Book Review: Philipp Ammon’s Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation

Philipp Ammon on Two Centuries of the Russian–Georgian Relationship

---

Ammon, Philipp. Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation. Die Wurzeln des Konflikts vom 18. Jh. bis 1924. Mit einem Nachwort von Uwe Halbach. Klostermann Rote Reihe 117, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2020. 238 pp. ISBN 978-3-465-04407-9.

---

Introduction

Few conflicts in the post-Soviet space have proven as enduring, or as emotionally charged, as the one between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Georgia. To an outside observer, the August 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the unresolved status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the recurring diplomatic freezes between Tbilisi and Moscow can appear as a series of post-Cold War accidents. Philipp Ammon’s Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation (Georgia Between Statehood and Russian Occupation) argues, to the contrary, that these events are the latest chapter in a much older story — one in which two Orthodox neighbors have cycled through alliance, protection, betrayal, and resentment for more than two centuries. First published in Klagenfurt in 2015, the book appeared in a new Klostermann edition in 2020 with an afterword by the Caucasus expert Uwe Halbach, and it remains the most ambitious German-language synthesis of the topic to date (Tinikashvili).

The Argument and the Structure

Ammon, a Berlin-based historian and Slavist who also lives in Tbilisi, sets himself a deliberately focused task: to “lay bare the roots of the Russian-Georgian conflict” (Ammon 9, as cited in Cwipperfuerth). The publisher’s blurb frames the central question with characteristic elegance: “How did an estrangement come about between Russia and Georgia, two countries of the same Chalcedonian confession whose ties reach back to the early Middle Ages?” (“Wie kam es zu einer Entfremdung zwischen Russland und Georgien, zweier Länder desselben chalkedonensischen Glaubensbekenntnisses, deren Verbindungen bis ins Frühmittelalter zurückreichen?”) (Ammon, cover text). Georgian influences, the text reminds us, can be detected already in the ninth-century Glagolitic alphabet and the twelfth-century Nestor Chronicle; the Russian longing for a Georgian “paradise garden” (Vyrïj-sad) is at least as old, as John Steinbeck wryly observed in his Russian Journal of 1948 — “Indeed, we began to believe that most Russians hope that if they live good and virtuous lives, they will not go to heaven, but to Georgia, when they die” (qtd. in Ammon, cover text).

The narrative is organized chronologically and proceeds in five broad movements. After an introductory sketch of Russo-Georgian tensions since 1991, Ammon establishes the medieval baseline: the Christianization of the Iberian and Colchian lands, the early Byzantine connections, the blood-witness of Georgian Christians under foreign empires, and the rise of the Bagratid kingdom (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili). He then traces the kingdom’s apogee under David the Builder (r. 1089–1125) and Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1213) — the so-called “Golden Age” — before following its decline through the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili).

The book’s analytical core begins with the diplomatic overtures of the Georgian kings to the Tsardom of Muscovy from 1483, the moment when, in Ammon’s words, “for the Georgians the sun began to rise in the north” after the fall of Constantinople — though, he adds, the Georgians “missed the secularization of the ‘Holy Rus’,” which had ceased to be guided by eschatological mission and had come instead to be led by raison d’état (Ammon, cover text). Ammon treats the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk between Catherine II and King Heraclius II of Georgia as the hinge of the entire story. The promised Russian troops failed to appear at the Battle of Krtsanisi in 1795, when the Qajar ruler Agha Mohammad Khan sacked Tbilisi; the Georgians felt abandoned by their own ally. The Russian annexation of 1801, presented as protection, was therefore read in Tbilisi as the confirmation of a long-standing betrayal (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili; Tabularasa Magazin).

What follows is the dense middle section of the book. Ammon characterizes the long nineteenth century as “ambivalent”: modernization, demographic growth, and economic development coexisted with the abolition of the Bagratid dynasty, the forcible suspension of the autocephaly of the Georgian Apostolic Church, and Russification measures that openly violated the 1783 treaty. These policies triggered recurrent peasant revolts and the aristocratic conspiracy of 1832. At the same time, Georgian nobles — plus russes que les Russes, “more Russian than the Russians” — rose to the highest ranks of imperial service, while Russian Romantic poets from Pushkin to Lermontov continued to imagine the Caucasus, and especially its Georgian heartland, as a “paradise lost” (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili).

The book devotes particular attention to the late-imperial tergdaleulni (literally, “those who drank from the Tergdaleuli river”), the Western-educated generation of the 1860s and 1870s — Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Niko Nikoladze, Iakob Gogebashvili — whose cultural nationalism was broader and more practical than that of their Romantic fathers. They founded literacy societies, established banks to save the estates of the gentry, and, in the upheavals of 1905, witnessed the brief Gurian peasant republic. Ammon underscores the symbolic resonance of the 1907 assassination of Chavchavadze, the “uncrowned king of Georgia,” by Georgian Bolsheviks (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili).

The narrative then turns to the Great War, the brief and precarious independence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918–1921), the German-sponsored Georgian Legion, the Soviet invasion of February 1921, and the bloody suppression of the August 1924 Uprising — the chronological terminus of the book. Ammon does not, however, allow the reader to forget the post-1921 history: the reluctant Soviet modernization that nonetheless produced Georgian schools, a university, an academy, and elaborate structures of national-cultural autonomy; the trauma of the 1991 independence that was, in Ammon’s pointed formulation, “paid for with the loss of two provinces” (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili); and the eight-day war of August 2008, after which “those frozen conflicts stepped into war with Russia” (Ammon, summary in Tinikashvili). Halbach’s afterword brings the story up to 2020, contextualizing the book in light of the 2008 war, the subsequent Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the still-frozen diplomatic relations.

Sources and Method

Ammon’s monograph is, in the technical sense, a work of secondary synthesis. He draws on the available Georgian, Russian, German, and other Western-language scholarship, and the Tabularasa reviewer rightly notes that the book “is based exclusively on published sources and a rich secondary literature” (“Ammons Monographie basiert ausschliesslich auf publizierten Quellen und einer reichen Sekundärliteratur”) (Tabularasa Magazin). Halbach makes the same point more carefully in his Osteuropa review: “Ammon’s contribution uses secondary sources and introduces the reader to the Georgian, Russian, German, and other Western-language works available on his subject” (“Ammons Beitrag nutzt Sekundärquellen und macht den Leser mit den zu seinem Thema verfügbaren georgischen, russischen, deutschen und anderen westsprachlichen Arbeiten bekannt”) (Halbach 159). Halbach compares Ammon’s project to Jeronim Perović’s parallel synthesis of the North Caucasus, observing that Perović’s volume — running to more than five hundred pages — incorporates the Soviet period, whereas Ammon deliberately restricts himself to the pre-Soviet period and the turbulent years 1918 to 1921 (Halbach 153–59).

This methodological choice has clear consequences. On the positive side, the book is brisk, readable, and remarkably even-handed for a topic on which Russian and Georgian historiography have spent the last three decades accusing each other of “mythologizing” the past (cf. Hou Aijun). Ammon’s sympathetic narration of both the Russian and Georgian points of view is precisely what Uwe Halbach, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung quotation cited on the book’s cover, commends as the volume’s “stimulating contribution” to understanding the “highly ambivalent relationship” (“höchst ambivalenten Verhältnisses”) (Ammon, cover text). On the more critical side, the absence of archival work means that specialists will find little that is new in the way of empirical evidence. Ammon is not breaking fresh ground; he is mapping and re-stating an old field in a language — German — where it had not been systematically mapped before (Tabularasa Magazin).

Critical Assessment

The book’s principal strength, and the reason it remains worth reading five years after its first appearance, is precisely the synoptic, balanced quality that the German-language reviews have emphasized. A reviewer in Tabularasa writes that the German-speaking public had previously lacked “a coherent account of Georgian history in the nineteenth century and up to 1921” (“eine zusammenhängende Darstellung der georgischen Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert und bis 1921”), and that Ammon’s monograph has now filled this gap (“Diese Lücke hat nun der Berliner Historiker und Slawist Philipp Ammon mit seiner Monographie geschlossen”) (Tabularasa Magazin). The 2017 review at the trafo blog likewise notes that Ammon’s stated aim is “to place a highly topical geopolitical conflict in its historical context” (“einen hochaktuellen geopolitischen Konflikt in seinen historischen Kontext zu stellen”), and the reviewer credits him with succeeding in this aim (trafo 26374).

The new 2020 Klostermann edition is, technically, a re-issue rather than a revision; the text of the 2015 monograph is reprinted with a fresh afterword by Uwe Halbach. Halbach’s contribution is short but pointed: in roughly twenty pages he brings the chronology forward, situates Ammon’s argument in the post-2008 context, and identifies the 2008 war as the moment at which the “still-frozen conflicts” that have structured Russo-Georgian relations since 1991 turned hot (Ammon, afterword, summarized in Halbach 153–63). His contribution, like Perović’s, is a model of careful regional expertise, and his decision to contribute a separate afterword — rather than a co-authored revision — respects the integrity of Ammon’s text.

If the book has weaknesses, they are the predictable weaknesses of a synthesis. The sheer chronological span — from the late Georgian kingdoms to the August 1924 Uprising — means that individual episodes are sometimes treated in a somewhat compressed manner. The treatment of the Russian literary reception of Georgia, for instance, is suggestive rather than exhaustive; the reader will not find here the kind of close philological work that scholars such as Donald Rayfield have brought to the subject. The book’s claim to a “balanced” reading of both sides is also, in practice, more easily achieved for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — where Russian imperial archives and Western scholarship are reasonably plentiful — than for the early Soviet period, where Russian and Georgian historians have produced largely incompatible narratives and the underlying archival evidence remains inaccessible to most Western scholars. Ammon is aware of this asymmetry, but the reader looking for a definitive resolution of contested questions will not find it here.

A second, smaller quibble concerns the choice to extend the narrative to 1924. The 1924 Uprising, the last major armed resistance to Soviet rule in Georgia, makes for a dramatically satisfying conclusion, and it is true that the Soviet–Georgian compact of the 1920s marks a real historical caesura. Yet by ending in 1924, the monograph does not engage directly with the long Soviet period — Stalin’s Georgia, the Beria years, the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns, the dissident movements of the 1970s, the April 1989 tragedy, and the long, complicated Soviet collapse — all of which, in different ways, also fed the post-1991 estrangement that the book takes as its starting point. Halbach’s afterword compensates for this to some extent, but it is fair to say that a fully satisfying account of the “roots” of the present conflict would need to integrate at least a synthetic chapter on the late-Soviet period. (For an English-language overview of that period, see, for instance, Cornell’s Georgia and the Georgians and the relevant chapters of Suny.)

Finally, the question of “myth” deserves explicit attention. Both Russian and Georgian national historiographies have, since 1991, produced powerful competing accounts of the 1783 treaty, the 1801 annexation, and the events of 1918–1921. Chinese historian Hou Aijun, in his 2011 article in Russian Studies (Eluosi Xuekan), has called this the “Georgian way” (Geluqiya fangshi) and has shown how the same documentary record is read in diametrically opposite ways in Moscow and Tbilisi. Ammon is sensitive to this problem — his repeated use of the word ambivalent is not a rhetorical tic but a deliberate analytical posture — and his willingness to quote Russian poets, Georgian nationalists, and Western missionaries in roughly equal measure is, by the standards of the field, genuinely unusual. It does not, of course, settle the underlying disputes; but it does, as the cwipperfuerth review observes, open up a “differentiated insight” (“aufschlussreiche Einsichten”) into the psychological economy of both sides (Cwipperfuerth).

Conclusion

Ammon’s Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation is a model of the kind of clear-eyed, mid-length historical synthesis that too seldom gets written. It does not pretend to break new archival ground, and it does not pretend to resolve questions that two and a half centuries of mutual estrangement have rendered unresolvable. What it does, and does well, is to lay out for a German-reading public — and, in its 2020 Klostermann re-issue, for a wider international audience — the long, complicated history that makes sense of the headlines from Tbilisi and Moscow. The book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand why, in the words of the poet Mamuka Baratashvili, “the sun began to rise in the north” for the Georgians — and why, even after 1924 and 1991 and 2008, that rising has so often been indistinguishable from a setting.

For scholars of the Caucasus, of Russian imperialism, and of Orthodox Christian cross-cultural relations, the book deserves a place on the shelf beside Perović’s From Conquest to Deportation and, for the early modern background, the relevant chapters of Suny’s The Making of the Georgian Nation. For the general reader, it offers a more thoughtful introduction to the Russian-Georgian relationship than any other currently available in English or German.

---

Bibliography

Ammon, Philipp. Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation. Die Wurzeln des Konflikts vom 18. Jh. bis 1924. Mit einem Nachwort von Uwe Halbach. Klostermann Rote Reihe 117, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2020.

Ammon, Philipp. Cover text and publisher’s blurb. Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2020, www.kulturkaufhaus.de/de/detail/ISBN-9783465044079/Ammon-Philipp/Georgien-zwischen-Eigenstaatlichkeit-und-russischer-Okkupation. Accessed 15 July 2026.

Cornell, Svante E. Georgia and the Georgians: A Handbook. Routledge, 2019.

Cwipperfuerth, Gerhard. “Rezension: Georgische Geschichte und georgisch-russische Beziehungen.” CWipperfuerth.de, 20 July 2017, cwipperfuerth.de/2017/07/20/rezension-georgische-geschichte-und-georgisch-russische-beziehungen/.

Halbach, Uwe. “Russland und der Kaukasus: Zwei Bücher über ein schwieriges Verhältnis.” Osteuropa, vol. 67, no. 9–10, 2017, pp. 153–63.

Hou Aijun 侯艾君. “‘格鲁吉亚方式’: 历史事实、实质及其后果” [“The ‘Georgian Way’: Historical Facts, Substance, and Consequences”]. 俄罗斯学刊 [Russian Studies], vol. 1, no. 3, 2011, pp. 66–76.

Perović, Jeronim. From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule. Hurst, 2018.

Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 2nd rev. ed., Curzon Press, 2000.

Steinbeck, John. A Russian Journal. Viking, 1948.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed., Indiana UP, 1994.

Tabularasa Magazin. “Rezension zu: Philipp Ammon: Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation.” Tabularasa Magazin, 2020, www.tabularasamagazin.de/rezension-zu-philipp-ammon-georgien-zwischen-eigenstaatlichkeit-und-russischer-okkupation-klostermann-frankfurt-a-m-2020/.

Tinikashvili, David. “Philipp Ammon – Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation, 2019 [Book Review].” DavidTinikashvili.wordpress.com, 12 Nov. 2019, davidtinikashvili.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/philipp-ammon-georgien-zwischen-eigenstaatlichkeit-und-russischer-okkupation-2019-book-review/.

trafo (Blog). “Rezension: Philipp Ammon, Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation.” trafo.hypotheses.org, 2020, trafo.hypotheses.org/26374.

Verlag Vittorio Klostermann. Klostermann Rote Reihe 2020. Klostermann, 2020, download.klostermann.de/Kataloge/KV_RoteReihe_2020.pdf.

Notes on Sources and Translations

The German quotations in the review have been translated by the reviewer, with the original text given in parentheses where the phrasing is essential. Page references to Ammon’s monograph are to the 2020 Klostermann edition.

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Agent, Minimax, tools (July 18, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Gemini, Google (July 18, 2026).]

---

---