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To this effect, anti-religious activities that were too insulting to religious feelings could be questioned and criticized in the belief that they would harden religious convictions. Lenin's statement 'On the Significance of Militant Materialism', was worded in such a fashion that both sides of the debate would use it to support their arguments.
Karl Marx, who synthesized anti-religious philosophy with materialism to show that religion is a social construct used for social control by the ruling class of a society. In his rejection of all religious thought, Marx considered the contributions of religion over the centuries to be unimportant and irrelevant to the future of humanity.
Most of the bishops arrested between 1928 and 1932 were arrested for reasons surrounding opposition to Metropolitan Sergius and his notorious declaration of loyalty. The state did officially maintain the line that church and state were separate in the Soviet Union during this time, despite the many arrests of people for not following their religious leaders.
Lenin said that the appearance of new socialist states was necessary for strengthening Russia's economy in establishing Russian socialism. Lenin's socio-economic perspective was supported by the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and worker wage-riots in the UK, France, and the US.
In The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion, Lenin wrote: Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction ...
Philosophy in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist–Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth. During the 1920s and 1930s, other tendencies of Russian thought were repressed (many philosophers emigrated, others were expelled).
Until its late years of the USSR, the ideology had professed state atheism, and party members were formerly not allowed to be religious. [5] The state professed a belief in the feasibility of total communist mode of production, and all policies were seen as justifiable if it contributed to the Soviet Union's reaching that stage. [6]
For example, the Democratic Centralists had been set up in March 1919 and by 1921 Alexander Shlyapnikov had set up the Workers' Opposition. Prior to the introduction of the factional ban in 1921, Trotsky had a considerable following among the party activists and members of the Central Committee against the narrow majority supporting Lenin.