The 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 aligned with the Soviet Union, in 1955 formally allied by the Warsaw Pact. Many nations to the west of this geopolitical divide were (and are) 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, fortified 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: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe."British Information Services excerpt of Churchill's speech 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 Germany. BBC History
The states/nations to the east of the Iron Curtain were the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the USSR. The Red Army had invaded and annexed the Baltic states in 1940 on Stalin's orders. Republics of the USSR were the Russian SFSR, Byelorussian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, Moldavian SSR, Latvian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Estonian SSR, Armenian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Georgian SSR, Uzbek SSR, Kirghiz SSR, Tajik SSR, Turkmen SSR, and Kazakh SSR.
Events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with the fall of communism in Poland,Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismăneanu, "Independence Reborn and the Demons of the Velvet Revolution" in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, Central European University Press. . p.85. Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.Piotr Sztompka, preface to Society in Action: the Theory of Social Becoming, University of Chicago Press. . p. x. East Germany reunited with West Germany on 3 October 1990. The USSR dissolved itself in December 1991. Czechoslovakia dissolved 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 "[a]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 (which provided for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (signed in late August 1939), named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.Day, Alan J.; East, Roger; Thomas, Richard. A Political and Economic Dictionary of Eastern Europe, p. 405.
The Soviets thereafter occupied Eastern Poland (September 1939), Latvia (June 1940), Lithuania (1940), northern Romania (Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, late June 1940), Estonia (1940) and eastern Finland (March 1940). 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 (February 1945) and the subsequent Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945). 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. (President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced at Yalta that after the defeat of Germany, U.S. forces would withdraw from Europe within two years.)Antony Beevor Berlin: The building of the Berlin Wall, p. 80
Churchill speech
Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address 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.For public opinion in the United States, compare:
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.Compare: 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 (all of Austria after the withdrawal of occupying Allied forces and the declaration of Austria's neutrality that resulted from the Austrian State Treaty in 1955) – found themselves under the hegemony of the Soviet Union which had annexed Estonia, Latvia,Senn, Alfred Erich, Lithuania 1940: Revolution from Above, Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, 2007 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 (incorporated into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs), Part of eastern Finland (became part of the Karelo-Finnish SSR)Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, Stalin's Cold War, New York: Manchester University Press, 1995, Northern Romania (part of which became the Moldavian SSR). Kaliningrad Oblast, the northern half of East Prussia, taken in 1945. Part of eastern Czechoslovakia (Carpathian Ruthenia, incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR).
Between 1945 and 1949 the Soviets converted the following areas into satellite states:
The German Democratic Republic The People's Republic of Bulgaria The People's Republic of Poland The Hungarian People's RepublicGranville, Johanna, The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, Texas A&M University Press, 2004. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic The People's Republic of Romania The People's Republic of Albania (which re-aligned itself in the 1950s and early 1960s away from the Soviet Union towards the People's Republic of China (PRC) and split from the PRC towards a strongly isolationist worldview in the late 1970s)