Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term iron curtain was coined by the British author and suffragette Ethel Snowden in her book Through Bolshevik Russia (1920). In her very early and negative critique of the Bolshevik form of communism, this British feminist referred to the iron curtain simply as the contemporary geographical border of Bolshevik Russia in 1919 (‘We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last’). At the end of the Nazi regime in Germany the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, used the term in a journal article and several times in his private diary in February 1945, and the minister of finance, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, used it in a radio broadcast on May 2, 1945. Both Nazi leaders argued that the Soviet Army is occupying one country after the other, lowering an iron curtain immediately afterward on these occupied countries in order to commit war crimes, without being observed and controlled by the outside world. During the last months of the Third Reich, both ministers regarded the iron curtain as a moving part of the ongoing occupation process by Soviet troops within the territorial scope of the Yalta agreements from 1943. This analogy with an iron curtain in a theater (Goebbels was in charge of German theaters and culture) in this usage of the notion refers to the fact that events behind the theater curtain are not visible by the audience and somehow cut off from outside observation. The British prime minister Winston S. Churchill used the term in a diplomatic telegram to President Harry S. Truman in May 1945, and in a public speech in the British Parliament on August 16, 1945, but the term was not popularized until the following year, with Churchill’s speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946:

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, Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but also to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. (Cannadine 1990, pp. 303–304)

The iron curtain refers to the boundary that divided Europe politically and militarily from the end of World War II until the end of the cold war. Geographically, the borderline ran from Estonia in the north to Yugoslavia in the south. Churchill’s famous 1946 address, which is sometimes referred to as the “Iron Curtain Speech,” is regarded as marking the commencement of the cold war between the democratic Western world and the Communist Eastern bloc with the Soviet Union as its political center. Between 1946 and 1989, the existence of this symbolic boundary forced many Central and East European countries to join the Communist bloc under the control of the Soviet Union. These countries—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and (until the 1960s) Albania—were labeled “Iron Curtain countries.”

The iron curtain was manned and defended militarily against the West by the Warsaw Pact, which combined the Soviet Red Army and troops from the new Communist one-party states after the end of World War II. It also served as a wall to prevent citizens of Eastern bloc countries from migrating west. In Berlin, the section of the iron curtain dividing West from East Germany took the form of the Berlin Wall, a long concrete wall separating Berlin into democratic and Communist parts; many East Germans lost their lives trying to escape over the wall to the West. In other areas, the iron curtain was constructed of nearly impenetrable steel fencing, creating a long and narrow strip of no-man’s-land of untouched wildlife.

The iron curtain was finally lifted on June 27, 1989, at the border between Austria and Hungary by the foreign ministers Gyula Horn (Hungary) and Alois Mock (Austria), forty-three years after Churchill’s historic speech. This first crack in the long border between the free world and the Communist world was the beginning of the final collapse of communism in November and December 1989, and the first sign of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fall of the iron curtain coincided with the end of the cold war, signifying the end of a crucial and dramatic period of European and world history.

SEE ALSO Berlin Wall; Churchill, Winston; Cold War; Communism; Democracy; Diplomacy; International Relations; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cannadine, David, ed. 1990. The Speeches of Winston Churchill. London: Penguin.

Harbutt, Fraser J. 1989. The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Muller, James W. 1999. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Rose, Brian. 2004. The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.

Snowden, Ethel. 1920. Through Bolshevik Russia. London: Cassell.

Wright, Patrick. 2007. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Christian W. Haerpfer