Atheists murdered 50 Million in USSR

I love history and take a keen interest in politics. Thus I often debate both with my captive audience. By debate I mean rant and wag my finger, and by captive audience I mean family.

Just this week one of my children told me their history teacher made some salient points which had previously escaped my very own lips. He said you can never remove religion (as GK Chesterton said when people stop believing in God they will believe in anything). He told the class that when Stalin tried to do this, he murdered 50 million Christians. Yet despite this the Russians (Ukrainians, Balts etc) clung to their faith).

The teacher said that we often hear about the holocaust, yet this paled in comparison to the huge numbers murdered by Stalin.

I have argued this with atheists on Twitter. They respond that the Soviet Union murdered for politics - conveniently forgetting that the USSR was an officially atheist state, and those murdered or shipped to gulags were Christian.

Imagine an officially Christian state, as a matter of policy, murdered, tortured and imprisoned millions of atheists in just a few decades. The atheists would be screeching it from the rooftops. Hollywood would churn out blockbuster after blockbuster. Richard Dawkins would have written a book on it.

Yet here we had an atheist state murdering Christians and we barely ever hear about it. Why?

And while we're at it, why did we declare war on Germany after they invaded Poland in September 1939, but did not declare war on the USSR after they invaded Poland (and Finland - another British ally). What's more, we went to war in 1939 because Poland was invaded, yet in 1945 with Europe in ruins, Poland was occupied by one of the very powers that had invaded it in 1939!!! As were many other countries!

You couldn't make it up.

But how comforting to know at least one history teacher is telling his class that the atheist USSR murdered circa 50 million Christians. The truth is out there...

Never again?