 While this severely impacted how regular parish churches operated, it did not have any effect on home churches which had neither property nor a separate legal identity from their host institutions to begin with and thus were effectively independent of the state.Ironically, the decree that was meant to hurt the freedoms of religious assembly ended up protecting them for house churches.However this protection did not last, and in August 1918 the People's Commissariat sent instructions out that all house churches at educational institutions would mandatorily be closed (roughly 16% of all house churches).