Doesn't burning the churches of the country's dominant religion strike you, um, a bit undemocratic?
God knows it was in part the Bolsheviks' policies toward Islam, Orthodoxy and Buddhism that caused a lot of people in the USSR (Ukrainians, Chechens, Tatars, Kalmyks etc.) to collaborate with the Nazis. That's why there were the Stalinist deportations afterward. Bolsheviks destroyed every Buddhist temple in Kalmykia and almost every mosque in the Caucasus. Kalmyks and Muslim Caucasians didn't like that and thought the Nazis would give them more religious freedom.
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Maybe the Nazis would have been a better deal for the religionists (except Jews, of course). After all, they had "Gott mit uns" imprinted on their belt buckles and their State ministry had signed a mutual tolerance agreement with the Vatican. The Azerbajani Muslim men were probably still pissed that the Bolshies had banished the veil. And I can see, as how Stalin's politburo had at least one person of Jewish origin on it, that a lot of anti-Semites might have seen Nazi propaganda as "truth".
Didn't Stalin change "the line" on religion before 1941 in order to line up at least the Orthodox types behind the defense of the USSR?
Regards, Mike B)
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