Not meaning to turn this into another Eastern Europe thread, but... according to official opinion polls, there were three times as many self-declared Orthodox Christians in the USSR than there were members of the Communist Party.
However, I don't think you're looking at it the right way. The discontent in EE was largely the result of the disparity between the values and statements of officialdom, on the one hand, and social expectations and values, on the other. The USSR was obviously not achieving Communism in 1980, regardless of what Khrushchev had said. "Socialism" had obviously not made Eastern Europe into a land of plenty. So reality was in conflict with the values of the official ideology itself.
--- On Tue, 6/23/09, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Eastern European communist parties controlled not just
> a fiercely cohesive state but every media outlet, labor
> union, youth organization, civic association, etc., in
> society - for 50 years. Yet they were unable to impose to
> their values sufficiently to maintain their system.
> Meanwhile the American Revolution created a notoriously weak
> and fractured state with virtually zero direct control over
> organized society, yet its leaders were wildly successful in
> imprinting the stated values of their revolution on much of
> US society for 200+ years and counting. How's that?
>
> SA
>
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