The Orthodox Church and hierarchy was the direct hand of the tsars in the same way the modern Russian church is the direct hand of Russian nationalism and Putin.
There was not a separation of state and religion. You’re imposing an anachronism into your understanding of why the Orthodox hierarchy needed to be dismantled. It was very directly part of an absolute dictatorship that explicitly saw the tsar as the appointee of god and that pushed an ideology where the monarchy were a required part of the natural order of things.
Avoid the anachronism of thinking “religion is the opiate of the masses” is a vaguely Richard Dawkins type statement. The era in which that was stated was an era where religion was the ideology of government and religious hierarchies were directly an extension of state power.
Private practice of religion under Stalin was often ridiculed but always tolerated as a matter of individual right. Public religion was suppressed in the aftermath of the revolution for the same reason the Tsar was shot and the period of dismantling monasteries and cathedrals was limited.
There was official hostility to religion but this was limited to being portrayed as backwards and anti-empirical, anti-material, at odds with the scientific nature of socialism advocated by Lenin and Marx.
The anti-clericism was intense in the 1930s to be sure, but for good reason. They were agents of the Tsar in a very direct sense.
I remember arguing about this with libs a million years ago. The church was rightly seen as a political institution that was counter revolutionary. Before the revolution it was an arm of the tsarist state.
Nah it’s overstated.
The Orthodox Church and hierarchy was the direct hand of the tsars in the same way the modern Russian church is the direct hand of Russian nationalism and Putin.
There was not a separation of state and religion. You’re imposing an anachronism into your understanding of why the Orthodox hierarchy needed to be dismantled. It was very directly part of an absolute dictatorship that explicitly saw the tsar as the appointee of god and that pushed an ideology where the monarchy were a required part of the natural order of things.
Avoid the anachronism of thinking “religion is the opiate of the masses” is a vaguely Richard Dawkins type statement. The era in which that was stated was an era where religion was the ideology of government and religious hierarchies were directly an extension of state power.
Private practice of religion under Stalin was often ridiculed but always tolerated as a matter of individual right. Public religion was suppressed in the aftermath of the revolution for the same reason the Tsar was shot and the period of dismantling monasteries and cathedrals was limited.
There was official hostility to religion but this was limited to being portrayed as backwards and anti-empirical, anti-material, at odds with the scientific nature of socialism advocated by Lenin and Marx.
The anti-clericism was intense in the 1930s to be sure, but for good reason. They were agents of the Tsar in a very direct sense.
I remember arguing about this with libs a million years ago. The church was rightly seen as a political institution that was counter revolutionary. Before the revolution it was an arm of the tsarist state.