SUMMARY:

In his article Anton Rybakov explores the factors that made the Russian imperial authorities embark on the project of full integration of the Georgian Church into the imperial system of confessional governance of the Orthodox Church and laity. The author traces the history of the process of integration and how integration affected the structure and status of the Georgian Orthodox Church. In tracing this process the author seeks to situate it in the broader context of transformations of the Russian Orthodox Church and the secularization of public life in the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century, also taking into account the specifics of the Church’s development in pre-Petrine Russia. The article lays out the phases of Church reform in Georgia, from the abolition of the Catholicos-Patriarch through the completion of the structure of the Georgian Exarchate. Along with this process the paradigm of Church–society relations changed: from the traditional view of the Church’s this-worldly presence to the new view of locatedness of the Church in “the realm of Caesar.” The author contends that because of these processes the Georgian Church was completely assimilated into the imperial Orthodox Church in an administrative and cultural sense. At the same time, Rybakov points out that the centralizing trends in Russian imperial governance could coexist with the politics of difference within the centralized space of empire as it occurred in Western Georgia where the boundaries of postreform dioceses overlapped with the political, administrative, and ethnographic borders. Finally, the article surveys the impact of the Church reform on the development of borderland society, which included the breakup of the traditional link between the Church hierarchy and the social elite, the exclusion of the Church from the processes of modern Georgian nation-building, and the dramatic secularization of Georgian public life.