Well, Britain's industrial revolution and enclosure acts against common agricultural land were the blueprints for the Soviet's industrialisation and collectivisation policies. The Ukrainian famine in 1931 was basically a carbon copy of the Irish Potato famine in the 1840s because both Britain and the USSR exported agricultural produce to fund industrialisation when it could have fed people at home. Soviet bureaucrats visited London's shopping centres to come up with the designs for marketing consumer goods in the 1930's. The Soviets adopted more market based approaches under the New Economic Policy, the Khrushchev reforms in the 1950s and Perestroika in the 1980s. And the Communist Party in China adoption of market economics transformed the country in recent decades.
Marxists can handle recognising the value of the past and trying to preserve it whilst believing we should improve on it. Communists weren't afraid to borrow Nazi designs for the V2 to design missiles and spacecraft, put satellites and dogs in space with Newtonian mechanics, built the atom bomb with Einstein's theory of relativity (and a fair amount of espionage), published, read and performed the collected works of Shakespeare in Soviet theatres, and Lenin was embalmed because of the craze for mummification after the discovery of Tutankhamen tomb in Egypt in 1922.
So- to get back to the thread- you can preserve cultural and historical works, monuments and sites, like Churches, without opposing them based on their social or ideological origins. It would be nihilistic not to try and preserve the past.
