The main goal of this article is to identify the socio-historical context of the emergence of the ideologically loaded concept of ‘scientific atheism’, constructed in the USSR in the 1950s-1980s during the period of the announced transition from socialism to the construction of communism. The article uses the method of the historical sociology of concepts, which makes it possible to identify the connection between semantic contexts and institutional practices and to show how the conceptual category around which the corresponding discourse was formed became an instrument that produces socially significant meanings used in the practice of ideological production. The classics of Marxism did not consider atheism as a separate doctrine from materialism; despite this in the late 1970s, scientific atheism in the Soviet academic space turned into a separate science with its own subject of research. At the same time, scientific atheism was opposed to all other forms of atheism as the most consistent and the only true one.