n the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500. The campaign slowed down in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and came to an abrupt end after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa.[1] The challenge produced by the German invasion would ultimately prevent the public withering away of religion in Soviet society.[4]
Yep, and obviously you aren't stupid right?!?! In the Soviet Union, nothing could be published without the authorization of the Communist leaders.
The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labour camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited.[1] More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone.[2] Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.[3] Are you even fucking reading this shit?!?!?!
So what? If your point is the magazine existed, I concede the point. If you have some other point to make, you haven't.
The church's successful competition with the ongoing and widespread atheistic propaganda, prompted new laws to be adopted in 1929 on "Religious Associations"[16] as well as amendments to the constitution, which forbade all forms of public, social, communal, educational, publishing or missionary activities for religious believers.[17] The Church thereby lost any public voice and was limited strictly to religious services that took place in the walls of churches. Atheist propaganda continued to have an unlimited right of propagation, which meant that the Church could not respond to the arguments used against it any longer.[16]The Church was not permitted to run study groups for religious adults, organize picnics or cultural circles, or organize special services for groups of believers, such as schoolchildren, youth, women or mothers.[18] Any pursuit of the true pastoral duties by clergymen became punishable by law.[15] These laws also forbade Christian charity efforts, participation of children in religious activities, and religious functionaries were restricted to the area associated with them.[19] So writing laws to abolish churches are just socialism?!?! LMAO!
I've made multiple points. All you need to do is admit that, even your blessed atheism, has people or large groups that have murdered millions in the name of their atheistic ideology. And the funny thing is I'm not even saying "atheists are evil" or anything like you are trying to press on this forum about theism. I'm merely pointing out that "humanity has evil", atheists, christians, muslims, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale and mechanisms. In the 1950s American scholars proposed a structural explanation of the Great Terror: as a totalitarian system, Stalin’s regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty, and recurrent random purging provided the mechanism (Brzezinski, 1958). Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin’s paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of “Old Bolsheviks”, and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party leadership as the first step toward terrorizing the entire population. In the mid-1980s, John Arch Getty, an American historian of the revisionist school, contested Conquest’s interpretation. He argued that the exceptional scale of the purges was the result of strong tensions between Stalin and regional Communist Party bosses who, in order to deflect the terror that was being directed at them, found innumerable scapegoats on which to carry out repressions. In this way, they demonstrated their vigilance and intransigence in the struggle against the common enemy. Thus, the Great Terror developed into a “flight into chaos” (Getty, 1985). Historians of both schools focused on the purge of political, intellectual, economic or military elites, and the struggle between the center and regional party cliques. Mainly because of the scarcity of information on the subject, neither studied the mechanisms, organization, implementation of mass arrests and mass executions, or the sociology of the victims, who represented a much wider group than party elites or intelligentsia. http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html By 1938, Conquest estimates that about 7 million Purge victims were in the labour/death camps, on top of the hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered outright. In the worst camps, such as those of the Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just 2 or 3 percent (see theincarceration/death penalty case study). Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls the prison colonies in the Solovetsky Islands "the Arctic Auschwitz," and cites the edict of their commander, Naftaly Frenkel, which "became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore.'" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.) (Nothing to do with religion or atheism)
Okay so you ignoring that 88,000 religious people were murdered in 1937 alone? So they mean nothing because this number is greater?!?! Wow not only are you a bigot, you are also insensitive for human life!
Do you understand the difference between Marxism and Atheism? Stalin did nothing in the name of Atheism. This is a repeatedly failed assertion on your part.
Clergy, not religious people. The church as organization was a threat to his power base. Not the actual religious people who attended the churches.
Many Muslim clerics were arrested and executed during Stalin's purges.[38] The campaign against Islam in the 1930s was directly linked with the physical annihilation of the "Islamic" nationalistic communists of the Central Asian parts of the USSR.[38] In 1936 there was an "unmasking" of the supreme Muslim Muftiof Ufa as a Japanese and German agent who had turned the entire Muslim Spiritual Administration of Ufa into a giant espionage network. In some parts of the Caucasus, the anti-religious campaign and attacks against Islam provoked guerrilla warfare that Soviet troops were brought in to suppress.[39]
LMAO! What?!?!?!?! Clergy: noun the body of all people ordained for religious duties, especially in the Christian Church.
Stalin called "to bring to completion the liquidation of the reactionary clergy in our country".[40] Stalin called for an "atheist five year plan" from 1932–1937, led by the LMG, in order to completely eliminate all religious expression in the USSR.[41] It was declared that the concept of God would disappear from the Soviet Union.[41] Yeah, as Denny would say, Stalin didn't do this in the name of atheism....
Do you really want to quote books? I could quote yours quite easily... Truth is, most Christians don't follow the teachings of Jesus...
Party members that were found to have religious affiliation were purged.[46] Party members that were found to have insufficiently detached themselves from religious affiliations (e.g. if they continued to be friends with the local priest) were expelled and purged.[47] Weird that in order to be in a leadership position in Soviet Union, you must renounce religion??? Yeah Socialism my ass!
Church icons and religious architecture were destroyed.[43] The People's Commissariat for Education reduced the list of protected churches from 7000 to 1000, thus leaving 6000 churches to destruction. There were public burnings of thousands of religious icons. The built religious cultural heritage of the country was largely destroyed.[43]
In 1928 the Politburo adopted a plan to eliminate monasticism in the country, and in the next several years all monasteries were officially closed. This was accompanied by press campaigns that depicted them as parasitic institutions that engaged in immorality (nuns were especially accused of sexual immorality). Many of the dispossessed monks and nuns formed semi-legal clandestine communities around the country after the closures. Prior to and up to this time, there had also been many believers who had taken monastic vows in secret and met with secret monastic communities that existed in Soviet cities. Beginning on February 18, 1932 the state conducted a campaign that resulted in near-complete annihilation of all monasticism in the country.[50] On that night all of the monks and nuns in Leningrad were arrested (a total of 316),[51] and the local prisons were filled to their limits in the subsequent period with the arrest of monks and nuns in Leningrad province.[8] In the Ukraine, there may have been some survival of semi-overt monasticism into the later 1930s. The NKVD Kul'tkommissiya, formed in 1931, was used as the chief instrument for legal supervision and forceful repression of religious communities over the next decade.[4]
Archbishop Antonii of Arkhangelsk was arrested in 1932. The authorities tried to force him to "confess" to his activities against the Soviet state, but he refused. He wrote in a written questionnaire given to him that he 'prayed daily that God forgive the Soviet Government for its sins and it stop shedding blood'. In prison he was tortured by being made to eat salty food without adequate drink and by restricting the oxygen in his dirty, crowded and unventilated cell; he contracted dysentery and died.[61]
Not in the name of Atheism. Post all you want, but you're not making your point still. I am not at all wanting to defend Stalin, he wasn't a good guy by any stretch. He killed many millions in the name of cementing his political hold on the USSR.
