With Putin talking about the orthodox church being holy and using to justify some conservative bullshit, all I can remember was the bolsheviks going around the country proudly declaring that cities were now "officially godless" and redistributing the church's gold amongst the people and using it to pay for electrification projects.
It is disheartening to see how seven decades of Marxist-Leninist ideological influence vanished within a few years, leaving Russia as a nationalist chud-fest.
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People were just hiding their religion back then. It was one of the most stupid descisions of the USSR, people who supported socialism were alienated because they couldn't pray and their preachers had to go into hiding or were deported.
This reads like anti soviet rhetoric.
Because that was an extremly shortsighted thing to do, there is little here to defend or talk positively about. It didn't work and was counterproductive. Though to be fair, most Mullahs weren't deported, they just left or went into hiding. I have no idea about the christians.
This is definitly something we have to learn from and should not repeat.
China's doing a good job with it. Using their expropriate political power and allow it to exist instead of exterminate methods.
Exactly, most faith just went underground and it led to resentment with soviet institutions. You can't forbid culture or religion wholesale it doesn't work.
Completely forbidding anything that isn't a new cultural development will lead to erosion of trust. You have to wean people off old ways of thinking by being better than their old support systems.
If socialism is going to win, it's going to be by just being better, not by banning old ways of thought (exceptions for old ways of thought that require oppression of individuals or groups).
This at least give me some hope that maybe that the reverse could happen for the USA and the Western world if there's ever revolutions
This is the problem of the lumpenproletariat. I'm sure the Soviets tried to eliminate their ignorance, but I don't think they were all that successful. This is gonna be a real tricky issue for any socialist project in the future.
People need a positive light to guide them. "Decide for yourself" is, literally, too hard for many of them. They need some kind of higher purpose, and "get the tractor factory running on time" ain't it. One of the Soviet Union's major failings was neglecting the people's spirituality, or worse, attempting to crush it.