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The Socialist Unity Party of Germany ((ドイツ語:Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands'', SED')) was the governing Marxist–Leninist political party of the German Democratic Republic from its formation in 1946 until it was dissolved after the Peaceful Revolution in 1989. The GDR functioned nominally as a multi-party state〔 with the SED playing a central role. Other parties in alliance with the SED were the Christian Democratic Union, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Farmers' Party, and the National Democratic Party. In the 1980s, the SED rejected the liberalisation policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, such as ''perestroika'' and ''glasnost'', which would lead to the GDR's isolation from the restructuring USSR and the party's downfall in the autumn of 1989. The party's dominant figure from 1950 to 1971, and effective leader of East Germany, was Walter Ulbricht. In 1953, an uprising against the Party was met with violent suppression by the Ministry of State Security and the Soviet Army. In 1971, Ulbricht was succeeded by Erich Honecker who presided over a stable period in the development of the GDR until he was forced to step down during the 1989 revolution. The party's last leader, Egon Krenz, was unsuccessful in his attempt to retain the SED's hold on political governance of the GDR and was imprisoned after German reunification. The SED's long-suppressed reform wing took over the party in the fall of 1989. In hopes of changing its image, on 16 December it renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), abandoning Marxism–Leninism and becoming a mainstream democratic socialist party. It received 16.4% of the vote in the 1990 parliamentary elections. In 2007, the PDS merged with Labour and Social Justice (WASG) into The Left (''Die Linke''), the third largest party in the German parliament following the 2013 federal election. ==Early history== The SED was founded on 21 April 1946 by a merger of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) which was based in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin. Official East German and Soviet histories portrayed this merger as a voluntary pooling of efforts by the socialist parties.〔On the discussion about Social Democrats joining the SED see Steffen Kachel, Entscheidung für die SED 1946 – ein Verrat an sozialdemokratischen Idealen?, in: ''Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung'', No. I/2004.〕 However, there is much evidence that the merger was more troubled than commonly portrayed. By all accounts, the Soviet occupation authorities applied great pressure on the SPD's eastern branch to merge with the KPD. The newly merged party, with the help of the Soviet authorities, swept to victory in the 1946 elections for local and regional assemblies held in the Soviet zone. However, these elections were held under less-than-secret conditions, thus setting the tone for the next four decades. A truer picture of the SED's support came with the local elections in Berlin, which were the first honest elections held there since the Nazi era. In that contest, the SED got less than half the votes of the SPD. The bulk of the Berlin SPD remained aloof from the merger, even though Berlin was deep inside the Soviet zone. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Russian initials: SVAG) directly governed the eastern areas of Germany following World War II, and their intelligence operations carefully monitored all political activities. An early intelligence report from SVAG Propaganda Administration director Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Ivanovich Tiulpanov (see ''External Links'' below) indicates that the former KPD and SPD members created different factions within the SED and remained rather mutually antagonistic for some time after the formation of the new party. Also reported was a great deal of difficulty in convincing the masses that the SED was a German political party, and not merely a tool of the Soviet occupation force. According to Tiulpanov, many former members of the KPD expressed the sentiment that they had "forfeited () revolutionary positions, that (KPD ) alone would have succeeded much better had there been no SED, and that the Social Democrats are not to be trusted" (Tiulpanov, 1946). Also, Tiulpanov indicated that there was a marked "political passivity" among former SPD members, who felt they were being treated unfairly and as second-class party members by the new SED administration. As a result, the early SED party apparatus frequently became effectively immobilised as former KPD members began discussing any proposal, however small, at great length with former SPD members, so as to achieve consensus and avoid offending them. Soviet intelligence claimed to have a list of names of an SPD group within the SED that was covertly forging links with the SPD in the West and even with the Western Allied occupation authorities. A problem for the Soviets that they identified with the early SED was its potential to develop into a nationalist party. At large party meetings, members applauded speakers who talked of nationalism much more than when they spoke of solving social problems and gender equality. Some even proposed the idea of establishing an independent German socialist state free of both Soviet and Western influence, and of soon regaining the formerly German land that the Yalta Conference, and ultimately the Potsdam Conference, had (re)allocated to Poland, the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Soviet negotiators reported that SED politicians frequently pushed past the boundaries of the political statements which had been approved by the Soviet monitors, and there was some initial difficulty making regional SED officials realize that they should think carefully before opposing the political positions decided upon by the Central Committee in Berlin. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Socialist Unity Party of Germany」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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