@georgeob1,
I haven't argued against the point about the universality of intolerance, so that's a straw man. Soviet "anti-religious" bureaucracies were largely nowhere jobs for those appointed to them, and were intended to make the religious keep their heads down, and were effective to an extent. Plenty of people who were not religious were accused of anti-Soviet activities. The nature of the activities needs to be examined in each case. Was the Waco incident with armed Branch Davidians an example of the United States government actively persecuting religion? Was hunting down Eric Rudolph a case of persecuting someone for his religious views?
During the Great Patriotic War, the Chechens and many of the Ingush were deported far to the east of the front lines. Other Muslims were left unmolested. It's easy to claim this is a case of religious persecution until you ask why other Muslims were left unmolested, and until you look for the real reason the Chechens were deported. They had never accepted Russian rule. In the reign of Peter the Great, they slaughtered every member of the embassy he sent to them. In the 1850s, thinking Russia too embarrassed by the war we call the Crimean War, they rose and slaughtered every Russian they could get their hands on. (Stupid, stupid, stupid--the Russians came down on them like a ton of bricks.) In the 1940s, the Chechens all too easily allowed themselves to be convinced the Germans were winning (a case of wishful thinking gone badly wrong) and actively, openly collaborated with them. They paid the price, but it wasn't because they were Muslim.
Religious people are so eager to cry persecution that many of them continue to claim that the deportation of the so-called Kulaks was religious persecution. When one is dealing with Christians, it's a good idea to take a hard and a careful look at any allegations of persecution.
If churches were closed down, when they were technically the property of the state, was it necessarily persecution? With no one to maintain them, and the state having no reason to do so, how did that differ from dealing with any derelict building? I wonder if you apply the same standard to the seizure of church property under Henry VIII, during the English civil wars and during the French Revolution? Were those people and groups as evil as you claim the Soviets were?
