Iron Curtain

views updated

IRON CURTAIN.

Popularized in a speech by Winston Churchill (1874–1965), the term Iron Curtain refers to the diminished contact and restricted travel imposed by the Soviet Union between the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the capitalist-democratic nations of Western Europe during the Cold War (1946–1989). A truly effective physical barrier between the two Germanys and Czechoslovakia and between Austria and Hungary did not exist until the early 1960s. For Western politicians and pundits, Iron Curtain dramatized the isolation of the police states forced upon the Eastern Europeans by the Soviet Union.

Forced from office in 1945, Winston Churchill, a leading voice against fascism and the wartime prime minister of Great Britain, returned to the cause of anticommunism, his personal crusade since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The title of Churchill's speech, given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, was "The Sinews of Peace," and in it Churchill stressed that world peace required a continuation of the Anglo-American wartime alliance.

Churchill did not invent the term iron curtain, which had entered the discourse of European politics before World War I to describe territorial divisions created by the breakup of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Joseph Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda, even used the term in Das Reich (1945), an attack on the Soviet Union.

Churchill's Iron Curtain speech was the brainchild of President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who wanted to honor Churchill for his wartime leadership. They also wanted him to take the lead in criticizing Joseph Stalin's postwar uncooperativeness, which had been clear at the foreign ministers' conference held in Moscow in December 1945. Truman discussed the speech with Churchill, but neither he nor any U.S. foreign policy officer cleared the final draft. Truman cautioned Churchill not to attack the United Nations but approved of the concept of a continuing U.S.–Great Britain "special relationship" for military peacekeeping. For his part, Churchill needed no prompting to stress the enduring common interests of "the English-speaking world."

To Truman's dismay—he introduced Churchill at Westminster—Churchill used the speech as an all-out condemnation of the Soviet Union. Churchill stressed the growing danger of Soviet-backed subversion in Europe, especially in France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. He predicted that the Soviet Union would never let occupied Germany reunite except as a Soviet satellite. He deplored the fact that the great cities of Eastern Europe now fell under the Soviets' "increasing measure of control." He introduced the theme of communist captivity: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Predictably, Stalin condemned the speech as warmongering by the most notorious Western imperialist.

Churchill's call to arms against Soviet communism did not change America's reluctance to make a long-term commitment to the future of a free Western Europe. Subsequent Soviet actions moved the United States into a union with free Europe, characterized by the Marshall Plan for economic reconstruction and the NATO alliance for military defense after Stalin blockaded Berlin, pressured Greece and Turkey for political concessions, threatened to invade communist (but anti-Soviet) Yugoslavia, and backed a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Churchill's call for "fraternal association" became the Truman Doctrine for the "containment" of communism in Europe, which continued until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989–1991.

The "iron curtain" Churchill imagined in 1946 became a reality by the end of the 1950s. To prevent refugees from flooding into Western Europe, which had occurred twice in the decade as a result of revolts in East Germany and Hungary, the Soviets built a barrier of electric and barbed wire fences and minefields along the borders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. This true iron curtain became a domain of border guards, watchtowers, guard dogs, and searchlights. The last addition to this system came in 1961, when the East German government, with Soviet help, built a wall from cinder blocks across the middle of Berlin to stop the flight of desperate Germans. When the Germans tore down the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 as part of a national revolt against their communist government and the Soviet armies that had occupied East Germany since 1945, the Iron Curtain, literally and figuratively, came tumbling down.

Churchill did not live to see his vision triumph. He returned as prime minister in 1951–1954 but found painting and the writing of history more congenial than parliamentary politics and the liquidation of the British Empire. He died, beloved for his wartime leadership, in 1965.

See alsoChurchill, Winston; Cold War; Eastern Bloc.