by James Millar
ARMENIA
TURKEY
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Lagodekhi Tsnori jPatara Shiraki Sh?ki Kirvovabad.
AZERBAIJAN
Georgia, 1992 © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION. when they controlled a multiethnic territory from the Black to the Caspian Seas and from the Caucasus Mountains in the north, toward the Armenian plateau in the south. It was also a time of great learning, with theological academies at Gelati, near Kutaisi, and in the east at Iqalto on the Kakhetian plain. The literary output of this time reached it zenith with Shota Rustaveli’s epic tale of heroism and chivalry, Knight in the Panther Skin, written in the last quarter of twelfth century.
In the thirteenth century a succession of invasions by Turks and Mongols brought chaos and destruction upon the Georgians. These culminated in the devastating raids of Timur in the early fifteenth century. From these depredations Georgian society was very slow to recover, and for much of the next four centuries it remained under the sway of the Savafid Persian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Georgians at this time were active at the Safavid court. The Bagratid dynasty continued to reign locally over a collection of smaller states that warred against one another. West European travelers who ventured through Georgia in these centuries give sad reports about the quality of life.
In the eighteenth century the Russian Empire’s steady expansion brought it to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains and along the Caspian Sea to the east of Georgia. Russians and Georgians had been in contact through earlier exchanges of embassies. Persian invasions in that century had been especially harsh, and the Georgians looked to their northern Orthodox neighbor for assistance. This assistance culminated first in the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk, by which Irakle II’s realm of Kartli-Kakheti became a protectorate of the Russian Empire. Then, in 1801, soon after his accession to the throne, Alexander I signed a manifesto proclaiming Kartli-Kakheti to be fully incorporated into RusGEORGIA AND GEORGIANS sia. Other parts of Georgia followed within the next decade, although not always willingly.
Despite Russification efforts during the nineteenth century, the Georgian language and culture underwent a renaissance that would undergird Georgian national aspirations in the twentieth century. The Society for the Spread of Literacy among the Georgians, founded by Iakob Gogebashvili, was important for fostering language acquisition, especially among children. Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, and Vazha Pshavela dominated the literary scene into the twentieth century.
Georgians joined with comrades throughout the Russian Empire in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. When the Russian state began to shed its periphery in 1918, the Georgians briefly entered the Transcaucasian Republic. This political entity lasted from February until May 1918, but then split into its constituent parts. Georgia proclaimed its independence on May 26, 1918. The Democratic Republic of Georgia, beset by internal and external enemies, lasted less than three years, and on February 26, 1921, the Bolsheviks established Soviet power in Tiflis. Independent Georgia had been governed mainly by Mensheviks, an offshoot of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. They were reluctant nationalists, led by Noe Zhordania, who served as president. These Mensheviks became the demonic foil for any number of aspects of Soviet historiography and remained so for the Abkhazians when they would press for greater autonomy.
The Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia entered the USSR through the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922 and remained a member of it until its dissolution in 1936. Afterward the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the USSR’s constituent republics. Three autonomous regions were created within Georgia, part of what some describe as a manifestation of the “divide and conquer” regime of ethnic pseudo-sovereignties. The South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast was established across the border from North Ossetia, and the Adjar A.S.S.R. was an enclave of historically Muslim Georgians in the southwest. The third, and most troubled, part of Georgia was Abkhazia. This region in the northwest along the Black Sea coast had been in an ambiguous federative, treaty status with Georgia, but was finally, in 1931, incorporated as an A.S.S.R.
Georgia fared generally no better or worse for having its “favorite son,” Iosep Jugashvili (a.k.a. Josef Stalin), as the dictator of the Soviet Union. With other parts of the U.S.S.R., it suffered the depredations of party purges and the destruction of its national intelligentsia in the 1930s.
In the latter decades of the Soviet period, Georgia was held up as a sort of paradise within the Soviet system. Agriculture, with tea and citrus in the subtropical zone in the west, prospered, and the Black Sea coast was a favorite spot for vacationers from the cold north. The hospitality of the Georgians, seemingly uncooled by Soviet power, and always warmed by the quality of Georgia’s famous wines, wooed Soviet and foreign guests alike.
The Georgians developed a vigorous dissident movement in the 1970s, with Zviad Gamsakhur-dia and Merab Kostava playing leading roles. Tens of thousands came out into the streets of Tiflis in 1978 to protest the exclusion of the Georgian language from the new proposed Constitution of the Georgian S.S.R.
As Gorbachev’s glasnost worked its effects, the Georgian independence movement gave rise to competing movements in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In reaction to a communiqu? issued by Abkhazian intellectuals in March 1989, the main streets of Tiflis again overflowed with protesters. On the morning of April 9, 1989, troops moved against the demonstration, killing at least twenty and injuring scores of others. This outburst of violence marked the beginning of the rapid devolution of Soviet power in Georgia.
Georgia voted for its independence on April 9, 1991, and elected its first president, Zviad Gam-sakhurdia, in May. His rule was harsh, and his presidency barely survived the final collapse of the USSR by a few months into 1992. Eduard Shevardnadze, who had held power in Georgia under Communist rule, and who became Gorbachev’s foreign minister, returned to Georgia, eventually to be elected twice to the presidency. His presidency was plagued by warfare and continuing conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which claimed independence. The ethnic conflict compounded the economic dislocations, although the proposed Baku-Tiflis-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the beginning of an east-west energy corridor, has brought the promise of some future prosperity. See also: CAUCASUS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH
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GEORGIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, W. E. D. (1971). A History of the Georgian People: From the Beginning down to the Russian Conquest in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Barnes amp; Noble. Aronson, Howard. (1990). Georgian: A Reading Grammar, 2nd ed. Columbus, OH: Slavica.. Braund, David. (1994). Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC-AD 562. Oxford: Clarendon. Lang, David Marshall. (1962). A Modern History of Soviet Georgia. New York: Grove. Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. (1997). “Imagining History at the Crossroads: Persia, Byzantium, and the Architects of the Written Georgian Past.” Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Suny, Ronald G. (1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Toumanoff, Cyril. (1982). History of Christian Caucasia. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
PAUL CREGO
GEORGIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
The Orthodox Church of Georgia, an autocephalous church of the Byzantine rite Eastern Churches, is an ancient community. It dates from the fourth century, and stories of the evangelization of Kartli center around St. Nino, called Equal to the Apostles, who was born in Cappadocia, studied in Jerusalem, and made her way through Armenia to preach, heal, baptize, and convert the Georgian people. Later traditions add apostolic visits from St. Andrew and St. Simeon the Canaanite that reflect evangelization of western Georgia. Christians in Kartli continued to have a strong relationship with the Armenians until the seventh century, when these Christian people opted for different Chris-tologies
.
The autocephaly of the Orthodox Church is claimed from the fifth century, when the Archbishop of Mtskheta was given the title of Catholi-cos. There was later also a Catholicos in western Georgia, coinciding with the Kingdom of Abkhazia.
Western Georgia was evangelized more directly by Greeks, and, after the split from the Armenians, the entire Georgian Church strengthened its ties with the church in Constantinople. Of the family of Orthodox Churches that derive their liturgies from the Byzantine tradition, the liturgical language remains an archaic Georgian, not entirely intelligible to modern speakers. The Georgians, for much of their history, have lived under the rule of Muslim states. Arab Muslims conquered Tiflis in 645, and it continued under Muslim rule until 1122. After a brief golden age the Georgians again came under Muslim control, alternating between Savifid Persians and Ottoman Turks. The church endured this period of time with difficulty and looked for assistance from their Orthodox neighbors in Russia toward the end of the eighteenth century. The identification of the Georgian nation with its Orthodox identity was strengthened in this period, as the church was often the guarantor of linguistic and national identity and the legal authority for the nation.
Soon after the Russians annexed Georgia (1801), the autocephaly of the Georgian Church was rescinded (1811) and it became a part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Georgian Church became one of the institutions in Georgia through which the imperial government attempted its program of Russification.
The Georgian Church reclaimed its autocephaly in 1918, as Georgia was proclaiming its independence. This short period of breathing space was quickly constricted with the imposition of Soviet power, and nearly seven decades of atheist education and oppression took a devastating toll on the Georgian Church. As in the rest of the USSR, church buildings were closed, confiscated for other purposes, left to ruin, or destroyed. The role of the clergy was restricted, and many came under suspicion as possible KGB agents.
The reign of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II from December 1977 marked a new beginning in the life of the Georgian Church. Slowly, Ilia began to restore episcopal sees and reopen churches. In October 1988, the Tiflis Theological Academy was opened. With the changes of perestroika and glas-nost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Georgian Church continued a dramatic revival. By the end of the 1990s dozens of churches had been rebuilt and many new ones built.
During the first decade of Georgia’s new independence the church struggled to find its place in society and in relation to the state. Georgian politicians, especially the first president Zviad Gam-sakhurdia, have used and misused their ties to the church. The new Georgian Constitution not only guarantees freedom of religion and conscience but gives the church a place of historical honor. This place of honor was given further definition and practical meaning by a Concordat signed by the government and the church on October 14, 2002.
GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
The Georgian Church was encouraged to join the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1961, and Ilia II has served as its president. Internal pressures from conservatives helped to further the decision of the Georgians to leave the WCC and other ecumenical bodies during the spring of 1997.
There has also been considerable persecution of non-Orthodox religious communities, including Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, in the post-Soviet period, some of it violent. The Orthodox responsible for this persecution are generally persons excommunicated by the Georgian Church. Some within the church, however, have participated either by direct violence or by an elevation of rhetoric against the non-Orthodox. See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; RUSSIFICATION.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Babian, Gorun. (2001). The Relations Between the Armenian and Georgian Church: According to the Armenian Sources, 300-610. Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia. Mgaloblishvili, Tamila, ed. (1998). Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus. Surrey, England: Curzon.
PAUL CREGO
GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
One of the unintended and initially unforeseen consequences of World War II was the division of Germany. At the end of the war, Western forces controlled and occupied Western Germany, while Soviet forces occupied Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe. The Allied powers, including Russia, agreed to divide Germany and Berlin into occupation zones. The tensions resulting from the joint administration of Germany, as well as the emergence of the Cold War, led in 1949 to the formal division of Germany into two separate states.
In 1949 occupied West Germany was transformed into the Federal Republic of Germany, a democratic state with close ties to the Western powers. In East Germany, the German Democratic Republic was founded. The Soviets had allowed political parties to form in their section of Germany as early as 1945, but had used pressure and coercive measures to achieve a merger between the socialist and communist parties during April of 1946. The result was the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialis-tische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED, which came to exercise near-complete control in East Germany. The GDR, like other communist governments established in Eastern Europe, had a central committee, and power came from the party leadership, which also assumed key roles in the state bureaucracy. The government used repressive measures such as censorship and arrest, and began to require communist ideology to be taught in schools. Walter Ulbricht, the head of the German Democratic Republic, had been part of the German Communist Party from 1919, the year it was founded, and had served as a communist deputy in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Ul-bricht was flown from the Soviet Union to Germany after the Soviet army had invaded Germany. Ulbricht, a hard-line Stalinist, stated in 1952 that East Germany could pursue the construction of full socialism, further restricting workers and reducing the availability of consumer goods. Although the Soviet Union had been exerting considerable pressure upon Ulbricht to reform and alter his repressive policies, the Soviets used force to suppress the rebellion his policies provoked in 1953.
Since the Soviet occupation of East Germany had begun, hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled to the West. The desire to escape Soviet-occupied territory intensified during Ulbricht’s tenure, a fact illustrated by the 400,000 Germans who left East Germany in 1953. The Soviet Union was able to lessen this massive emigration by patrolling the border between the two German states and making it impassable, but until 1961, Germans could take public transportation from East Berlin to West Berlin and then declare themselves to authorities. In 1961, the Soviets officially sealed off East Berlin, as well as the last breach in East Germany, by building the Berlin Wall.
The erection of the Berlin Wall led to a stabilization of the situation in East Berlin and the end to the constant drain on the population. Ulbricht introduced the New Economic System in 1963. The New Economic System did not succeed in substantially altering the centralized structure of the East Germany economy, but it allowed for a relaxation of the rigid economic policies and for some independent decisions. As a result of these changes, the East German economy became the strongest of all of those countries within the Soviet sphere of occupation, while still far below the economies of
GERMAN SETTLERS
Western Europe. Ulbricht appeared to be at the height of his power in 1968, but many of his policies were unpopular. In 1971 Soviet authorities forced Ulbricht to step down. Ulbricht died in 1973, and his death paved the way for improved relations between East and West Germany. The East German minister, Willie Stoph, negotiated and signed several treaties with the German Federal Republic. Stoph briefly served as the effective head of state but was replaced by Erich Honecker in 1976. In 1989 the changes and reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and the reluctance of the Soviet leader to use force to suppress rebellions elsewhere led to uprisings in Eastern Europe. In East Germany the Berlin Wall symbolized not just the repressive Soviet-style government that had been in place since 1949 but also the single largest cause of resentment among Germans. The Soviet control of
East Berlin and East Germany necessitated the forced separation of family and friends who were unable to secure travel permits or permission to emigrate from the notoriously inefficient and reactionary bureaucracy in the East. The uprisings in Eastern Europe and the discontent in Germany led the SED to replace Honecker and to pass a new law regarding travel and emigration. It was too little too late, however, and crowds swarmed the crossing point arguing that restrictions had been relaxed. When Soviet guards, unsure of the situation, opened the gate and allowed them to pass, Germans began to dismantle the Wall, and it was not long until the communist government in East Germany collapsed. The non-communist leadership of the German Democratic Republic immediately arranged to meet with authorities from the German Federal Republic. The initial focus of these talks was on the financial situation and the request for a loan to East Germany, but the question of German reunification also hung in the air. These developments led to the “Two plus Four” talks, encompassing the two German states and the four powers that had occupied Germany. The Two plus Four Treaty, concluded on September 12, 1990, dealt with all international issues regarding affairs in Germany, to the satisfaction of the major powers. The support of the president of the United States, George H.W. Bush, was instrumental in securing the approval of the French, who had grave concerns about the renewal of Germany. At 12:01 A.M. on October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, and the German Federal Republic became the sole authority for a reunified Germany. Reunification has greatly impacted all Germans socially, economically, and politically as the complicated process of reintegrating East and West Germany has taken place within both a national and an international context. See also: COMMUNIST BLOC; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Detwiler, Donald S. (1999). Germany: A Short History, 3rd edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. (1992). Germany from Partition to Reunification. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press.