This paper explores the legalisation of Pentecostal believers in late socialist Czechoslovakia as a case of state acknowledgement without full equality. Focusing on Pentecostal communities that were eventually legalised as the Apostolic Church, I argue that believers pursued formal legal recognition through a strategy of defiant compliance: they rejected illegality, continued semi-public religious practice, and repeatedly petitioned state authorities while presenting themselves as loyal socialist citizens. This strategy opened a path to legal status, but also exposed them to surveillance, arrests, and pressure to accept state-approved institutional solutions. State acknowledgement thus reduced some vulnerabilities while reproducing others. A comparison between the Czech and Slovak parts of the country shows that outcomes depended not only on ideology ("communist rule") but also on administrative structures, local-state relations and federal asymmetries.