Imperial Russian Rule and Revolution
The Russian Empire absorbed the two principal Georgian kingdoms, those of Kartli-Kakheti and Imereti in 1801 and 1810, respectively. The members of the dispossessed royal dynasty fomented a series of rebellions against Russian rule, but all of them failed. The Russian administration, using a combination of military pacification and diplomatic persuasion, succeeded in winning a degree of loyalty of local elites. The Bagrationi princes themselves subsequently bowed to the inevitable and reconciled with a fait accompli.
Shortly after the Decembrist revolt of 1825, royalist Georgians in St. Petersburg and Moscow, urged on by the grandsons of the penultimate king of Georgia Erekle II, the princes Okropir and Dimitri, tried to convince Georgian students in the two Russian cities that Georgia should be independent under the Bagrationi dynasty. Okropir visited Tiflis in 1829 and helped found a secret society with the aim of restoring the Georgian monarchy. Inspired by the French revolution of 1830 and the Polish insurrection of 1830-1831, the conspirators were united in their anti-Russian sentiment but divided in their program although the majority favored a restoration of the Bagrationi to the Georgian throne. The planned coup was prevented by the police in 1832.
The loyalty of Georgian nobility to the Russian Tsar, won by liberal politics of the Imperial viceroy Prince Vorontsov (1844–1854), began to fade in the 1860s. Yet, after the Georgian royalist-led conspiracy in 1832, no Georgian movement or political party called for an outright independence until World War I.
During the World War I years, Georgian émigrés, under the guidance of Prince Matchabelli established a National Committee in Berlin which considered a reinstatement of a monarchy in Georgia under the German protectorate. An influential lobby of the idea was Otto von Lossow, who suggested putting the German prince Joachim of Prussia on the Georgian throne. However, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgians restored their independent state in the form of a democratic republic (May 26, 1918), the result of a long-time domination of Georgian political scene by Social Democrats. Georgian nobility, including the scions of the former royal dynasty, lent their support to a new republic. As a contemporary Western observer noted: "Like that of France, the Georgian nobility has a social rather than a political significance. The people are democratic in spirit; there is not the least chance of a revival of monarchy in Georgia, and the nobles will hardly have more political weight than their individual merit entitles."
Read more about this topic: Monarchism In Georgia
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