ABC-BOOKS FOR BAPTISED TATARS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19<sup>TH</sup> - FIRST DECADES OF THE 20<sup>TH</sup> CENTURIES
This article deals with the history of the Baptised-Tatar ABC-book (Russ. букварь) which was designed for a speciﬁ c ethno-confessional group, namely Volga- and Ural-region Tatars, i.e. baptised Orthodox Tatars (Kryashens). This ethnoconfessional group had been forming mainly during the second half of the 16<sup>th</sup> - ﬁrst half of the 18<sup>th</sup> centuries, after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552 and its inclusion in the Russian state. The article gives a detailed description of the ﬁrst ABC-book for the baptised Tatars: Букварь, краткая священная история, сокращенный катехизис и молитвы (Russ. “ABC-book, concise Holy History, abridged catechism, and prayers”), prepared and published in 1862 by the prominent Russian orientalist, educationalist and missionary N.M. Il’minskiy. Attention is paid to its novel character as an ABC-book in the Tatar language designed in Cyrillic script. The article studies the history of preparation of the ABC-book, the problem of authorship, the problem of adapting the Russian alphabet to Tatar phonetic features. The ABC-book was republished many times up to 1917 and was the only ABC-book for baptised Tatars during all this period. The article also identiﬁes the role and place of this ABC-book in the integrated system of Christian enlightenment of non-Russian ethnic groups of Russia developed by N.I. Il’minskiy, as well as in the formation of Orthodox religious consciousness among baptised Tatars. Special attention is paid to the ﬁrst Sovied Bap-tised-Tatar ABC-books published in the second half of the 1920s in Arabic and then in Latin scripts as a speciﬁc cultural and historical phenomenon reﬂecting the national and educational strategy of Soviet authorities prior to transition to the uniﬁ ed system of school education in the USSR, both as a medium of integrating a child not only into the new Soviet reality, but also into the new Tatar educational and ethno-cultural space which took into account the cultural speciﬁcity of each ethno-cultural group, reaching as far as separate education. Overall, the ABC-book is discussed in the context of the authoritative “imperial” educationl perspective and the adjustment of the Imperial and Soviet educational policy to speciﬁc conditions of multi-ethnic and multi-confessional environment.