Old Russia under atheism was a shithole-
"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism”-Lenin
I've just read Karlo Stajner's book '7000 Days in Siberia', Stalins secret police knocked his door gone midnight and arrested him on a trumped up charge in 1934 and it was 20 years before he saw his wife again.
Like literally millions of other innocent civilians he was sent to the gulags because Stalin needed slave labourers to work in the far off Siberian mines, lumber yards and factories.
On his release Stajner soon returned to his native Austria and sums it up in the last sentence of the book-
"Now I had the feeling of escaping as if by a miracle from a plague-infested land"