The Church was necessary to keep the proles minds occupied with hope and not on revolution................
Stalin was a seminary student in his younger days.
Note to self: maybe a cautionary tale for our times.
You appoint a State Religion that espouses “render unto Caesar” and suppress all other religions. It’s good for the ruling class.
That’s smarter than trying to ban religion. Such suppressions never work.
Many, if not all of the re-created Church of Russia (Orthodox) priests, prelate and patriarchs— well.. they were payrolled in essence by Stalin.
For all the paranoid reasons— a “religious” spy network. Turned in a lot of “counter revolutionaries” whose testimony was their confessionals.
There is a great book written on this appalling cynical Stalin actions, under cover of the WWII. The new found “religion” did not stop Stalin insisting the Ukrainian White Russians who fought with German Nazis against Soviet “ally” troops- be returned to Soviets— where all of them were either imprisoned, tortured and/or slaughtered, including the leaders of the Don Cossacks who long fought the Soviets in the Russian Communist Revolution. Cossacks from the Don, Kuban, and Terek, and a number of groups from the Caucasus fought the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War & had been persecuted under Joseph Stalin. In Ukraine these Cossacks joined the Germans to fight Soviets in WWII. It was at Yalta that Stalin got them returned for execution.
Nikolai Tolstoy has written eloquently on this in “Victims of Yalta” discussion here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Yalta
Russian culture is rotten and drunk. Putin knows this and knows his population is dwindling. Faith brings hope to a hopeless people.