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Abstract: 

Marxist thought reached its most relevant position as a “policy tool” in a State in the Soviet Union (USSR). Inasmuch as Marx considered religion “the opium of the people”, it is not surprising that it was a sensitive topic to the Union. In this context, several Sovietologists (scholars of the Soviet Union) focused on how the Soviet Union dealt with the issue. The present research intends to open up a new venue for understanding the Cold War by analyzing how the Sovietologist discourse approached religion by conferring natural predicates to the USSR. The main hypothesis is that the Sovietologist discourse constructed the subjectivity of the USSR from conditions of possibility that characterized it as inferior, expansionist, and contradictory. Following Foucault, the archeological method was deployed in order to understand how utterances on religion took place under the conditions of possibility of the Sovietologist discourse. In practical terms, the analysis considered several papers on religion that were published in the journal “Soviet Studies”, one of the most important in the field of Sovietology. After the reading of eight articles, it was possible to infer that: 1) contradictoriness is, in fact, the basis of the discourse of Sovietologists; 2) expansiveness and inferiority are present characteristics, but not necessarily central; 3) characteristics such as combativeness to religion and the Soviet inability to deal with religious issues are pivotal in the discourse.