I have a half baked theory about organized religion. The more silly the head gear the more whack the religion. Stalin made at least two mistakes. We all know the first one but imho the second one is that he did not crush the orthodox church until it was reduced to its elemental form. Hoxha did nothing wrong. When a guy like this is a shot-caller in your culture you have already failed. I loathe all organized religion but I feel like relatively speaking the roman catholics are the least bad. I consider roman catholics the ML party of christianity and the vatican is the vanguard. Sure they did a lot of evil stuff back in the day but If I look at the last 1000 years of christians I see them making incremental improvements as opposed to the orthodox wing which has slowly rotted on the vine. The current pope is arguably the best in its history.
Made this post because I just saw this:
The State Duma of the Russian Federation unanimously adopted the law aimed at prohibiting sex change.
Citizens who have already changed sex will be prohibited from adopting children, being their guardians or trustees, and their marriages will be annulled.
The law will come into force from the date of official publication. This was reported by the press service of the lower house of parliament on Friday, July 14.
The law prohibits any medical interventions, both surgical operations and the use of drugs aimed at forming primary or secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex in a person.
Assholes
I think that "crushing" the Orthodox Church would have been the wrong move, but the Bolsheviks should have recognized its cultural sway and instead of clashing with it directly the way they did they should have sought to overwrite it. Imagine if all of the church leaders were communist party members, priests at seminary were required to read Marx alongside the Bible, and every other religion in the Soviet Union similarly integrated into the Party, rather than made into natural collaborators with the capitalists.
it might be possible to co-opt it back from what Constantine did to it, focusing on ante-nicene anti-imperialism, but I still think participation in the first estate should limit your advancement in the party