Three Centuries Of Christian Atrocities

[Szuchow]

Marxist Russia was born in an era of war.  The Russian - Polish war and then the White Russian  war.  In an era of war, this allows civilized norms to easily go by the wayside.  Once on a war footing, the Marxists easily had excuses for any excesses that occurred in their early days.  Once Stalin won control of Marxist Russia, he was able to use an assassination of a high ranking Bolshevik to institute a paranoid government of purges, gulags and dictatorship based on paranoia, on top of the lingering war hysteria.  As Trotsky opposed Stalin, Trotsky's standing with the Red Army he had formed meant Trotsky and others allied with him were seen as dangerous rivals.  To be rooted out of government and executed or imprisoned.  The dynamics of revolutionary Russia had an underlying hysteria that had nothing much to do with religion per se except that opposition of the Orthodox Russian church to Bolshevikism made the church a target no less than the Red Army leadership which was decimated to end any possible opposition to Stalin's rule.  Oppression of the churches had started with Lenin precisely because they supported the White Russian counter revolutionaries during the early war against the Bolsheviks.  The underlying complexities of Russian anti-clericism are more complex than the simple minded cold war rhetoric us Americans have been fed for decades.

Mostly it was born during the Great War, thanks to Russian loses, war fatigue and hunger. Russian - Polish war could be called afterbirth pains. Also Soviet Russia was dictatorial from the start even if Lenin been forced to take into consideration stances of other bolsheviks; concentration camps started before Stalin era too.

Church was enemy of the Soviet Russia by default - ideocracy or theocracy if one sees marxism-leninism as religion couldn't stomach a rival.