Your assertion is patently false.
No.
Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made state atheism the official doctrine of the Soviet Union.
Yes.
Marxism-Leninism required the control, suppression, and the elimination of religion.
I don't know about Soviet Russia, which was a bit different, but in Estonia which was occupied in 1940, the Lutheran church was doing just fine, there was no "elimination". The "society" was just "negatively minded" against religion. In the 1950's, church congregation member numbers
increased.
The Soviet Union set about to do just that committing itself to the destruction of religion. They destroyed churches, mosques, temples, a great wealth of historical architecture and literature simply because it was religious; ridiculed, harassed, assaulted, imprisoned, and executed the religious; they seized the property of religious people; they took their children from them and placed them in state run atheistic orphanages; they committed religious people to mental institutions to be used as guinea pigs (after all anyone that believes in God must be insane in their view); flooded the schools and media with atheistic teachings, and promoted atheism as the only metaphysical truth that society could accept.
In what parallel universe do you live in? I'll just talk how the things were here, not in Soviet Russia:
1. They didn't destroy churches. A handful of churches were taken away from the congregations in the 60's and were used for different purposes (one given to artists to use it as a place to paint paintings etc.) Those churches were all very new, built in the 20th century. The absolute majority of churches, remained untouched and continued their work.
2. They (the media under the control of the Commie rulers) were negatively minded/ridiculed religion, yes. Harassed? Well only fringe groups like the Jehovah's witnesses, as they refused military service. Mainstream Lutherans weren't harassed. Assaulting and imprisonment? Again, only to fringe groups like the Jehova's witnesses, not to the 99% of the religious people/Lutherans. Refusing military service = imprisonment. Execution? That was rare, you had to be some extremely critically minded priest fighting against the Commie rule every day. Taking children from religious people and placing them in orphanages? Stop smoking what you're smoking.
My father went to church on Sundays during the Soviet occupation as a kid. What happened to him and his parents? Absolutely nothing. There was only one minor thing, the local school's teacher was standing near the church door and wrote down the names of all the students going to church. Then what happened? The behavior mark of the students was lowered. There was "Very good, Good, satisfactory (bad) and not-satisfactory (very bad)". He got "satisfactory" instead of "good" because he went to church, big deal, it had no influence on anything.
The total number of Christians murdered under Soviet state atheist policies strictly for religious reasons has been estimated to range between 12-20 million people by secular historians. The number persecuted is in the hundreds of millions. BY FAR most of them were Orthodox Christians.
I'm usually not rude, but are you retarded? The millions who died in gulags and such, had no relation to religion. It was about social class and ethnicity (Estonians being sent to Siberia and replaced with Russians etc.)
Sources in the Russian Orthodox Church itself claim that as many as fifty million Orthodox believers may have died in the twentieth century from persecution by state atheist communists.
That many people didn't even die in the USSR and it was about persecuting social classes and natives of certain regions (like recently occupied Baltic states and the genocide there).
Your post mostly composes of pure made-up bullshit and you're talking to a historian with a degree who focused on 20th century history. Your emotional BS may fool some average American, but not a historian who has studied the field.
What does the bible say about lying? You should read the bible and then think about your posts.
