Author:  Mark Kramer Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught international relations and comparative politics at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities. He was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Many of his publications have dealt with the nature of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and he was, among other things, translator and editor of the English edition of "The Black Book of Communism," published by Harvard University Press in 1999.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR), often known as East Germany, was formed in October 1949 out of what had been the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945, the three main Allied powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain — had agreed that Germany would be divided temporarily into four zones (under American, Soviet, British, and French rule, respectively) until the fate of the country was permanently settled.