| Stalin and his successors were masters at maintaining the traditional, tsarist practices of divise et impera (divide and conquer) vis-a-vis the various subjugated nationalities of the Soviet empire, in order to maintain centralized power. Stalin was particularly adept at creating enclaves of minority groups and at fostering inter-ethnic rivalries, so as to justify Soviet intervention to "preserve the peace". Present-day residues of this policy are evident in Georgia, Armenia, Moldava and the Central Asian republics. A particular vicious variant of this practice was state-sponsored anti-semitism, especially in Ukraine. Knowing that anti-semitism in Ukraine would be confused with anti-semitism by Ukrainians, the tsar and his communist successors operating out of Moscow, would arrange to have vile racial tracts published at Ukrainian addresses so as to foment friction between Ukrainians and Jews. Quite often the antagonism took the form of class-friction, first encouraged under the Polish hegemony of earlier centuries, whereby Jews (perhaps on account of their greater knowledge of languages acquired through commercial necessity) were recruited by the upper classes as administrators of a system of economic, religious and national oppression imposed upon the Ukrainian peasantry. This fact is readily acknowledged today by Jewish scholars (Rosman, 1985). |