On the eastern side of the Cold War, atheism was state doctrine and the churches lived as suspects. The Soviet Union had already destroyed most of its religious institutions between the wars; the postwar decades added Khrushchev's renewed antireligious campaign of 1959 to 1964, which closed roughly half the Orthodox parishes that had reopened during the war, while the surviving hierarchy was penetrated by the security services and dissenting priests and Baptists filled the camps. Across the new satellite states the pattern repeated with local variations: the show trial of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949, the imprisonment of Cardinal Wyszynski in Poland, the suppression of the Greek Catholic churches of Ukraine and Romania, which were forcibly merged into Orthodoxy and driven underground, and the League of Militant Atheists' successors teaching scientific atheism in every school.
Albania went furthest, declaring itself the world's first atheist state in 1967 and banning religious practice outright. In Asia the same decades brought the suppression of Buddhism in China and Tibet, the destruction of temples and monasteries in the Cultural Revolution, and the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959.
Yet persecution nowhere produced the extinction it aimed at. Underground seminaries ordained in secret, Bibles were smuggled by the truckload, and the persistence of belief under pressure became one of the quiet facts of the confrontation, and one of the forces that ended it.