When communists closed churches and uprooted faith from believers in the Soviet Union (article) PART E The third period of persecution begins in 1929 and ends in 1941.

In early April 1929, J.V. Stalin introduced a new law on religion. This time any kind of religious teaching becomes a criminal offense. In addition, Article 17 of the Constitution prohibits all forms of charitable and educational activity of the Church and restricts any ceremony of religious worship. These measures include: mass closure of churches, arbitrary taxation of the incomes of the few remaining parishes, arrests of clergy and faithful, exiles, executions without cause. During this period, 151 bishops and 49,400 priests were exterminated, thousands of churches (about 75,000) were destroyed, including numerous historical monuments, such as the demolition in Moscow of the Cathedral of the Savior of Our Lady of Kazan, the Monastery of Miracles in the Kremlin and St. Simeon. In Kiev, despite the protests of the Academy, the priceless Monastery of Archangel Michael was destroyed. In the 11th century, the church of the three Hierarchs in Jerusalem, icons of great value, handwritten gospels and burned thousands of books. In 1941 the coming war changed the relations of Church and State. Stalin understands that the Church possesses enormous spiritual power and is capable of stimulating the faith and patriotic feeling of the people, and asks for its help. Metropolitan Sergius addresses a message to the people and calls them to resistance. After the victory, Stalin awarded the Supreme Order of Military Merit to the Orthodox Church, and Metropolitans Sergius, Alexius and Nicholas were received in the Kremlin by Stalin and Foreign Minister Molotov. This period of tolerance is not long. In 1959, new persecutions against Orthodoxy were unleashed, which lasted until the first years when Mikhail Gorbachev took over the U.S.S.R. government. Nikitas Khrushchev, General Secretary of the CPSB and chairman of the Supreme Soviet, at a meeting with French diplomats on September 22, 1962, cynically gave the slogan: "Do not think that the communists have changed their attitudes towards religion. They remain atheists as we have always been. We are doing everything we can to free all those who are still under the allure of religious opium." The brutal bloody persecution of religions occurred not only in the USSR but in all its satellite countries, such as Bulgaria, Albania, China, etc. Lenin's article "Socialism and Religion" written in December 1905 answers all the questions raised by the church-state conflict. So Lenin says, among other things: "Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere and always has borne the burden of the masses of the people, crushed by eternal work for others, poverty and loneliness. The weakness of the exploited classes in the struggle against the exploiters inevitably breeds the belief in a better afterlife, just as the weakness of primitive man in the struggle with nature giving birth to faith in gods, devils, miracles, etc. To him who all life works and lacks, religion teaches humility and patience in earthly life, comforting him with the hope of heavenly reward.  And to those who live off foreign labor religion teaches benevolence in earthly life, offering them a very cheap justification for all their exploitative existence and selling them advantageous tickets to heavenly bliss at an advantageous price.  Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual alcohol, in which the slaves of capital drown their human form, their claims to a somewhat human life. But the slave who felt his slavery and rose up in the struggle for his liberation ceases to be a slave by half.  The modern conscious worker, educated by the great factory industry, enlightened by city life, casts off religious superstitions with contempt, leaves heaven at the disposal of priests and bourgeois hypocrites, conquering a greater life here on earth. The modern proletariat is on the side of socialism, which employs science in the city against religious haze and redeems the worker from faith in the afterlife, rallying him to the real struggle for a better earthly life." So this is what Lenin wrote in his 1905 article. And the communists of AKEL believe what he writes and that is why most of them are Ath