The policy that began with Lenin and continued for the course of Soviet history was that religion was to be tolerated by the state, but the Party was to do whatever it deemed necessary in order to gradually remove it from society.[40][41] Thus, the Soviet state and the Communist Party – which were two separate institutions – were supposed to have two different attitudes towards religion, with the first being neutral and the second being hostile to it. However, since the USSR was a one-party state, the distinction between Party and state became very blurred over time, with the result that religion was sometimes repressed and sometimes tolerated, to varying degrees.[42] When writing about the Party's anti-religious stance, Lenin did not see the replacement of religion with atheism as an end to itself, but wrote that it needed to be accompanied by a materialist world-view.