Churchill made the iron curtain famous, but others said it first
The Iron Curtain labeled Europe's Cold War split from 1945 until 1990–91, with Warsaw Pact states east of a line Churchill described at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946—from Stettin to Trieste. NATO-aligned west faced Soviet-aligned east until communism's cascade collapse.
The image comes from the theatre, where iron safety curtains were lowered to slow a stage fire. Queen Elisabeth of Belgium used it in 1914 for the barrier between her people and Germany, and Vasily Rozanov's 1918 polemic The Apocalypse of Our Time pictured an iron curtain dropping on Russian history as the show ended. Ethel Snowden applied it to the Soviet border in her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, and Nazi propagandists, including Goebbels in February 1945 and William Joyce in his last broadcast that April, used it too.
Churchill's own first recorded use was a telegram to Harry Truman on 12 May 1945, complaining that he could not see what the Soviets were doing behind their front. He repeated the phrase in June and in the Commons that August, before his Sinews of Peace address at Westminster College, with Truman in the audience, made it public. He listed Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia as lying in the Soviet sphere and called for close British-American unity. Many Westerners still saw Moscow as a wartime ally, and the speech was coolly received.
The division had older roots. In August 1939 the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact secretly carved up Poland and Eastern Europe, and the Soviets went on to occupy eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and part of Finland, trading oil, rubber and manganese for German machinery until Germany invaded in June 1941. Stalin's wish for a buffer of friendly states strained the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and US-Soviet cooperation collapsed in September 1946 before Truman adopted a hard anti-communist line, after which the phrase spread widely.
One stretch is sometimes called its last remnant: apart from the Kars–Gyumri rail link, the Turkish–Armenian border has been shut since the 1920s.
Source: Iron Curtain
