Old Russian Parable

[moondust]

10. Moral wasteland.

When the era of Communist rule began in Russia in 1917, religion was seen as a hindrance to a thriving socialist society. As Karl Marx, coauthor of the The Communist Manifesto, declared, “Communism begins where atheism begins.”

Joseph Stalin, as the second leader of the Soviet Union, tried to enforce militant atheism on the republic. The new “socialist man,” Stalin argued, was an atheist one, free of the religious chains that had helped to bind him to class oppression. From 1928 until World War II, when some restrictions were relaxed, the totalitarian dictator shuttered churches, synagogues and mosques and ordered the killing and imprisonment of thousands of religious leaders in an effort to eliminate even the concept of God.

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Why Stalin Tried to Stamp Out Religion in the Soviet Union

For more than a century now I believe there has been little to no moral teaching in Russia. No Ten Commandments. No Seven Deadly Sins. No Golden Rule/Do Unto Others. Etc. Many populations elsewhere learn that stuff as kids in church/Sunday school. The communists didn't want competition from churches for the hearts and minds of the population. Russians have been so propagandized first by the communists for a century and then continued by former communist KGB man Putin up to the present day that I just don't think there is much moral fabric there to restrain their worst instincts. And so they're bombing playgrounds and hospitals and schools and apartment buildings and killing a conductor and anybody else who is not okay with their barbarism.

K/R