This paper offers a reconceptualization of Cold War peace initiatives by examining religious actors as participants in complex and asymmetrical fields of transnational interconnections. It challenges the persistent tendency in both Cold War historiography and religion-related scholarship to interpret religious peace engagement either as an autonomous moral alternative to geopolitical conflict or as a purely instrumentalized extension of state propaganda. Instead, the paper argues that peace initiatives constituted a historically specific arena in which religious agency, political constraint, surveillance, and theological language were deeply entangled. The paper turns to peace-related narratives produced in various republics of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and examines the internal logic of religious peace actors operating within the Soviet space. This perspective is informed by a crucial post-Soviet observation: after the collapse of the USSR, peace largely disappeared as a meaningful theological paradigm in the theologies of these contexts, suggesting that Cold War peace engagement cannot be dismissed as merely imposed from above. By reconstructing how peace was articulated, negotiated, and inhabited by religious actors under conditions of repression and control, the paper analyzes peace not as an abstract ideal, but as a historically contingent theological practice shaped by asymmetrical power relations and constrained agency. By foregrounding these asymmetries, the paper raises uncomfortable questions about agency, responsibility, and moral visibility in religious peace work. It suggests that Cold War peace initiatives cannot be adequately understood through moral binaries of authenticity versus manipulation, but must instead be analyzed as contingent religious practices shaped by unequal power relations and competing theological and political expectations.