Faculties and departments were created for training atheist lecturers in the regions of Moscow, Leningrad, Lipetsk, Gorky and in the Tatar ASSR; permanent seminars existed for the same purpose in Ukraine, Moldavia and Lithuania.
All of the state work, however, was found insufficient to counter the influence of religion, especially among youth, who were believed to be finding the atheistic material unconvincing and of low quality.
The atheistic journal 'Problems of Scientific Atheism' (Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma) in the late 1970s began to question the explanation that the perseverance of religious beliefs in the USSR was simply a survival of the pre-revolutionary past.
[4] There continued to be criticisms of the mass of anti-religious propagandists employed by the USSR for being uneducated about religion and failing to produce effective arguments that convinced believers.
The media further argued that the religious art of previous ages (including the work of Andrei Rublev or Theopanes the Greek) was simply expressing humanistic and secular concepts through the only way that such things were permitted to be depicted.
The press called on them to explain ‘the class character’ of religion and give secular explanations of religious art and that they should emphasize the negative aspects of church history and not the positive.
Scientific means were used to support atheism by placing holy water under a microscope and determining it to be identical to normal water, the corpses of saints were exhumed to show that they did in fact experience deterioration, while exhibits at atheist museums showed Noah's ark to be impossible even in concept due to the fact that the number of different animal species on the earth could not fit within the dimensions in Genesis.
They even may have felt affinities for the West, and cooperation between the Vatican or other western Christian establishments with the CIA, or the radio messages by Orthodox priests broadcast through Voice of America, also influenced the interpretation to see believers as untrustworthy.
In the 1970s a special irregular publication called ‘The World of Man’ issued by the Komsomol monthly ‘The Young Guard’ (Molodaia guardiia) was created as an answer to this threat.
[23] At the June 1983 CPSU Central Committee Plenum, General Secretary KU Chernenko declared that the West was trying to cultivate religiosity in the USSR as a method of subversion.
The article stressed that Sasha wore his cassock whenever he went to visit friends and relatives in Moscow in order to shock and impress them, and that everything in life is turned into a fraud through such choices.
[25] The 19th Komsomol congress in 1982 ordered all local committees 'to perfect that atheistic upbringing of the young generation, to profoundly expose the anti-scientific essence of religious ideology and morals'.
[27] The journal 'Voprosy filisofi' on the sixtieth anniversary of Lenin's 1922 article 'On the Importance of Militant Materialism' even claimed that the state's antireligious struggle was still quite weak and needed improvement.
The renegades suffered fines and arrests for breaking these rules, and they were also persecuted for refusing to take part in the Soviet military except in engineering or medical corps.
A sect called Skrytniki (concealers) led by Khristofor Zyrianov was accused of engaging in mass suicides through self-immolation in the woods of Northern Russia in the pre-war period.
She is treated to severe fasting, hatred of the world, despotic exploitation, banning of all literature but the Bible and some theological tracts, living in a cellar without seeing the sun, absence of smiles or friendliness, and rudeness.
[49] The state encountered a major problem in its campaign in Lithuania, however, because like in Poland, there was a strong national identification of the Lithuanians with the Roman Catholic Church and the persecutions provoked nationalist resistance as well as publicity.
In April 1982, five young Orthodox Christians were arrested in Moscow for having illegally possessed a Xerox copier that they used to print thousands of religious books and brochures, which they allegedly sold for a profit.
[7] The CPSU Central Committee in 1979 called for the implementation of concrete measures for the escalation of atheistic education, and to 'raise the responsibility of communists and Komsomol members in the struggle against religious superstitions'.
Soviet psychiatric practice considered that highly educated people who became religious believers at a mature age, especially if they came from atheist families, suffered from a psychotic disorder.
Yurii Belov, a student of history and literature, was sent to the Sychevcka psycho-prison and was told in 1974 by a representative of the central Moscow Serbsky Institute of Forensic Medicine: ‘In our view religious convictions are a form of pathology, hence our use of drugs’.
[69] A 33-year-old doctor, Olga Skrebets with a PhD in medical sciences, was diagnosed with an early stage of schizophrenia and sent to a hospital in Kiev in 1971 after she had withdrawn from CPSU membership for religious reason.
He had founded the Moscow-based religio-philosophic seminar in 1974, headed by Alexander Ogorodnikov (a graduate student of cinematography that was expelled from the institute along with others for trying to produce a film about religious life among Soviet youth).
The seminar began to be harassed in earnest in 1976 after it had grown considerably and shown much vitality, as well as established itself in Ufa (Bashkiria), Leningrad, L’vov (Ukraine), Minsk and Grodno (Belarus).
Those convicted of religious crimes in the Soviet Union were given especially harsh treatments and were classed (along with political dissidents) as "especially dangerous state criminals", which disqualified them from amnesty or leniency.
These pilgrimages were subjected to very brutal attacks by militia and Komsomol voluntary aides leading to physical injuries and the state claimed that they were organized by either fanatic believers or opportunists trying to make income.
[86] Fr Vasilii Romaniuk of the village of Kosmach in the Carpathians was criticized for organizing illegal carol-singing youth groups and visiting believers’ homes during Christmas-time.
Other notables arrests included Sergei Ermolaev and Igor Poliakov who were sentenced respectively to four and three-and-a-half-years’ hard labour in September 1979 for shouting anti-Soviet slogans.
This was a painful subject for Soviet propaganda, due to the USSR's own poor historical record as well as its wholesale destruction of cultural monuments, churches, monasteries and other elements of Russia's heritage.
In practice, the most important aspect of this conflict was that openly religious people could not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which meant that they could not hold any political office.