Living in Latvia, visiting Russia and Bulgaria and owning an apartment in Pamporovo, I've seen what you write about up close. As walking, talking status meters, abused humans self medicate by finding someone of lower status to dish out what they've been receiving from those above. In Moscow and St Petersburg I repeatedly heard hatred against Tadzhik, Kazakh and Kirghiz, Turkmen and Uzbek immigrants, as well as some good old fashioned Russian anti-semitism. In Bulgaria it's directed at the Turkish and Roma minorities (but the Turkish minority still makes the best yoghurt). In Serbia and Croatia in 1986 I heard it directed at Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims. Many Latvians still admire their Baltic German conquerors' sense of Ordnung while viewing their former Russian overlords as disorganized, drunken peasants.

This is why the German socialist August Bebel called anti-semitism the socialism of fools (though he got this aphorism from the Austrian socialist Ferdinand Kronawetter).