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.
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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Just denial, alienation, and psychosis.
It's not like they were raised on a Christian education or anything. They all went to public school and have college degrees. They just never found community outside of evangelical church and having that belief is a requirement for access to that support network.
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
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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