Russian annexation of Georgia between 1801 and 1810 was followed in 1811 by the abolition of the Georgian church's autocephaly: its Catholicos was replaced by a Russian-appointed Exarch, its distinct liturgical practices suppressed in favor of Russian Synodal norms, and its considerable historical wealth and land holdings substantially confiscated. Georgian clergy and laity treated the loss as a religious grievance bound tightly to the loss of national sovereignty, a link that shaped Georgian nationalism through the following century.
The church restored its own autocephaly unilaterally in 1917, in the same revolutionary upheaval that ended the Russian empire, electing a new Catholicos-Patriarch, but recognition from the Russian church and the wider Orthodox world did not follow for decades, and the Soviet period that began in 1921 brought a fresh round of suppression: churches closed or converted to secular use, clergy imprisoned or executed, and monastic life driven nearly to extinction.
The Georgian Orthodox Church's Soviet-era survival owed much to Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, elected in 1977 and still serving decades later, whose leadership through the Soviet collapse and Georgian independence in 1991 saw the church rebuilt as a central institution of national life. The Russian Orthodox Church recognized Georgian autocephaly formally only in 1943 and again more fully afterward; today the church claims the allegiance of the large majority of ethnic Georgians.