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Iron Curtain
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The Iron Curtain was the symbolic, ideological, and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. At both sides of the Iron Curtain, the states developed their own international economic and military alliances: the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact on the east side with the Soviet Union as most important member, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Community on the west with the United States.
The Iron Curtain took the shape of border defences between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe, most notably the Berlin Wall, which served as a longtime symbol of the Curtain altogether.
The term was first used by Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in a manifesto he published in the German newspaper Das Reich in February 1945, but was popularised by Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" speech of March 5, 1946.
antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West that led to Churchill's speech had various origins.
The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Canada, the United States and many other countries had backed the White Russians against the Bolsheviks during the 1918–20 Russian Civil War, and the fact had not been forgotten by the Soviets.
During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations with both a British-French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a Commercial Agreement providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, commonly named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.
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The Iron Curtain was the symbolic, ideological, and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. At both sides of the Iron Curtain, the states developed their own international economic and military alliances: the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact on the east side with the Soviet Union as most important member, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Community on the west with the United States.
The Iron Curtain took the shape of border defences between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe, most notably the Berlin Wall, which served as a longtime symbol of the Curtain altogether.
The term was first used by Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in a manifesto he published in the German newspaper Das Reich in February 1945, but was popularised by Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" speech of March 5, 1946.
Building antagonism between Soviet Union and West
The antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West that led to Churchill's speech had various origins.
The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Canada, the United States and many other countries had backed the White Russians against the Bolsheviks during the 1918–20 Russian Civil War, and the fact had not been forgotten by the Soviets.
During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations with both a British-French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a Commercial Agreement providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, commonly named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states. The Soviets thereafter invaded Eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, northern Romania, Estonia and eastern Finland. From August 1939 to June 1941 (when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union), relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Germany engaged in an extensive economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other material in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology.
Following the war, Stalin was determined to acquire a similar buffer against Germany with pro-Soviet states on its border in an Eastern bloc, leading to strained relations at the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the subsequent Potsdam Conference (August 1945). In the West, there was opposition to Soviet domination over the buffer states, and the fear grew that the Soviets were building an empire that might be a threat to them and their interests. And, in particular, Churchill was concerned that the United States might return to its pre-war isolationism, leaving the exhausted European states unable to resist Soviet demands. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced at Yalta that after the defeat of Germany, U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Europe within two years.
The Iron Curtain Speech
Use of the term "Iron Curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was not popularized until Churchill used it in his "Sinews of Peace" address March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:
Reactions
At first, many countries in the West widely condemned the speech. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as close allies, in context of the recent defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan. Many saw Churchill's speech as warmongering and unnecessary. In light of the now public Soviet archives, some historians have now revised their opinions.
Although the phrase was not well received at the time, it gained popularity as a short-hand reference to the division of Europe, as the Cold War strengthened. The Iron Curtain served to keep people in and information out, and the metaphor eventually was widely accepted throughout the West.
Political, economic and military realities
The Eastern Bloc
While the Iron Curtain was in place, certain countries of Eastern Europe and many in Central Europe (except West Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Austria) were under the control of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of these were originally countries effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These later annexed territories include Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (became Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR).
Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as East Germany, the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania, which aligned itself in the 1960s away from the Soviet Union and towards the People's Republic of China.
Eastern Bloc countries were either Soviet Socialist Republics or were ruled by Soviet-installed governments, with the exception of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which retained its full independence.
To the east of the Iron Curtain, many such states developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
West of the Iron Curtain
To the west of the Iron Curtain, the countries of Western Europe, Northern Europe and Southern Europe—along with Austria, West Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland—operated market economies. With the exception of a period of fascism in Spain and Portugal and military dictatorship in Greece, these countries were ruled by democratic governments.
Most states to the west of the Iron Curtain— with the exception of neutral Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Ireland—were allied with the United States and Canada within NATO. Economically, the European Community and the European Free Trade Association were the Western counterparts to COMECON, though even the nominally neutral states were economically closer to the United States than they were to the Warsaw Pact.
Further division in the late 1940s
In January 1947, Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, scrapped Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) directive 1067, which embodied the Morgenthau Plan and supplanted it with JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.". Administration officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others to press for an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, good and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. After six weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned. Marshall was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a solution to German economic problems. The United States concluded that a solution could not wait any longer. In a June 5, 1947 speech, Marshall announced a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe, called the Marshall Plan.
Stalin opposed the Marshall Plan. He had built up the Eastern Bloc protective belt of Soviet controlled nations on his Western border, and wanted to maintain this buffer zone of states combined with a weakened Germany under Soviet control. Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed Cominform from accepting Marshall Plan aid. In Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.
Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, the1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power. In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published Falsifiers of History, a Stalin edited and partially re-written book attacking the West.
After the Marshall Plan, the introduction of a new currency to Western Germany to replace the debased Reichsmark and massive electoral losses for communist parties, in June of 1948, the Soviet Union cut off surface road access to Berlin, initiating the Berlin Blockade, which cut off all non-Soviet food, water and other supplies for the citizens of the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin. Because Berlin was located within the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the only available methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors. A massive aerial supply campaign was initiated by the United States, Britain, France and other countries, the success of which caused the Soviets to lift their blockade in May 1949.
Emigration restrictions
Migration from east to west of the Iron Curtain, except under limited circumstances, was effectively halted after 1950. Before 1950, over 15 million people emigrated from Soviet-occupied eastern European countries to the west in the five years immediately following World War II. However, restrictions implemented during the Cold War stopped most East-West migration, with only 13.3 million migrations westward between 1950 and 1990. More than 75% of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries between 1950 and 1990 did so under bilateral agreements for "ethnic migration." About 10% were refugees permitted to emigrate under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Most Soviets allowed to leave during this time period were ethnic Jews permitted to emigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 caused the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigrations. The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration.
As a physical entity
The Iron Curtain took physical shape in the form of border defences between the countries of the western and eastern Europe. These were some of the most heavily militarized areas in the world, particularly the so-called "inner German border"—commonly known as die Grenze in German—between East and West Germany. The inner German border was marked in rural areas by double fences made of steel mesh (expanded metal) with sharp edges, while near urban areas a high concrete barrier similar to the Berlin Wall was built. The barrier was always a short distance inside East German territory to avoid any intrusion into Western territory. The actual borderline was marked by posts and signs and was overlooked by numerous watchtowers set behind the barrier. The strip of land on the West German side of the barrier—between the actual borderline and the barrier—was readily accessible but only at considerable personal risk, because it was patrolled by both East and West German border guards. Shooting incidents were not uncommon, and a total of 28 East German border guards and several hundred civilians were killed between 1948–1981 (some may have been victims of "friendly fire" by their own side).
Elsewhere (i.e. at the Western borders of Czechoslovakia and Hungary), the border defences between West and East were similar to the German version. During the Cold War, in Hungary the border zone started 15 kilometers from the border inside the country and citizens could only enter it if they lived in the zone or had a passport valid for traveling out. Traffic control points and patrols enforced this regulation.
Even living inside the border zone, people needed special permissions to enter the next strip (5 kilometer to the border). The border was very uneasy to approach but nevertheless it was heavily fortified. In the 1950's and 60's, there was a double barbed-wire fence installed some 50 meters from the border and between them there was a strip full of landmines. Later the minefield was replaced with an electric signal fence (about 1 kilometer from the border) and a barbed wire fence, complete with guard towers and sand strip for border violation tracking. Regular patrols (even cars and mounted units), guards and K-9 units were watching the border 24/7 and were ready to prevent any escape attempt, even using their weapons to stop escapees. The outer wire fence was carefully and irregularly (i.e not parallel) placed far from the actual border (which was marked by border stones only), thus an escapee sometimes had to run 400 meters or more in the right direction to reach and cross the actual border. Not knowing this, several attempts failed as being stopped after crossing the outer fence.
The outer fence became the first part of the Iron Curtain to be dismantled in 1989. On June 27, 1989, the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, ceremonially cut through the border defences separating their countries. (The border fortifications actually were dismantled earlier already at the ceremonial place so the border authorities had to reinstall a section of the fence to be cut through.)
In parts of Czechoslovakia the border strip became hundreds of meters wide, and an area of increasing restrictions was defined as the border was approached. Only people with the appropriate government permissions were allowed to get close to the border.
The creation of these highly militarized no-man's lands led to de facto nature reserves and created a wildlife corridor across Europe; this helped the spread of several species to new territories. Since the fall of the iron curtain several initiatives are pursuing the creation of a European Green Belt nature preserve compound.
The term "Iron Curtain" was only used for the fortified borders in central Europe; it was not used for similar borders in Asia between communist and capitalist states (these were, for a time, dubbed the Bamboo Curtain). The border between North Korea and South Korea is very comparable to the former inner German border, particularly in its degree of militarization, but it has never conventionally been considered part of the Iron Curtain.
Earlier uses of the term
There are various earlier usages of the term "iron curtain" pre-dating Churchill. The origin of the term goes back to the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sota 38b, which refers to a "mechitza shel barzel," an iron barrier or divider:
????? ????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ??????
(Even an iron barrier cannot separate [the people of] Israel from their heavenly father)
Some suggest the term may have first been coined by Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians after World War I to describe the political situation between Belgium and Germany, in 1914. An iron curtain, or eiserner Vorhang, was an obligatory precaution in all German theatres to prevent the possibility of fire from spreading from the stage to the rest of the theater. Such fires were rather common because the decor often was very flammable. In case of fire, a metal wall would separate the stage from the theater, secluding the flames to be extinguished by firefighters. Douglas Reed used this metaphor in his book Disgrace Abounding (Jonathan Cape, 1939, page 129): "The bitter strife [in Yugoslavia between Serb unionists and Croat federalists] had only been hidden by the iron safety-curtain of the King's dictatorship." Joseph Goebbels wrote of an "iron curtain" in his weekly newspaper Das Reich:
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The first recorded use of the term iron curtain was derived from the safety curtain used in theatres and first applied to the border of communist Russia as "an impenetrable barrier" in 1920 by Ethel Snowden, in her book Through Bolshevik Russia.
It was used during World War II by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and later Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk in the last days of the war. The first oral intentional mention of an Iron Curtain in the Soviet context was in a broadcast by Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk to the German people on May 2, 1945:
The first recorded occasion on which Churchill used the term "iron curtain" was in a May 12, 1945 telegram he sent to U.S. President Harry S. Truman:
1945, vol. 1, p. 9)
Churchill repeated the words in a further telegram to President Truman on June 4, 1945, in which he protested against such a U.S. retreat to what was earlier designated as, and ultimately became, the U.S. occupation zone, saying the military withdrawal would bring
At the Potsdam Conference, Churchill complained to Stalin about an "iron fence" coming down upon the British Mission in Bucharest.
The first print reference to the "Iron Curtain" occurred when C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times first used it in a dispatch published on July 23, 1945. He'd heard the term used by Vladimir Macek, a Yugoslav opposition leader who had fled his homeland for Paris in May, 1945. Macek told Sulzberger, "During the four years while I was interned by the Germans in Croatia I saw how the Partisans were lowering an iron curtain over Jugoslavia so that nobody could know what went on behind it."
Allen Dulles used the term in a speech on December 3, 1945, referring to only Germany:
Monuments
There is an Iron Curtain monument in the southern part of the Czech Republic at approximately . A few hundred meters of the original fence, and one of the guard towers, has remained installed. There are interpretive signs in Czech and English that explain the history and significance of the Iron Curtain. This is the only surviving part of the fence in the Czech Republic, though several guard towers and bunkers can still be seen. Some of these are part of the Communist Era defences, some are from the never-used Czechoslovak border fortifications in defence against Hitler, and some towers were, or have become, hunting platforms.
Another monument is located in the village of Devín, now part of Bratislava, Slovakia, at the confluence of the Danube and Morava rivers.
There are several open air museums in parts of the former inner German border, as for example in Berlin and in Mödlareuth, a village that has been divided for several hundred years. The memory of the division is being kept alive in many other places along the Grenze.
Analogous terms
Throughout the Cold War the term "curtain" would become a common euphemism for boundaries, physical or ideological, between communist and capitalist states. Other usages of the term can be found elsewhere in the world.
See also
Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing BRD/DDR
External links
- S-175 "Gardina(The Curtain)" Main type of electonic security barrier on the Soviet borders or (in russian).
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