The fall of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 isolated Georgia from western Christendom. In 1510 the Ottomans invaded Imereti and sacked the capital, Kʿutʿaisi. Soon afterward, Shah Ismāʿīl I of Iran (Persia) invaded Kartli. Ivan IV (the Terrible) and other Muscovite tsars showed interest in the little Christian kingdoms of Georgia, but the Russians were powerless to stop the Muslim powers—Ṣavafid Iran and the Ottoman Empire, both near their zenith—from partitioning the country and oppressing its inhabitants. In 1578 the Ottomans overran the whole of Transcaucasia and seized Tbilisi, but they were subsequently driven out by Iran’s Shah ʿAbbās I (reigned 1587–1629), who deported many thousands of the Christian population to distant regions of Iran. There was a period of respite under the viceroys of the house of Mukhran, who governed at Tbilisi under the aegis of the shahs from 1658 until 1723. The most notable Mukhranian ruler was Vakhtang VI, regent of Kartli from 1703 to 1711 and then king, with intervals, until 1723. Vakhtang was an eminent lawgiver and introduced the printing press to Georgia; he had the Georgian annals edited by a commission of scholars. The collapse of the Ṣafavid dynasty in 1722, however, led to a fresh Ottoman invasion of Georgia. The Ottomans were expelled by the Persian conqueror Nādir Shah, who gave Kartli to Tʿeimuraz II (1744–62), one of the Kakhian line of the Bagratids. When Tʿeimuraz died, his son Erekle II reunited the kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti and made a brave attempt at erecting a Caucasian multinational state based on Georgia. Imereti under King Solomon I (1752–84) succeeded in finally throwing off the domination of the declining Ottoman Empire.

Raids by Lezgian mountaineers from Dagestan, economic stringency, and other difficulties impelled Erekle to adopt a pro-Russian orientation. On July 24, 1783, he concluded with Catherine II (the Great) the Treaty of Georgievsk, whereby Russia guaranteed Georgia’s independence and territorial integrity in return for Erekle’s acceptance of Russian suzerainty. Yet Georgia alone faced the Persian Āghā Moḥammad Khan, first of the Qājār dynasty. Tbilisi was sacked in 1795, and Erekle died in 1798. His invalid son Giorgi XII sought to hand over the kingdom unconditionally into the care of the Russian emperor Paul, but both rulers died before this could be implemented. In 1801 Alexander I reaffirmed Paul’s decision to incorporate Kartli and Kakheti into the Russian Empire. Despite the treaty of 1783, the Bagratid line was deposed and replaced by Russian military governors who deported the surviving members of the royal house and provoked several popular uprisings. Imereti was annexed in 1810, followed by Guria, Mingrelia, Svaneti, and Abkhazia in 1829, 1857, 1858, and 1864, respectively. The Black Sea ports of Potʿi and Batʿumi and areas of southwestern Georgia under Ottoman rule were taken by Russia in successive wars by 1877–78.

National revival

By waging war on the Lezgian clansmen of Dagestan and on Iran and the Ottomans, the Russians ensured the corporate survival of the Georgian nation. Under Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, who served with distinction as viceroy (1845–54), commerce and trade flourished. Following the liberation of the Russian serfs in 1861, the Georgian peasants also received freedom from 1864 onward, though on terms regarded as burdensome. The decay of patriarchy was accelerated by the spread of education and European influences. A railway linked Tbilisi with Potʿi from 1872, and mines, factories, and plantations were developed by Russian, Armenian, and Western entrepreneurs. Peasant discontent, the growth of an urban working class, and the deliberate policy of Russification and forced assimilation of minorities practiced by Emperor Alexander III (1881–94) fostered radical agitation among the workers and nationalism among the intelligentsia. The tsarist system permitted no organized political activity, but social issues were debated in journals, works of fiction, and local assemblies.

The leader of the national revival in Georgia was Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, leader of a literary and social movement dubbed the Pirveli Dasi, or First Group. The Meore Dasi, or Second Group, led by Giorgi Tseretʿeli, was more liberal in its convictions, but it paled before the Mesame Dasi, or Third Group, an illegal Social Democratic party founded in 1893. The Third Group professed Marxist doctrines, and from 1898 it included among its members Joseph Dzhugashvili, who later took the byname Joseph Stalin. When the Mensheviks—a branch of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party—gained control of the group, Stalin left Georgia.

The 1905 Revolution in Russia led to widespread disturbances and guerrilla fighting in Georgia, later suppressed by Russian government Cossack troops with indiscriminate brutality. After the Russian Revolution of February 1917 the Transcaucasian region—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—was ruled from Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and known as the Ozakom. The Bolshevik coup later that year forced the predominantly Menshevik politicians of Transcaucasia to reluctantly secede from Russia and form the Transcaucasian Commissariat. The local nationalisms, combined with the pressure brought on by an Ottoman advance from the west during World War I (1914–18), brought about the breakdown of the Transcaucasian federation. On May 26, 1918, Georgia set up an independent state and placed itself under the protection of Germany, the senior partner of the Central Powers, but the victory of the Allies at the end of 1918 led to occupation of Georgia by the British. The Georgians viewed Anton Ivanovich Denikin’s counterrevolutionary White Russians, who enjoyed British support, as more dangerous than the Bolsheviks. They refused to cooperate in the effort to restore the tsarist imperial order, and British forces evacuated Batʿumi in July 1920.

Georgia’s independence was recognized de facto by the Allies in January 1920, and the Russo-Georgian treaty of May 1920 briefly resulted in Soviet-Georgian cooperation.

Incorporation into the U.S.S.R.

Refused entry into the League of Nations, Georgia gained de jure recognition from the Allies in January 1921. Within a month the Red Army—without Lenin’s approval but under the orders of two Georgian Bolsheviks, Stalin and Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze—entered Georgia and installed a Soviet regime.

After Georgia was established as a Soviet republic, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze incorporated it into the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The still-popular Georgian Social Democrats organized a rebellion in 1924, but it was brutally suppressed by Stalin.

During Stalin’s despotic rule (1928–53), Georgia suffered from repression of all expressions of nationalism, the forced collectivization of peasant agriculture, and the purging of those communists who had led the Soviet republic in its first decade. Stalin installed his Georgian comrade Lavrenty Beria as party chief, first in Georgia and later over all of Transcaucasia. Even after Beria was transferred to Moscow to head the secret police, the republic was tightly controlled from the Kremlin. In the Soviet period, Georgia changed from an overwhelmingly agrarian country to a largely industrial, urban society. Meanwhile, Georgian language and literature were promoted, and a national intelligentsia grew in number and influence. After Stalin’s death, a freewheeling “second economy” developed, which supplied goods and services not otherwise available.

Under the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, Georgia moved swiftly toward independence. The former dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia led a coalition called the Round Table to victory in parliamentary elections in October 1990. After Georgia declared independence on April 9, 1991, Gamsakhurdia was elected president. But Gamsakhurdia’s policies soon drove many of his supporters into opposition, and in late 1991 civil war broke out. In January 1992 Gamsakhurdia was deposed and replaced by the Military Council, which subsequently gave power to the State Council headed by Eduard Shevardnadze, former Soviet foreign minister and one-time first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia. In October, 95 percent of voters elected Shevardnadze to serve as chair of the Supreme Council, Georgia’s legislature, a position then tantamount to the country’s president.