German Democratic Republic (GDR)

A state that had to build a wall to keep its own citizens in, and collapsed within a year of opening it. The German Democratic Republic was founded in the Soviet zone in 1949 and governed by the Socialist Unity Party, formed from a forced merger of communists and social democrats. It began with an uprising: workers in East Berlin struck over production quotas in June 1953 and the protest spread nationwide before Soviet tanks ended it. The central problem was demographic. Until 1961 the open border in Berlin let people leave, and around 2.7 million did, disproportionately young and qualified, which the economy could not sustain. The Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 and closed the gap for twenty-eight years; at least 140 people died at it. The state ran the most thorough surveillance apparatus in the Eastern Bloc, with the Stasi employing around 90 thousand officers and perhaps twice as many informers in a country of 16 million, and its files were seized by citizens in 1989 and later opened, which is why the system is documented in detail unavailable elsewhere. Its athletes won extraordinary numbers of Olympic medals under a state doping programme. Living standards were the highest in the bloc and far below the west. Hungary opened its border in 1989 and the exodus resumed. The wall opened in November 1989. The state dissolved itself into the Federal Republic in October 1990. The republic existed from 1949 to 1990 with East Berlin as its capital. It covered around 108 thousand square kilometres. The Berlin Wall ran about 155 kilometres around West Berlin. The Stasi files run to well over a hundred kilometres of shelving.

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