"THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH AND THE MOSQUE" IN THE STATEMENTS AND COMPLAINTS OF MUSLIM TATARS OF THE ULYANOVSK REGION IN THE 1940s AND 1980s. 1 The article examines the complex views of believers about the mosque and its role in the public life of the country and the religious community. It was reflected in numerous statements of Muslims of the Ulyanovsk region in the 1940s and 1980s about the opening of new mosques and the return of old ones sent to local and central Soviet authorities. The ideas and arguments expressed in the statements about the need for the normal functioning of religious buildings were elements of the collective identity of Muslim Tatars. They allow us to reveal the nature of their relations with the state, their perception of the existing system, their social position and historical and legal culture. The total number of requests to open mosques and the structure of the arguments themselves on the part of believers were related to the changing position of Islam in the country, its internal evolution, and fluctuations in the atheist policy of the Soviet state. All the arguments presented in the written sources are divided into several groups: 1) legal arguments that go back to ensuring social justice and equality of ethnic groups and confessions, 2) religious and everyday arguments, and 3) state-oriented (statistic)arguments 4) ethno-cultural, 5) patriotic, going back to the ideas of duty and service of Muslims for the benefit of the state and the fatherland. Keywords: Islam, Tatars, mosque, atheist politics, believers, Ulyanovsk region, freedom of religion in the USSR. A person's religious identity is a complex system of representations about faith and its fundamental elements, such as the duties of a believer, God, the other world, and holy places. For Muslim Tatars, one of the sacred places is a mosque, the behavior in which is determined by the system of religious and moral requirements of Sharia law. In particular, in the mosque it is not allo ... Читать далее