ABSTRACT
Tsars Paul and Alexander 1 in 1801 ignored promises implicit and explicit and began a ruthless absorption of the Georgian kingdoms and Georgian church into the Russian state. The disaster was mitigated in that Georgia was now spared massacres, forced conversion, and internecine anarchy: slave-trading, castration, decapitation gave way to milder forms of oppression. Russification was a more insidious process, since the Georgian aristocracy was lured into deserting their people by the offer of integration into the Russian nobility and military élite, while the church lost not just its frescos and music, but its dignity to the tamed and apathetic Orthodoxy of the Russian Holy Synod. The peasants were subjected to a new serfdom under a lazy, corrupt, ignorant, and arrogant Russian bureaucracy, with whom they literally had no common language. Divorced from their vassals, serfs, and roots, the Bagrations were mildly punished by exile for any remaining aspirations to their throne: those who did not become courtiers, soldiers, or civil servants to the tsar spent their forces in largely dilettante literary efforts. Nevertheless, the Russians built more than they demolished: the printing-presses that Agha Mahmed Khan wrecked in 1795 were replaced by General Titsianov (a Russified Tsitsishvili) in 1804, even though it was 1818 before the suspicious Russian censor allowed a feeble Georgian newspaper to appear. Nevertheless, Tbilisi’s College for Sons of the Gentry, which became its first new grammar school, its vice-regal court and civil service, even its infant bureaucratic establishment, provided a new hearth for the eventual spread of a new Georgian-language culture.
