Many of those conservative people aren't going to be all that open-minded to what you have to say after all much effort has been out toward releasing their religious practices. I'll admit that I'm not super well informed on this (yet), but understanding was that the USSR caused a lot of issues for itself with it's attitudes toward religion (or at least the handling of it).
Edit: to clarify, I'd have rather seen a more lenient approach to religious practices, so that the political capital could be better spent on things like preventing the actual oppression of LGBT people. Saying "well he should have just done the right thing" is overly simplistic, but my understanding of Stalin is that this was a shortcomings of his leadership in general (though he had his strengths)
You can say that the party appealed to popular opinion but they made no effort whatsoever to change it. Homosexuality remained illegal and taboo in Soviet society until 1991, after which pretty much every Western country had decriminalised. Hell, the Warsaw pact states decriminalised it too.
The uncomforatble truth is that the soviet leadership was either actually homophobic or didn't care about gay people, or both.
Many of those conservative people aren't going to be all that open-minded to what you have to say after all much effort has been out toward releasing their religious practices. I'll admit that I'm not super well informed on this (yet), but understanding was that the USSR caused a lot of issues for itself with it's attitudes toward religion (or at least the handling of it).
Edit: to clarify, I'd have rather seen a more lenient approach to religious practices, so that the political capital could be better spent on things like preventing the actual oppression of LGBT people. Saying "well he should have just done the right thing" is overly simplistic, but my understanding of Stalin is that this was a shortcomings of his leadership in general (though he had his strengths)
A land of contrasts and all that
You can say that the party appealed to popular opinion but they made no effort whatsoever to change it. Homosexuality remained illegal and taboo in Soviet society until 1991, after which pretty much every Western country had decriminalised. Hell, the Warsaw pact states decriminalised it too.
The uncomforatble truth is that the soviet leadership was either actually homophobic or didn't care about gay people, or both.