(August 13, 2015 at 2:47 pm)Cephus Wrote:(August 13, 2015 at 11:11 am)Parkers Tan Wrote: I'd like to see a link to something supporting this claim. I've never been to the old Soviet Union, but everything I've read about it indicates that while the Orthodox Church was persecuted at times, particularly before the Second World War, people weren't incarcerated simply for being faithful, much less executed as traitors. That is according to Solzhenitsyn in The GULag Archipelago.Actually, while Stalin did, indeed, persecute the church in the early days, he also reinstated the church and used it quite extensively for political purposes. Of course, the religious aren't usually aware of actual history, they have no clue what their own religion has done and even less knowledge of the world outside of it, they just go by what they've been taught from the pulpit.
The only group he mentions being targeted because of their faith were the Anabaptists, and that wasn't for their faith in and of itself, but rather, the profound pacifism it preaches. Anabaptists refused to serve in the Soviet armed forces, so the Soviets gathered them all up -- and there weren't many -- and put them in work camps, not executed them. Of course, those who went to camps like Kolyma or Vorkuta were worked to death; but being religious in the USSR was not a capital offense, indeed hardly an offense at all.
Indeed, but it's fair to say Stalin reinstated tolerance for the ROC for cynical reasons; the country was being shattered by German hammerblows in 1941, and the government needed support from every quarter of civic society.