The Cold War and the Ideological Struggle on the "Religious Front": Some Patterns of Soviet Propaganda

Abstract

The article demonstrates, on the basis of archival materials, periodicals and Soviet atheist literature of the late 1940S-1970S that certain ideological cliches, symbolically reflecting “religious” aspects of the Cold War, were used in the propaganda and the scientific discourse in the Soviet Union. These cliches and the content of the propaganda were determined more often not so much by an ideological approach of the Marxist critique of religion, but rather by the specific objectives of the international politics of the Soviet Union and by the country’s internal situation. This propaganda was also a response to the use of religion as an instrument of the Cold War by the Western countries as “the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith” (A. Preston).