Georgia was dragged into wars against Armenia and remnants of the Ottoman Empire, while the rapid spread of ideas of revolutionary socialism in rural regions accounted for some Soviet-backed peasants' revolts in Racha, Samegrelo and Dusheti.

On 13 October 1921 the Treaty of Kars was signed, which established the common borders between Turkey and the three Transcaucasian republics of the Soviet Union.

During this period the province was led by Lavrentiy Beria, the first secretary of the Georgian Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia.

Lavrentiy Beria became head of the Georgian branch of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) and was transferred to Moscow in 1938.

During the purges, many eminent Georgian intellectuals such as Mikheil Javakhishvili, Evgeni Mikeladze, Vakhtang Kotetishvili, Paolo Iashvili, Titsian Tabidze and Dimitri Shevardnadze were executed or sent to the Gulag.

During this period Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, ordered the deportation of the Chechen, German, Ingush, Karachay, Karapapaks, Meskhetian Turks and Balkarian peoples from the Caucasus; they were transported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration with the Nazis.

The decentralisation program introduced by Khrushchev in the mid-1950s was soon exploited by Georgian Communist Party officials to build their own regional power base.

However, in 1978, Soviet authorities had to face the opposition of thousands of Georgians, who gathered in downtown Tbilisi to hold mass demonstration after Soviet officials accepted removal of the constitutional status of the Georgian language as Georgia's sole official state language.

Bowing to pressure from mass street demonstrations on April 14, 1978, Moscow approved Shevardnadze's reinstatement of the constitutional guarantee the same year.

[8] Shevardnadze's appointment as Soviet Foreign Minister in 1985 brought his replacement in Georgia by Jumber Patiashvili, a conservative and generally ineffective Communist who coped poorly with the challenges of perestroika.

[9] Georgia (excluding Abkhazia) was one of the six republics along with Armenia, Moldova and the Baltic States who boycotted participation in the March 1991 union-wide preservation referendum.

[10] Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991 under Zviad Gamsakhurdia[11] as one of the republics to secede just four months before the failed coup against Gorbachev in August, which was supported by a declining number of hardliners.