After a devastating invasion by the Persians that destroyed large parts of the city, the Russians marched into Tiflis (1800), which soon became their principal administrative center in Caucasia. The city was then largely Armenian in population, but through the century the percentage of Georgians increased steadily until they became a majority in Soviet times. In the twentieth century Tiflis (Tbilisi) was successively the capital of the Transcaucasian Federation (1918), the first independent Georgian Republic (1918-1921), the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia (1921-1991), and the second independent Republic of Georgia (since 1991). Today it is a city of more than one million people, but since the end of the Soviet Union Tiflis has lost much of its cosmopolitan flavor as Armenians, Russians, and Jews have steadily migrated elsewhere. The post-Soviet disintegration of Georgia and the collapse of its economy have taken a toll on the town, but the beauty of its buildings and natural setting remains intact. See also: CAUCASUS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ISLAM; TRANSCAUCASIAN FEDERATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1986). “Tiflis, Crucible of Ethnic Politics, 1860-1905.” In The City in Late Imperial Rus
1546
sia, ed. Michael F. Hamm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917-1918.” Slavic Review 50:497-511. Roslof, Edward E. (2000). “Russian Orthodoxy and the Tragic Fate of Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin).” In The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, ed. William B. Husband. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
(1865-1925), eleventh patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, 1917-1925.
The son of a provincial priest, Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin attended the Pskov seminary and the theological academy in St. Petersburg. He took monastic vows in 1891, adopting the name “Tikhon,” and was elevated to the episcopacy in 1897. Over the next twenty years, he served dioceses in Russia and North America. He became the first popularly elected Metropolitan of Moscow in July 1917 and president of the national church council that convened in August. After the October Revolution, the council chose Tikhon as the first Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia since 1701. Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks and their supporters in January 1918, but then backed away from direct confrontation in the face of government reprisals, adopting a strictly neutral political stance during the civil war. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks saw Tikhon as a counterrevolutionary. They split the church in 1922 by supporting the Living Church Movement. Tikhon spent a year under arrest and interrogation. He was released in mid-1923 after signing a statement repenting his political crimes and condemning foreign church leaders. Tikhon’s last years were spent under constant threat of arrest as he worked to reunite the Church. His death in April 1925 led to new schisms when the government prevented election of a new patriarch and promoted rivalries among Orthodox bishops. Despite official Soviet depictions of Tikhon as an arch-reactionary, Orthodox believers revered him due to his suffering at the hands of the Communists in defense of the faith. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Patriarch Tikhon in 1989. See also: LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evtuhov, Catherine. (1991). “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the
The Treaty of Tilsit is the name of the document signed by Emperor Napoleon I of France and Tsar Alexander I of Russia on July 7, 1807, following a famous meeting between the two on a raft in the Niemen River. The treaty focused on three questions: (1) the peace terms between Russia and France; (2) how to handle a war that had erupted between Russia and Turkey; (3) the status of the defeated kingdom of Prussia, which had risen up against Napoleon only the year before. For Alexander, negotiating on behalf of the Prussian king, Frederick William III, Tilsit was a decisive moment. Not only had he experienced murderous military reversals at Danzig and Friedland in June, he was now confronted by the prospect of intrigue and disorder at home, and in this his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, figured conspicuously and ominously. Most of all, Alexander desired in the most intimate way to bring peace to Europe, and he came to realize that this could only be done if Britain, alone now against Bonaparte, was brought to heel. The treaty was an extremely onerous instrument-a prize example, in fact, of the ruthless brutality of Napoleonic power. The treaty left Russia untouched, but it reduced Prussia to a makeshift territory east of the River Elbe, occupied by Napoleon’s troops, and ringed by his puppet states old and new. It tore away one-third of Prussia’s territory and placed it under the control of the king of Saxony in a new Napoleonic satellite called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. It pledged Russia would go to war with Britain if the latter did not accept Napoleon’s peace terms; it pledged Napoleon would do the same with respect to Turkey. It was at Tilsit that the whole of Napoleon’s unconscionable ambition found its fullest and most virulent expression. See also: ALEXANDER I; NAPOLEON I
1547
lllustration of Napoleon I of France, Frederick William III of Prussia, and Alexander I at Tilsit, July 7, 1807.
Schroeder, Paul. (1994). The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
In the decade and a half before the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Russia endured what has been known ever since as the Time of Troubles, a period of severe crisis that nearly destroyed the country. It followed the death of Tsar Fyodor I in 1598 and ended with the election of Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613. The Time of Troubles has long fascinated and puzzled the Russian people and has inspired scholars, poets, and even musicians. To many Russians who lived through the Troubles, it was nothing more or less than God’s punishment of their country for the sins of its rulers or its people. Others since then have sought more secular explanations, noting that at the center of the Troubles was the most powerful uprising in Russian history prior to the twentieth century, the so-called Bolot-nikov rebellion (named after the rebel commander, Ivan Bolotnikov). Focusing on that event, historians erroneously concluded long ago that at the heart of the Troubles was Russia’s first social revolution of the oppressed masses against serfdom. Recently, that interpretation has been decisively overthrown; instead of a social revolution, the Time of Troubles produced Russia’s first civil war, a conflict that split Russian society vertically instead of horizontally. The long and bloody civil war occurred in two distinct phases: 1604-1605 and 1606- 1612.
The Time of Troubles began with the extinction of Moscow’s ancient ruling dynasty. After
1548
Tsar Fyodor I’s death in 1598, Boris Godunov (regent for mentally retarded Fyodor) easily defeated his rivals to become tsar. Nevertheless, many people questioned the legitimacy of the new ruler, whose sins supposedly included having Tsar Ivan IVs youngest son, Dmitry of Uglich, killed in 1591 in order to clear a path to the throne for himself. During Tsar Boris’s reign Russia suffered a horrible famine that wiped out up to one-third of the population. The effects of the famine, coupled with serious long-term economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and political
