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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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.
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.
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
