Reply #79: Granted, but I would argue those persecutions happened not because of the party's avowed atheism...

[SteppingRazor]

but because religion itself was a competing power structure. There were only two ways to go for the communists -- erase religion or co-opt it. And unlike in Nazi Germany, where various competing religions with relatively brief histories allowed for the co-opting of religion by the state, the Eastern Orthodox church had few rivals in Russia and was much more a part of the lives of the people. Stamping it out completely was necessary for control in a totalitarian state.

In other words, we see again that it was not atheism that caused the communists to persecute even the hidden practice of religion. It was communism. Or, more accurately I suppose, a totalitarian dictatorship based on Marxist-Leninist ideals. Whichever way you look at it, my argument is simply that religion was persecuted not because of atheism but because religion in Soviet Russia represented one of the very few, if not the only, competing authoritarian structures following the revolution.