The article demonstrates, on the basis of archival materials, periodicals and Soviet atheist literature of the late 1940s‑1970s that certain ideological clichés, symbolically relecting “religious” aspects of the Cold War, were used in the propaganda and the scientiic discourse in the Soviet Union. These clichés 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 speciic 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).