Iron Curtain

Metaphorical term for the political and economic divide between Western and Soviet spheres of influence in Europe following World War II. For more than 40 years, the idea of an Iron Curtain represented the absolute ideological divide between the communist and capitalist worlds. This invisible barrier became an important psychological element in the national-security concerns of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The first person to use the term iron curtain was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who used the term in a speech in late February 1945. Goebbels stated that “an iron curtain would at once descend,” because he anticipated that the Soviet Union stood ready to secure its western borders. However, the term is more closely linked to one of Germany's most implacable enemies during World War II—Winston Churchill.

On March 5, 1946, former British prime minister Winston Churchill gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In his address, Churchill popularized the term Iron Curtain when he stated, “From Stetting in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” In his speech, Churchill gave voice to the principles, beliefs, and ideas that would shape the story of the new postwar era.

During World War II, then–prime minister Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted and even encouraged a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. They recognized that the Soviet Union had legitimate security interests in the region and that the Soviet Red Army could balance Nazi power there. After the war, however, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was loath to relinquish control of Eastern Europe. Russia had been continuously threatened or invaded by the West over the previous centuries—by Napoleon in 1812 and by Germany in World War I and World War II.

Churchill and Roosevelt were eager to have Stalin's cooperation in stabilizing Europe and creating the United Nations after the end of the war. Thus, at the Yalta Conference of 1945, they agreed to Soviet control of Poland, specifically, and to Soviet influence over Eastern Europe as a whole. The Potsdam Conference, held later that year, confirmed these arrangements.

By June 1945, the United States and Soviet Union were the sole world superpowers. Over the next few years, they gradually consolidated their spheres of influence. In February 1946, Foreign Service officer George Kennan sent the famous Long Telegram to Washington—an 8,000-word document describing and interpreting the hostile foreign policy of the Soviet Union and urging a strong stand against it in the United States. Kennan's telegram signaled a decisive break from the period of alliance with the Soviet Union that had prevailed briefly during World War II. The United States had grown increasingly mistrustful, and the Soviets reciprocated.

Throughout 1946, negotiations about the forms of governments in Eastern Europe, the Soviet withdrawal from Iran, and, most important, the future of [Page 384]Germany exacerbated tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States had begun unilaterally instituting democratic and economic reforms in those parts of Germany under its control, despite agreements to reintegrate and reunify the country.

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