Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain, the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. The term Iron Curtain had been in occasional and varied use as a metaphor since the 19th century, but it came to prominence only after it was used by former British prime minister Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, U.S., on March 5, 1946, when he said of the communist states, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

The restrictions and the rigidity of the Iron Curtain were somewhat reduced in the years following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, although the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 restored them. During the Cold War the Iron Curtain extended to the airwaves. The attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE) to provide listeners behind the Curtain in the Eastern bloc with uncensored news were met with efforts by communist governments to jam RFE’s signal. The Iron Curtain largely ceased to exist in 1989–90 with the communists’ abandonment of one-party rule in eastern Europe.