The question of freedom of religion, and what had happened to Russia’s missing clergy, had been candidly answered by Joseph Stalin himself, in an audience given to a visiting American delegation just a few years earlier: “The Party cannot remain neutral regarding the propagators of religious prejudices, with regard to reactionary clergy poisoning the minds of labouring masses. Have we annihilated the clergy? Yes, we have annihilated it. The trouble is that it is not yet completely liquidated.”
