Russification and the Georgian Predicament

After annexation, the slow pressure of empire on Georgian language, school, and Church — the russification of seminary and administration and the fear that a people without a state or an autocephalous Church might lose, next, its language and its very identity. This is the cultural predicament to which the tergdaleulebi generation, and Ilia above all, would respond.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Nation Without a State

By the middle of the nineteenth century Georgia was, for the first time in its long history, a land without a Georgian sovereign and without a self-governing Georgian Church. Both the crown (1801) and the catholicate (1811) had been dissolved into imperial institutions (see The Annexation and the Abolition of Autocephaly). What remained of Georgian distinctiveness now rested not on institutions of state but on language, literature, faith, and memory — and these were precisely what the machinery of a modernizing empire tended, whether by design or by drift, to erode (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5).

The Georgian nobility, into whose princely ranks Ilia was born, occupied an ambiguous position in this order. The empire had confirmed the Georgian nobles in their status and drawn them into imperial service, the army, and the Russian-language educated world; many of the leading families became bilingual and, in their upper reaches, russified in manners and outlook (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 2005, on the social structure of the nobility and its decline). The danger Ilia’s generation perceived was not the sudden abolition of Georgian identity but its quiet dissolution: a nobility that spoke Russian at home, a Church whose language was displaced in its own seminaries, a literate culture that might simply fade for want of schools, books, and a reading public in Georgian.

The Pressure on Language and Church

The most concrete instrument of russification ran through the Church and the school. Under the exarchate the Georgian language was displaced in worship and, more consequentially for the future, in the seminaries that trained the clergy and much of the educated class; instruction moved toward Russian, and Georgian was in places treated as a subordinate subject rather than the medium of learning (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Lang, A Modern History of Georgia, 1962, on the exarchate’s language policy). The Tbilisi Theological Seminary, in particular, became a flashpoint: a Russian-run institution educating Georgian youths, it bred over the following decades exactly the resentments — national and, later, revolutionary — that its administration feared (Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 2005, on the seminary as a seedbed of dissent). The same seminary would, a generation after Ilia, form both Georgian nationalists and Georgian Marxists — among the latter, the young Ioseb Jughashvili, later Stalin, whose name will return in the story of Ilia’s death (see Who and Why: The Live Dispute).

Against this pressure the defenders of Georgian identity had a single, powerful counter-argument, one Ilia would make the center of his life’s work: that the Georgian language was not merely a vernacular but the vessel of a fifteen-hundred-year Christian literary civilization, the language of the Gospels and the liturgy in Georgia since late antiquity, of the great hymnographers and hagiographers, of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (see St. Tamar of Georgia). To let it decay was to let a Christian culture die (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the language question among the Georgian intelligentsia).

The Cultural Crisis and the Generational Response

What made the mid-century a genuine crisis, and not merely a grievance, was that the older forms of Georgian public life had lost their footing while new ones had not yet been built. The Georgian literary language itself was in question: unstandardized, weighed down by archaisms and by Russian and other borrowings, without a modern press or a broad reading public (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010, on the state of the language before the reformers; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012). There was no widely circulating Georgian journalism, few Georgian schools open to the mass of the population, and no institution channeling the energies of educated Georgians toward the preservation of their own culture. In this vacuum a people could russify not by decree but by neglect.

It was this predicament that produced, in the 1860s, the reform generation known as the tergdaleulebi — literally “those who had drunk from the Terek,” the river crossed on the road to Russia, so that the name marked them as the young Georgians educated in the empire who returned home carrying European and Russian reformist ideas (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the tergdaleulebi and the term). Their program was cultural before it was political: to standardize and defend the Georgian literary language, to create a modern Georgian press, to found schools and reading societies, and to awaken in the nobility and the people a consciousness of themselves as a nation with a language, a homeland, and a faith worth keeping. Ilia Chavchavadze, returning from St. Petersburg in 1861, would become the acknowledged leader of this generation and the architect of nearly all its lasting institutions (see St. Petersburg and the Tergdaleulebi; The National Work).

The Shape of the Answer

The predicament thus defined the answer. Because the threat was the slow erosion of language, faith, and memory, the response would be built not from politics but from culture: journals to create a public, a society to spread literacy, a bank to keep Georgian land in Georgian hands, and a literature to give the nation back its self-knowledge. And because the deepest layer of the threat touched the Church — whose autocephaly had been abolished and whose language had been pressed out of its own seminaries — the national program would, in Ilia’s hands, always carry a religious dimension, culminating in his defense of the Church’s suppressed self-government (see The Defense of Autocephaly). The genius, and the limitation, of Ilia’s answer was that it met an imperial dissolution not with revolution but with the patient rebuilding of a national culture from below (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the cultural-national program).

References

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Russification; the position of the nobility; the state of Georgian culture; the tergdaleulebi and the national movement.)
Jones, Stephen F. Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. (The Tbilisi Seminary as a seedbed of dissent; the social structure of the nobility.)
Manning, Paul. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. (The tergdaleulebi; the term “those who drank from the Terek”; the language question.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The state of the Georgian literary language before the reformers.)
Lang, David Marshall. A Modern History of Georgia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. (The exarchate’s language policy in Church and seminary.)
Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The cultural-national program as the answer to russification.)