- 13 Dec 2021 06:39
#15202489
Competition for power. Pure and simple.
Religion is a way to control the masses, and Stalin didn't want to have to compete with it.
He also didn't do it forever.
Why Stalin Wanted to Completely Eradicate Religion from the Soviet Union
And why his anti-religion campaign didn’t work out.
Stalin argued that the perfect man in Soviet Russia is free from religion’s shackles. He claimed that organized religion had made people slave to the affluent class that wanted them to continue to pursue a life of bondage. In Stalin’s Russia, one could only be truly free if they denounced religion and adapted a scientific way of thought to help them progress far in life.
With this mindset, Stalin made sure that he tried his best to eradicate places of worship, campaign tirelessly for atheism, and ultimately eliminate the concept of God from people’s lives altogether. Spoiler alert: It didn’t quite work as he intended it to.
While there was a sharp rise in atheistic thought in urban centers where ‘thought’ was supposedly valued more, the generations of religious sentiment in the peasant class were unshaken. They continued to care deeply about religion, and as soon as Churches reopened in the late 1900s, they were flooded like they were pre-communism.
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
- By SpecialOlympian
- By Unthinking Majority
- By Saeko
- By Tainari88