USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–28)

The USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–1928) was a campaign of anti-religious persecution against churches and believers by the Soviet government following the initial anti-religious campaign during the Russian Civil War. The elimination of most religion and its replacement with deism, agnosticism and atheism supported with a materialist world view was a fundamental ideological goal of the state. To this end the state conducted anti-religious persecutions against believers that were meant to hurt and destroy religion. It was never made illegal to be a believer or to have religion, and so the activities of this campaign were often veiled under other pretexts (usually resistance to the regime) that the state invoked or invented in order to justify its activities.

The persecution entered a new phase in 1921 with the resolutions adopted by the tenth CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) congress, and would set the atmosphere for the remainder of the decade's persecutions, which would enter another new phase in 1929 when new legislation was passed on prohibition of public religious activities.

The 10th party congress launched Lenin's "New Economic Policy" (NEP), in response to the poor state of the Russian economy that resulted from World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the War Communist system used during the latter. The state faced large scale popular revolts of workers, which Trotsky believed threatened the survival of the state. The NEP brought in some measure of limited free enterprise, and was meant to compromise with the general population as well as to present the new regime in a more respectable light to the world community and thus acquire a place in the world market. To acquire a better reputation, the regime considered it detrimental to continue with the civil war policy of murdering religious believers without trials or plausible accusations.

Therefore, the anti-religious campaign needed to be conducted under more respectable pretexts. However, the elimination of religion remained a fundamental ideological goal of the state.

There were two main principal anti-religious campaigns that occurred in the 1920s, with one surrounding the campaign to seize church valuables and the other surrounding the renovationist schism in the Orthodox Church.

This portion of the state's religious campaign came to an end in 1929, when Stalin began the implementation of a much harsher campaign that would take place in the following decade.

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