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The relevance of this paper is due to the multicultural nature of the Russian state and the significant role of religion in the contemporary socio-cultural and political processes taking place in the country. The knowledge and analysis of the history of the relationship between government and religion in Russia in general and in its individual regions will undoubtedly contribute to a more objective understanding of the fundamental aspects of the contemporary religious situation in Russia, since many problems in this field are now, in many cases, conditioned by a certain specificity or distortions in the state's policy toward religion - in the past. In this regard, the chronological scope of the research - the ambiguous and in many respects contradictory period of the Khrushchev's "thaw" - has a great scientific and applied interest in the problems under study. The administrative and geographic scope of the study is limited to the territory of the Tatar ASSR - a region traditionally formed as multi-confessional. At the same time, the processes that took place in the religious sphere of the Tatar ASSR in many respects were characteristic of many other multicultural regions of the Soviet state. The objective of the paper is to identify the factors that conditioned the survival and functioning of religious associations of the republic under the dominating atheistic ideology and strengthening of the anti-religious administrative pressure of the state in the contradictory period of the Khrushchev's "thaw".

The relevance of the problem under study is caused by multi-confessional character of Russian society and the need of power to take into account the specific features of each confession in its religious policy. In order to understand the essential characteristics of contemporary issues in the state-confessional and inter-confessional relations the events and the processes taking place in the atheist Soviet past should be examined carefully. The purpose of the article is to study the specifics of the relationship between the authorities and associations of Evangelical Christians-Baptists during 1960s – 1980s, using the example of such a multi-confessional region as Tatarstan. The leading approach to the study of this problem was the civilizational approach, which enabled a comprehensive study of the object under study. The main results of the study are the studying of Tatar ASSR Baptist association forms and ways in the context of Soviet political and legal realities. The materials of the article can be useful in the preparation of educational literature, as well as in the practical activities of state structures implementing the policy in the spiritual sphere.