Iron Curtain

IRON CURTAIN

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." With these words on March 5, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill marked out the beginning of the Cold War and a division of Europe that would last nearly forty-five years. Churchill's metaphorical iron curtain brought an end to the uncomfortable Soviet-Anglo-American alliance against Nazi Germany and began the process of physically dividing Europe into two spheres of influence. In his speech Churchill recognized the "valiant Russian people" and Josef Stalin's role in the destruction of Hitler's military, but then asserted that Soviet influence and control had descended across Eastern Europe, thereby threatening the safety and security of the entire continent through "fifth columns" and "indefinite expansion of [Soviet] power and doctrines." In even more provocative language Churchill equated Stalin with Adolph Hitler by telling his American audience that the Anglo-American alliance must act swiftly to prevent another catastrophe, this time communist instead of fascist, from befalling Europe.

In response, Stalin also equated Churchill with Hitler. Stalin rebuked Churchill for using odious Nazi racial theory in his suggestion that the nations of the English-speaking world must unite against this new threat. For Stalin this smacked of racial domination of the rest of the world. He noted that Soviet casualties (which he grossly under-counted) far outweighed the deaths of the other allies combined and that therefore Europe owed a debt to the USSR, not to the United States as Churchill claimed, for saving the continent from Hitler. Stalin explained his intentions in occupying what would become known as the Eastern Bloc: After such devastating losses, was it not logical, he asked, to try to find peaceful governments on the Soviet border? Stalin conceded Churchill's point that communist parties were growing, but argued that this was due to the failures of the West, not Soviet occupation. The people for whom Churchill had such disdain, according to Stalin, were moving toward leftist parties because the communists throughout Europe were some of the first and fiercest foes of fascism. Moreover, he noted that this was precisely why British citizens voted Churchill out of power in favor of the Labor Party.

By linking the other to Hitler, both men sought to demonize their one-time ally and convince their audiences that a new war against an equal evil was on the horizon. This set the tone for the rest of the Cold War as the western powers established the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and NATO, to which the USSR responded in quick succession. The chief battleground was divided Germany and Berlin. Any escalation by one side was quickly met by the other, as both sides operated on mistaken assumptions that a war for world dominance (or at least regional dominance) was at hand. In short, the "Iron Curtain" speech, the real title of which was "Sinews of Peace," created a metaphorical division of Europe that soon became a reality. This division only began to erode in 1989 with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

See also: cold war; germany, relations with; stalin, josef vissarionovich; world war ii

bibliography

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Gaddis, John Lewis. (1997). We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kort, Michael. (1998). The Columbia Guide to the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press.

McCauley, Martin. (1995). The Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1949. New York: Longman.

Karl D. Qualls