Why did stalin reintroduce religious institutions that had previously been banned in russia

During World War 2, Stalin needed to motivate more and more people to support the Soviet Union's cause in the war. so he softened the Soviet Union's official stance against the Russian Orthodox religion. Even though the Soviet Union was officially anti-religion, the vast majority of its peoples continued to be religious minded. Stalin wanted to create in the minds of all Soviet citizens a feeling of nationalism that would bring Soviet peoples together to fight against the Germans. One way of doing this was to reintroduce religious practices. People who till then may have hated the Soviet regime because it suppressed their desires to practice their religion were now able to embrace the Soviet Union completely and be willing to fight for it.

The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church had been dissolved in the 1920s. In 1943, Stalin permitted the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church to be reestablished. Formal organized religion was now reintroduced in the Soviet Union