Excerpts from the book Red Famine – Oppressing Christian Churches

Churches—where villagers had gathered over many decades or centuries—remained a potent symbol of the link between the present and the past. In most Russian and many Ukrainian cities, the Bolsheviks had immediately sacked churches—between 1918 and 1930 they shut down more than 10,000 churches across the USSR, turning them into warehouses, cinemas, museums or garages. By the early 1930s few urban churches were still functioning as places of worship. The fact that they had continued to exist in so many villages was one of the things that made the peasants seem suspicious to urbanites, and especially to the urban agitators who arrived to help carry out collectivization.

Churches also served a social function, especially in poorer villages that had few other social institutions. They provided a physical meeting place that was not controlled by the state, and at times were centres of opposition to it. During a series of violent peasant riots in Ryazan province, near Moscow, church bells had served as a call to arms, warning the farmers that the brigadiers and soldiers from the capital had arrived. Above all, the church was an institutional umbrella under which people could organize themselves for charitable and social endeavours. During the 1921 famine Ukrainian priests and church institutions had helped organize assistance for the starving.

Once the churches were gone, no independent bodies in the countryside remained capable of motivating or organizing volunteers. The church's place in the cultural and educational life of the village  was taken instead by state of institutions--"houses of culture," registry offices, Soviet schools—under the control of the Communist Party. Churches were eliminated in order to prevent them from becoming a source of opposition; in practice, their absence also meant that they could not be a source of aid or comfort when people began to die from hunger.

Source: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) by Anne Applebaum.