Iron Curtain


The [Elisabeth of Bavaria, Queen of the Belgians|]Iron Curtain was the political and physical boundary that divided Europe from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1990/1991. East of the Iron Curtain were many small states controlled by the Soviet Union, in 1955 formally allied by the Warsaw Pact. Many nations to the west of this geopolitical divide were NATO members. Over time these economic and military alliances developed into broader, more entrenched, cultural barriers; widespread distrust on both sides deepened. Initially, the term "Iron Curtain" was a literal description of physical barriers such as razor wire, fences, walls, minefields, and watchtowers along the western border of the Eastern Bloc.
The term later took on a broader, metaphoric meaning perceived as a generalized "differentness" of ideology, economy, government, and way of life that emerged when the Cold War severed earlier cultural connections between European populations.
The term's origin is often attributed to the Fulton Speech delivered by Winston Churchill on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri where he said: "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe."

In fact, the phrase was originally used by Queen
Elisabeth of Belgium in 1914. when she described an "Iron Curtain" descending between her people and the nation of Germany.
The states/nations to the east of the Iron Curtain were the three Baltic states, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the USSR.
The Red Army had invaded the Baltic states in 1940 on Stalin's orders and the Stalin regime had annexed them.

Countries of the USSR were the Russian SFSR, Byelorussian SSR, Latvian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, Estonian SSR, Moldavian SSR, Armenian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Georgian SSR, Uzbek SSR, Kirghiz SSR, Tajik SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Turkmen SSR, and Kazakh SSR.
Events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with the Fall of communism in Poland,
Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
East Germany reunited with Western Germany on 3 October. The USSR dissoluted itself in December 1991. Czechoslovakia dissoluted in 1992.
Due to the decreased human activity around the physical border during the Cold War, natural biotopes were formed, now the European Green Belt. With the exception of the Kars-Gyumri railway crossing which operated during the Soviet Era, the Turkish–Armenian border has remained closed since the 1920s and is sometimes described as the Iron Curtain's last vestige.

Pre-Cold War usage

Historically, iron safety curtains were installed on theater stages to slow the spread of fire.
Perhaps the first recorded application of the term "iron curtain" to Soviet Russia was in Vasily Rozanov's 1918 polemic The Apocalypse of Our Time. It is possible that Churchill read it there following the publication of the book's English translation in 1920. The passage runs:
In 1920, Ethel Snowden, in her book Through Bolshevik Russia, used the term in reference to the Soviet border.
A May 1943 article in Signal, a German propaganda periodical, discussed "the iron curtain that more than ever before separates the world from the Soviet Union". Joseph Goebbels commented in Das Reich, on 25 February 1945, that if Germany should lose the war, "An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered". English-language Nazi propagandist William Joyce used the term in his last propaganda broadcast on 30 April 1945, declaring that "the Iron Curtain of Bolshevism has come down across Europe." German leading minister Lutz von Krosigk broadcast 2 May 1945: "In the East the iron curtain behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward".
Churchill's first recorded use of the term "iron curtain" came in a 12 May 1945 telegram he sent to U.S. President Harry S. Truman regarding his concern about Soviet actions, stating "n iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind".
He repeated it in another telegram to Truman on June 4, mentioning "...the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward", and in a House of Commons speech on 16 August 1945, stating "it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain".

During the Cold War

Building antagonism

The antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West that came to be described as the "iron curtain" had various origins.
During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations both with a British-French group and with Nazi Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.
The Soviets thereafter occupied Eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, northern Romania, Estonia and eastern Finland. From August 1939, relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany engaged in an extensive economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other materials in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology. Nazi–Soviet trade ended in June 1941 when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
In the course of World War II, Stalin determined to acquire a buffer area against Germany, with pro-Soviet states on its border in an Eastern bloc. Stalin's aims led to strained relations at the Yalta Conference and the subsequent Potsdam Conference. People in the West expressed opposition to Soviet domination over the buffer states, and the fear grew that the Soviets were building an empire that might be a threat to them and their interests.
Nonetheless, at the Potsdam Conference, the Allies assigned parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Soviet control or influence. In return, Stalin promised the Western Allies that he would allow those territories the right to National Self-Determination. Despite Soviet cooperation during the war, these concessions left many in the West uneasy. In particular, Churchill feared that the United States might return to its pre-war Isolationism, leaving the exhausted European states unable to resist Soviet demands.

Churchill speech

Winston Churchill's :s:Sinews of Peace| of 5 March 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, attended by President Harry Truman, publicly used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe:
Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a close ally in the context of the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany and of Imperial Japan.
Although not well received at the time, the phrase iron curtain gained popularity as a shorthand reference to the division of Europe as the Cold War progressed. The Iron Curtain served to keep people in, and information out. People throughout the West eventually came to accept and use the metaphor.
Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address strongly criticized the Soviet Union's exclusive and secretive tension policies along with the Eastern Europe's state form, the Police Government.
He expressed the western Allied nations' distrust of the Soviet Union after the World War II. In September 1946, US-Soviet cooperation would collapse due to the US disavowal of the Soviet Union's opinion on the German problem in the Stuttgart Council, and then followed the announcement by US President Harry S. Truman of a hard line anti-Soviet, anticommunist policy. After that the phrase iron curtain became more widely used as an anti-Soviet term in the West.
Additionally, Churchill mentioned in his speech that regions under the Soviet Union's control were expanding their leverage and power without any restriction.
He asserted that in order to put a brake on this ongoing phenomenon, the commanding force of and strong unity between the UK and the US was necessary.
Stalin took note of Churchill's speech and responded in Pravda in mid-March 1946. He accused Churchill of warmongering, and defended Soviet "friendship" with eastern-European states as a necessary safeguard against another invasion. Stalin further accused Churchill of hoping to install right-wing governments in eastern Europe with the goal of agitating those states against the Soviet Union. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief propagandist, used the term against the West in an August 1946 speech:

Political, economic, and military realities

Eastern Bloc

While the Iron Curtain remained in place, much of Eastern Europe and many parts of Central Europe – except West Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and most of Austria – found themselves under the hegemony of the Soviet Union which had annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as Soviet Socialist Republics.
Germany effectively gave Moscow a free hand in much of these territories in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, signed before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Other Soviet-annexed territories included:
  • Eastern Poland,
  • Part of eastern Finland
  • Northern Romania.
  • Kaliningrad Oblast, the northern half of East Prussia, taken in 1945.
  • Part of eastern Czechoslovakia.
Between 1945 and 1949 the Soviets converted the following areas into satellite states:
Soviet-installed governments ruled the Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which changed its orientation away from the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to a progressively independent worldview.
The majority of European states to the east of the Iron Curtain developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as Comecon and the Warsaw Pact.