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.
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Liberalization was a catastrophe that caused mass death and suffering, and churches provided the same sort of community support and mutual aid that they do in the US, helping people survive. It makes perfect sense why in the sudden absence of the social support and secular community building that the USSR provided people would end up dependent on newly rebuilt religious institutions and become indoctrinated as a result (and the study on excess mortality resulting from liberalization specifically called out areas where religious institutions provided support networks as experiencing less excess death, demonstrating that such communities were an effective social defense mechanism that helped people survive hardship).
I've seen the same basic process happen firsthand in the US: my family was always secular and my grandparents were explicitly atheists and socialists, but decades ago my mother started attending a church with a friend of hers out of a vague need for community and mutual aid and became thoroughly indoctrinated for a few years before breaking with them for reasons I never learned (and more recently she completely cut ties with that friend after I came out and that person was apparently a transphobic piece of shit about it).
People have a desperate need for community and support, and religious institutions prey upon that need very successfully. I can 100% believe that 75% of the population was atheist-by-default until everything collapsed around them and their only lifeline was accepting religious indoctrination. This is also why leftist mutual-aid operations are so specifically targeted for violence and suppression by capitalist police: providing people with material support and community is an extremely effective means of winning people over to your side, and so only far-right institutions are allowed to provide them on any large scale by the capitalist state.
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Yeah, atheism was just the default for me, apart from some vague pagan animist stuff from my father, while Christians were always a hostile Other who were basically outside tormentors and attackers. I can absolutely understand why atheists become misanthropic and reactionary in the face of that sort of hostility, and went through a phase of that myself when I was a teen (in addition to the absolute incoherence of swinging wildly from edgy libertarian shitheel to earnest totalitarian quasi-trot/ultra when I was in high school, progressing to edgy chauvinist succdem libertine in college).
Ironically, going from a position of relative privilege (believing myself to be a cishet guy) to an active target of religious hatred and persecution (trans woman) has mellowed me out considerably, despite making the conflict all the more personal. Maybe it's just a broadening understanding of what the opposing side really is: the chauvinism, racism, and classism that all exist independent of religious institutions. That is to say that the religion is a tool for reinforcing and spreading these problems, rather than the actual root of them, and that what must be defeated are chauvinist and reactionary tendencies as well as the material conditions of precarity, alienation, and desperation that drive people into the arms of theocratic institutions; by educating away bigotry and chauvinism, you remove the most toxic effect of religious institutions; by providing a cure for alienation and precarity through secular social support and mutual aid institutions you remove the material factors that entrench religious institutions as systems of control.
If those goals are accomplished, then personal religiosity stops mattering for the most part, and people should ideally be allowed to follow whatever belief system they want so long as they don't propagate reactionary and chauvinist ideals.
I don't believe that there's a functional difference after long enough: while obedience is enforced through holding social support hostage, even a cynical and performative expression of belief becomes genuine over time as a function of how memories and belief work (so, simply expressing belief in something or stating it as a fact will eventually lead to it becoming ingrained if one doesn't actively denounce it in one's mind). As you go on to say, the emotional experiences people have in churches with group song and other rituals serve to reinforce and build belief.
Yeah. That reminds me of a different, related topic that I've talked about on here before, about how back then the "western left" as it were included a bunch of chauvinist libertines who were only there because fundamentalism was an active threat to their own personal hedonism, and when clear lines were drawn with Gamergate and its related culture war shit all the chauvinist libertine types went full fash because it promised them freedom not only from the rules of theocrats but also from the restriction of women saying "no" to them or the McDonalds cashier asking them to please stop screaming slurs. It's quite scary to think that I probably would have gone down that same path if not for the fact that I realized I was trans right when all that shit was kicking off, suffered what can only be described as the complete razing of my ideology and worldview as I dismantled all the lies and values that built up my repression, then rebuilt my worldview from the ground up in a world that was suddenly actively hostile to my very existence. It's also kind of disheartening to think that deprograming all the chauvinist shit I'd absorbed from pop-culture or synthesized on my own from own alienation took something as drastic as a deep and personal need to dismantle it for my own benefit, and how hard it was to overcome all the toxic barriers it left sitting around just to learn to be a better person. Teaching people to be better is not a simple matter of providing accurate information and education, but requires something that makes them receptive somehow.
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It is scary. It can be used positively, and it's a common facet of self-help snake oil (as well as outright occult theory stuff) where just vocally declaring what you want to be true can alter your perspective to an extent if it's repeated for long enough. It can also be used to make certain lies automatic like an alias or fake backstory (some old friends of mine used to do this shit, making up aliases and backstories for themselves and one another and just telling these lies to random strangers as small talk), or just used to make yourself believe a lie enough that you can tell it convincingly. I think method acting may work on a similar principle, where you just kind of trick your brain into giving you a different headspace and set of information to draw on.
But it also has much darker uses when it comes to indoctrination, where if someone is made to repeat something enough it does start to sink in, whether that's religious or secular (like the ritual of pledging allegiance to the american flag that many millions of children are made to do every single day, although the abject misery of school probably detracts from the power of that particular ritual by associating it with being uncomfortable and miserable). It's not mind control by any means, and I don't want to give the impression that that's what I'm claiming, but it can ingrain itself over time if it's not challenged and corrected. I don't believe it's enough in and of itself to make someone coerced into performative rituals and declarations of belief start to believe them, since the coercion aspect implies an active resistance, but when paired with the other emotional effects of ritual it leaves people with a lot of sort of default lines with strong positive emotional attachment that their memory will bring up and so they will consider these to be beliefs just as a basic function of what they feel like when remembered.
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Yeah, I remember it mostly not being taken seriously in high school, and I just ignored it apart from my last semester there, when there was the unfortunate combination of it happening during a class that I actually enjoyed and was interested in (and which I'd probably say was the single positive experience I had in high school) and the teacher making a big deal of it, so I stood to avoid antagonizing someone I otherwise liked and respected.
That's wild, the only thing I ever heard from ROTC kids in high school was that they wanted to be officers or get some enlistment privileges related to having taken ROTC.
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Interesting, but were religions suppressed?
My general understanding is that religion was suppressed than oppressed, if that makes sense. It's a topic I'm interested in because growing up in American Evangelicalism in the 80s and 90s, all I heard was how the godless communists would shoot and kill anyone found with a Bible. While that was an absurd exaggeration the USSR did take tons of measures to try and decrease religiousity, at least that's my cursory understanding.
From all i know, that's a very good way to put it. I can't speak about the USSR, but the DDR still had churches, people still attended, but it was publicly frowned upon and the churches did not have the sway over the government they show in western Germany to this day. Germany actually isn't a particularly religious country, we have a lot less practicing Christians than the USA even in the western parts and the eastern states bring that number down further to a considerable extend, religion still isn't popular there to this day. In total and utter defiance of this, both the Catholic and Protestant church still are disproportionately powerful lobbying groups who, to give a recent example, get super pissy when the federal government tries to take their easter mass from them due to covid - around Easter, we had less than 10% vaxxed people, btw, and the churches still insisted on holding services in person and got through with that.
That kind of influencing wasn't the case in the DDR at all, and i think it's part of the reason why both homosexuality and abortion got legalized earlier in the DDR than in the west. I also have the hunch that the DDR going ahead on this put pressure on the west to give in to demands of gay and women's rights groups unless they wanted to look backwards compared to the rival DDR, although that's speculation on my part.
BTW, the churches in the east were also hotbeds of counterrevolution and revisionism and were subject to state surveilance. For some people, social activities organized by the church where also a way to partake in gatherings that weren't state sponsored. So there'd be people on the fringes of the congregation, especially teenagers, who didn't bother much with Jesus and just wanted to hang out with other folks from around town in church-adjacent social clubs and the like, but there was also some subversion going on. Being religious itself didn't necessarily get you in trouble, but it made you look sus because of these elements being present around the churches and that could lead to further problems depending on what was found out on a closer look. Absolutely not "in gommulism, religious people get shot", nominally you could practice freely, but de facto you'd be considered a bit reactionary and treated accordingly. Groups meeting at churches played a fairly prominent part in the fall of the DDR as well, so Honnecker may have been on to something there.
Thank you for sharing, I love learning about the DDR. Stasi State or Socialist Paradise is pretty high on my list of books to read next.
It's still a bit of a heated subject here. I'm old enough to remember the wall coming down, but i grew up in the west, so i always only knew the western side of the story, which was full of horseshoe theory, vuvuzela no iphone (our equivalent is "DDR no banana", as imported fruit where often hard to get there) and resentment about the partition. Then when i got older, i met a ton of people from the east (both from the DDR and a bunch of other formerly AES countries) and the common theme was usually "yes, it was bad ... it was a dictatorship and i didn't want that system any longer, BUT ..." The east had it really rough after the reunification. It wasn't as harsh as in Russia, but 80% of the people there lost their jobs, entire industries got bought up for nothing by companies from the west, and while the stores were suddenly full of consumer goods that people had always yearned for, they had no money to buy them with. There's a lot of very deep resentment of capitalism among easterners and while there's historic reasons why nazis are a really serious problem there, it's also the part of the country where leftist politicians are still most successful. People there often don't buy into the narratives of liberal democracy, one way or the other. There's a lot of small differences like that. A historic case of one society being split in two and then both halves developing independently under totally different material conditions and a totally different ruling ideology.
This is a good perspective to hear. Like, so much of what the west said about the DDR was bullshit. But at the same time, I also want to be fair and not pretend it was a workers paradise and everyone was just tricked into wanting capitalism.
There was no going back after the USA flooded East Germany with capital. In From Us To Me the co-op fisherman made a great point that if the GDR managed to create an exchange program wherein young people were forced/allowed to live under capitalism for a while (working min wage in Mexico or something) they would never have wanted the wall to come down.
People fell for the Propaganda and wanted to try it, but there was no going back once the Vanguard fell and capital was allowed to reign freely.
Yes, but also don't ignore how fundamental the church and its influence are onto mainstream politics, business and such. Being outside of cities or within the Southwest / South makes a huge difference.
Absolutely, i'm just talking in general here. I've unfortunately still run into young earth creationist types more than once, but it's a lot less common than, say, in America.
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Yeah, figures like that are usually off the charts for the US compared to other western nations.
Everyone in my family except my grandmother and siblings believe that shit
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Bibles were prohibited from being imported. If they searched your luggage and found one you were in troooooooouble. That's what they said back then anyway.
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Going of the memories of my parents, in a Soviet affiliated country but not the USSR... the vast majority of practicing priests were agents for the internal police. In general practicing religion was discouraged, outright preaching wasnt a thing, and tabs were kept on people who openly went to church. Schoolchildren would get their behavior score deducted for going to church and school institutions could have a stern talk with parents over it. And of course kids were encouraged to snitch on parents over it.
Sounds good to me
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During Late Gorbi ? Doupt tbh, he was fucking up too much all over the place to care about anti-religious propaganda . That was mostly till Stalin died tbh
Others have already gave some good answers, but I'll say that the Soviets (for most of their history) desired for there to be ideally only one church in each town (plus a synagogue or mosque if there was a significant population of Jews or Muslims, though that didn't always happen.) If it was a bigger city there could be a few more but religion was definitely kept controlled. Obviously it'd be a pain in the ass to get to the one church and the KGB monitored most of them since dissidents often were there. If you went to church you wouldn't advertise it but it wouldn't be considered criminal.
Smart move lol. But yeah that's deff religious "control"
This is a good explanation for the very sudden rise in the 90s, alongside people discovering religion as a guideline in the chaos, pauperization and uncertainty following the collapse. But it has gone up continuously and almost without interruption after that. If it was just "i actually was always devout, i just had to hide it under the Soviets", you'd see it plateau after a few years, but that plateau phase is only reached 23 years after the USSR's fall. Active proselytization seems more likely as an explanation for the rise past the mid 90s.
I mean, this is just guesswork based on what seems plausible at a glance, i'm not particularly knowledgeable on Russia.
I read texts about how faith became hidden and private and how people would go great lenghts to keep their rituals.
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This is a very correct interpretation. Faith in general was kept hidden and private. These are mostly not new converts, but people more openly talking about it. If the USSR had survived a few more generations probably religion would have genuinely fallen off...