The Soviets and the Christian Democrats: the Challenge of a ‘Bourgeois’ Party in Eastern Germany, 1945–9

Abstract

There was very little scholarship before 1989 on the relations between the Soviet authorities and the non-socialist parties in Eastern Germany, in particular the large and significant CDU (Christian Democratic Union).¹ Historians in the Federal Republic, not to mention the Anglo-American scholarly world, tended to look at the CDU in the East as a party that had been simply a ‘transmission belt’ for Soviet needs, writing off the early period of struggle as anomalous and inconsequential. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have been more willing to explore the political alternatives presented by the past.² The selective opening of the Soviet archives for the post-World War II period also make it possible now to examine the extent to which the Soviets were interested in the development of ‘bourgeois’ parties in the East.