The forced unification of the KPD with the SPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was carried out in April 1946 under the influence of Soviet power.

[2] After Adenauer rejected the offers of the Stalin notes, the East German integration into the Eastern Bloc was strengthened and the SED announced the building of socialism ("Aufbau des Sozialismus") in July 1952.

An increase in labor standards shortly after Stalin's death sparked the uprising of June 17, 1953, which was crushed with the help of Soviet tanks, leaving at least 50 dead.

[4] However, the ties to the Soviet Union remained close and the East Germany joined the Warsaw Pact in 1955 with the “Treaty on Relations between the GDR and the USSR”.

[9] On the day Khrushchev left for his vacation, East German Premier Willi Stoph made a sudden visit to Moscow and commenced an intensive three-day series of talks with Kosygin and other high-level Kremlin leaders.

Suslov made a flat no-sell-out pledge in Moscow on the same day (5 October) that Brezhnev was welcomed in East Berlin by Ulbricht, who had refused to greet Khrushchev's son-in law two months earlier.

The GDR's first official reaction to the Kremlin coup, which was registered in the 17 October communique of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany—the first Eastern European party statement on the Khrushchev ouster—was that the friendship treaty of June 1964 will be carried out "honorably" implying, perhaps, that there was some question among the East German leaders as to whether it would have been honorably implemented prior to Khrushchev's ouster.

The new leadership may have felt that other more pressing domestic and foreign matters demanded their initial concentration and that any major diplomatic action such as the Bonn visit—on the German question should be postponed.

Concentration on other foreign and domestic matters may also explain, in part, Moscow's dropping of any element of urgency in the new Soviet peace treaty line.

[12] In 1981, the Soviets reduced their oil deliveries, whereupon the West Germany offered aid payments in return for travel relief for GDR citizens.

Both nations were participants in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, with the Soviet Union serving as East Germany's primary trading partner.

In 1979, a substantial portion of East Germany's imports from the Soviet Union included 65.9% of its coal, 37% of its coke, 89.1% of its crude oil, 78.2% of its sheet metal, 99.1% of its wood, and 85.4% of its cotton.

In the final phase of the GDR, the government even had Soviet media such as Sputnik censored because they began to report critically as part of Gorbachev's reforms.