As I said in another comment, just because Communist nations ostensibly banned religion - not always entirely successfully - doesn't mean religion is absent from them. In China, for instance, traditional religions like Buddhism or Taoism were replaced by a civil religion, which included veneration of images of Mao Tse-Tung. Think of it as similar to the way the Kim dynasty is revered in North Korea - civil religion can and does come in and provide the same sort of spiritual ideas that a more traditional religion can.