East Germany's ruling party counted one in six adults as members
At its last official count in November 1989, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany had 2,129,250 members, about 17 per cent of East German adults. Weeks later it was scrambling to reinvent itself, and its descendants still sit in the Bundestag as part of The Left.
The SED was born on 21 April 1946 from the merger of the Communist Party of Germany and the eastern branch of the Social Democrats in the Soviet occupation zone. Official histories called the union voluntary, but the Soviet authorities leaned heavily on the Social Democrats to join. Soviet intelligence reports from the time, by the propaganda chief Sergei Tiulpanov, describe former Communists grumbling that they would have done better alone and former Social Democrats feeling treated as second-class members. Soviet monitors even worried that the new party might drift toward nationalism.
Within a few years dissenting Social Democrats had been sidelined or purged, and by the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949 the SED was essentially the old Communist Party under a new name. Other parties survived only inside the National Front, whose candidate lists the SED controlled, so election results were settled in advance. Power flowed in theory from the Party Congress, in practice from the Politburo and the general secretary, who often held top state posts as well.
Walter Ulbricht led from the early 1950s until 1971, building the socialist economy before being pushed out over failed reforms and strained ties with Moscow. Erich Honecker then presided over growing stagnation. The party backed universal schooling and healthcare, collectivised farming and nationalised industry, and made Marxism–Leninism and Russian compulsory subjects. Its motto demanded that wherever a comrade was, the party was present too, and cells reached into factories, farms and offices.
Rigid to the end, the SED rejected Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost as destabilising, which deepened East Germany's isolation before the Peaceful Revolution of 1989. That December it renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism, dropping Marxism–Leninism, and won 16.4 per cent in the 1990 East German election. In 2007 it merged with the WASG to form The Left.
Source: Socialist Unity Party of Germany
