memes

Uh off the top of my head he was extremely secular and practically atheistic throughout his public life. The few times he's made any rare religious reference was usually in some form of recorded public address to workers where he either makes a well-known Orthodox religious reference to drive in a point or as a sort of "gods on our side" kind of throwaway phrase.

Now if I really wanted to look deeper for where Stalin had more to say on religion, I'd want to look to the period of the great patriotic war where we see a rapid easement of relations between the Orthodox church and the Soviet state, particularly around '43 when Patriarch Sergius of Moscow worked his ass of trying to figure out how to build enough theological justification to compromise with the government in return for an end to active prosecution. This is also the time when we'd look for any writing in relation to the Islamic population of the Soviet Union as well.

I can say there's some apocryphal writing saying he was still privately a believer and worked to soften the most harshest elements of the militant atheism that was practiced during the 20s, there's even an apocryphal story where Molotov was talking with him about some city plans and how there was a proposal to demolish some really old fucking church and replace it with some Soviet propaganda building, and Stalin just said "nah. Leave it."

I'll try to look into it because it sounds like an interesting little project to dig around into.