Stalin did not try to stamp out religion, you sound like a victim of US propaganda. Stalin, as head of the communist state controlled all of the purse strings, not allowing priests to collect money from congregations in the process.
I really wish the history had been so benign, but it wasn't. It is true that Communist anti-religious policies did fluctuate depending on the position of the Communist Party depending on the country and time frame they were being implemented in. During World War Two, Stalin did use the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to mobilise the Red Army to defeat Nazis. But this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.
The nationalisation of Church property was done under Lenin in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution as part of Soviet policies of secularisation. They used the 1921 famine as a pretext to confiscate Church property and valuable in the name of famine relief as shown in the picture below. You can tell it's the civil war era because of the
Red Army Soldier's hats.
The policies towards different religious groups varied, with the Russian Christian Orthodox Church receiving the brunt of the persecution in the early years. Islam was treated a little more sympathetically [until the 1930's] because it was believed to represent the oppressed national minorities in the Russian Empire in Central Asia and the Caucuses. Here is a picture of Joseph Stalin in Islamic dress expressing his sympathy for Sharia Law.
This relative tolerance was brought sharply to an end however. During the early part of Stalin's rule, the Soviet Union had a
five year plan to eliminate belief in God and had the up to three and a half million members of the league of the militant godless implement this plan. The organisations leader, Yemelyan Yaroslavksy, said at the
Second Congress of Atheists in 1929:
"It is our duty to destroy every religious world-concept.... If the destruction of ten million human beings, as happened in the last war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done."
As part of this effort, the Soviets adopted
a new calendar of rotating 5 and 6 days weeks which abolished Sundays so people didn't know when the sabbath was, banned Christmas celebrations and then replaced them with "Days of Industrialisation" that you celebrated by going to work and declared Santa Claus an enemy of the people as an
"ally of the priest and the kulak". Here's a picture of when they demolished the
Cathedral of Christ the Savoir in Moscow in 1931 (later rebuilt after the fall of the USSR).
When the Soviets conducted the 1937 Census, they included a question on how many people were religious with 55.3 million people (56.7% of the population) replying they were. This was very embarrassing for the Soviets because it showed that the Godless Five Year plan had failed and over half the population were basically disloyal to Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the state. Naturally, they repressed the results to prevent it becoming public knowledge.
Needless to say this is really just skimming some of the details, but I hope it's enough to make you take another look at this subject. Feel free to check out as many sources as you like. Wikipedia does have a really good series of articles on Soviet Anti-Religious policies which will be more than adequate for most interested in the subject.
[Russian Civil War] [1921-1928] [1928-1941] [1958-1964] [1970's-1987]. I'd highly recommend
Victoria Smolken's book if you want a more expert view.
