Musicology Annotation << Back Evolution of the Qur’anic Reciting by the Russian Muslim – Tatars and Bashkirs Imamutdinova Zilia A. The evolution of the tradition of Qur’anic reciting by the Ural-Volga Turkic Muslims lasted for more than a millennium and included epochs both the flowering (during the existence of Bulgaria, the Kazan Khanate, in the pre-Soviet period), and destruction and stagnation (in the historical stages of the medieval conquests of the region; the Russian imperial ruling until the Catherine the Great liberal reforms at the end of the XVIII century and the Soviet decades). This article characterizes the religious practice and the most important properties of the Qur’anic reciting by the Ural-Volga Tatars and Bashkirs in the Soviet period from a new methodological standpoint. It’s raised the question about the decline of tradition and at the same time, its existence in semilegal and hidden forms under the atheistic course of the state. The melodious reading of the Qur’an by Muslim Tatars and Bashkirs is interpreted as a common ethno-regional phenomenon, historically oriented to the Arabic normative and ethno-regional intonation styles. The loss of connections with the Arabic melodic origins is indicated. The author confi rms that the melodic characteristics of the ethnic tradition of the Qur’an reciting are conditioned by the peculiarities of folk music, determined primarily by the pentatonic (five-step) modebasis. The work employs archival data available to modern science, materials of the field research (interview, audio recordings) accumulated since the late 1980s, musical notations verified by computer melograms. Keywords: Soviet period, atheist campaign, Ural-Volga Turkic Muslims, reciting of the Quran, stylistic direction, destruction of the tradition, loss of continuity, transformation of melodies. DOI: 10.25791/musicology.8.2021.1208 Pp. 41-50.