It is clear that the Soviet Union believed that proverbs had a direct link to the values of a culture, as they used them to try to create changes in the values of cultures within their sphere of domination. Sometimes they took old Russian proverbs and altered them into socialist forms. These new proverbs promoted Socialism and its attendant values, such as atheism and collectivism, e.g. "Bread is given to us not by Christ, but by machines and collective farms" and "A good harvest is had only by a collective farm." They did not limit their efforts to Russian, but also produced "newly coined proverbs that conformed to socialist thought" in Tajik and other languages of the USSR.