR harbor anger toward Russians, as some Ukrainian nationalists do today?
Thank you for your answers!
While the Soviet Union did improve upon the Russian Empire in terms of the treatment of Jews, there was still widespread antisemitism. Look up Rootless cosmopolitan & the Doctors' plot. Jews were often excluded from a variety of different professions. According to Sergey Brin, Jews took their Moscow State University exams in different rooms and were graded on a harsher scale. Brin's father was not allowed to enter the Physics Department. Jews pretty much fled the Soviet Union en masse starting in the 1980s. The Soviet Jewish population was 2.2 million in 1970 and is now 280,000.