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.
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).