What was the Iron Curtain?

The speech at Fulton

Churchill was no longer prime minister when he gave the speech. British voters had turned him out in July 1945, and on March 5, 1946, he spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, as a private citizen, with President Truman beside him on the platform: Missouri was Truman’s home state. The speech was titled “The Sinews of Peace,” and much of it pleaded for a close partnership between Britain and the United States, the “special relationship.” The sentence that made the headlines came in the middle.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Behind that line, Churchill went on, lay the old capitals of Central and Eastern Europe, Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all in what he called “the Soviet sphere.” Both ends are easy to find on a map today. Stettin is Szczecin, in Poland, because Poland’s borders moved west in 1945. Trieste is in Italy.

Who coined the phrase?

Not Churchill. An iron curtain was first a piece of theater equipment: the fireproof screen lowered between the stage and the audience so that a fire could not spread. As a picture of a sealed frontier it was already in print about Russia in 1920, when the British socialist Ethel Snowden described her journey in Through Bolshevik Russia. In February 1945 Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, wrote that an eiserner Vorhang would come down over whatever part of Europe the Soviets occupied. Churchill himself used the image in a private telegram to Truman on May 12, 1945. Fulton made it public property, and it stuck.

Moscow’s answer

Stalin replied nine days later, in an interview printed in Pravda on March 14. He said Churchill and his friends “bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends,” because Churchill, like Hitler, set one group of nations, the English-speaking ones, above the rest. Then he made Moscow’s case. Germany had attacked the Soviet Union through Poland, Romania and Hungary because those countries had governments hostile to Moscow. Why be surprised, he asked, that the Soviet Union, “anxious for its future safety,” wanted loyal governments there? Where Churchill saw a curtain, Stalin described a shield. The secret cables of that year show the same fear running both ways (the Long Telegram).

From a phrase to a fortified border

In 1946 the line was still a figure of speech, and it moved. Yugoslavia broke with Stalin in 1948, and Austria, occupied by all four powers, became neutral in 1955, so Belgrade and Vienna ended up outside the Soviet bloc. Elsewhere the line hardened. Along the border between the two German states and the western borders of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Eastern governments built fences, minefields, watchtowers and a plowed strip, mainly to stop their own citizens from leaving. In Berlin it became a wall in 1961 (why the Wall was built). The first crack came on May 2, 1989, when Hungary began taking down its fence with Austria. Much of the old border strip is now a nature corridor, the European Green Belt.