ABSTRACT
In the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region the mainstream academic thinking is perceivable, viewing atheism and other forms of nonreligion mainly as a distance from organized religiosity, and, with respect to the Soviet era, “atheism” is studied under the banner of church-state relations. The collapse of the Communist regimes after 1989 marked a key milestone in the history of the 20th century, resulting in the majority of the CEE countries turning politically as well as culturally to the West. In the CEE region, anticlericalism draws especially from the legacy of the Enlightenment, which was influential all over the region from the Czech Republic to Russia at various times and with varying degrees of intensity. One can say that the “ideological” atheism of the first half of the 20th century was mainly influenced by the thought systems that followed the Enlightenment critique of religion.
