Needless to say, Lenin had no plans to respect the freedom of religion. But until the famine, most of the persecution of religion appears to have been taken on local initiative. Most religious property was ordered expropriated, although in fact clergymen usually continued to occupy and use their church buildings. Parents lost the right to give their children religious education - although again, during the Civil War years, this does not seem to have been enforced. (Interestingly, while the state subsidies to the church greatly declined, the Orthodox Church under Lenin essentially remained a bureau of the state). Serious government persecution of the Orthodox Church began with the famine, which gave Lenin the chance to bring the Orthodox Church into line. He demanded that the Church hand over valuable relics to help famine victims (or so he said). The Church resisted, resulting in around 8000 executions of persons resisting the confiscation of relics. Similar but milder persecution began against Jews, Catholics, and to a lesser extent, Muslims. (These religions, however, had less to lose than the Orthodox Church, because they had no subsidies for the Bolsheviks to cut off).
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