Reply #46: Sorry, wrong again...

[onager]

If I say that all card-carry communists in the USSR in the 20th century were atheists, I am correct simply because the communists in the Soviet Union were Marxist-Leninists and as such are required to declare themselves to be atheists.

:rofl:

So after 1917, all Russians suddenly and magically became Official Atheists? Strange, since clashes between Russian religious believers and Communists persisted (and were documented) for many years after the Revolution.

Here's an example from 1935, nearly two decades after the USSR officially, suddenly and magically became atheist:

Even members of the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol's junior branch for ten to fourteen-year-olds, might be targeted for attack. In the Rossosh district of central Russia, a stronghold of religious sectarianism and monarchism, Pioneers were subjected to regular harassment by religious believers who "call the Pioneer tie 'the devil's noose' and consider that it is a sin to wear it.'

In 1935, a group of adult believers ambushed some Young Pioneers as they were coming back from the Pioneer club...

'...Arepev (the sectarians' leader) seized Pioneer K.I. Loboda and tore off his clothes and threw stones at the others and broke the head of one of them. As they threw stones the sectarians shouted: "Little idolatrous devils, I'll show you how to wear a tie."

From Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick...who really is an expert on Stalinist Russia.