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some support from across the frontiers (cf. p. 297),Here there was, however, one notable change in thatTurkey, under the new secularist regime of MustaphaKemal, ceased to act as a powerful magnet for RussianMoslems.The frontal attack against religion (mainly the Orthodoxand Catholic churches) took various forms, ranging fromcessation of all payments by the state to the clergy,prohibition of religious instruction in schools andtheological seminaries, or closing of churches, to widespread,sporadic violence against the clergy, looting andconfiscation of church property, or imprisonment andexecution of the clergy and the faithful on politicalgrounds as supporters of counter-revolution. Violentaction against the churches declined after the earlyanarchic years and the Civil War, partly because theSoviet regime was more firmly established, partly becauseit was realized that, as Lunacharsky, commissar foreducation, expressed it, " religion is like a nail and theharder you hit the deeper it goes into the wood.''Lenin and the Communist party had always stressedthat "the complete dying out of religious prejudices"could only be the result of complete reconstitution ofsociety and of new education. Hence, the main methodsof combating the influence of religion became less direct,and much more efficacious. Besides the ban on religiouseducation in any schools, discriminatory taxation andthe strict control of the printing press and licensing ofchurches, these methods concentrated on educating ageneration on communist principles, unacquainted withand feeling no need for religion because bred up in anew economic and social order. Meanwhile some degreeof accommodation with the churches was reached;advantage was taken of the divisions within the Orthodoxchurch to weaken its hold, and there was some favouringof the Baptists and other Russian dissenters, whosesocial outlook in general had always been anti-monarchicaland equalitarian.In 1929 there was a return to militancy during thefurious years of collectivization and the nrst five-yearplan, and the whole weight of the state machinery backed172