Much of this is easily debunked in accessible books and even YouTube videos. The original Bolsheviks had indeed read their Marx. They knew that a revolution needed to happen not in Russia (which everyone knew was a pre-industrial state), but in industrialized Germany and potentially Britain. Merely decimating Russian society was never the end goal of the Bolsheviks.

Russia was considered by Lenin to be a staging ground for the more meaningful revolutions to follow. It wasn't until Stalin emerged as the Soviet leader that this strategy was abandoned in favor of "socialism in one country", where the exploitation of pre-industrial Russia was deemed good enough.

I doubt anyone would even describe Stalin's reign in religious terms (although his upbringing was deeply religious)...but just another manifestation of history's most reliable anti-pattern: the folly of investing total power in one person.