Iron Curtain

• 1. Introduction

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  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Winston Churchill spoke those words on the 5th of March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Harry Truman seated beside him. He named the cities that now lay behind the line: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. The phrase he chose would describe a divide that lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until the Cold War ended in 1990 and 1991. But Churchill did not coin the term, and the boundary he described was more than a metaphor. It was razor wire, fences, fortified walls, minefields, and watchtowers strung along the western edge of the Eastern Bloc. Who built it, who tried to cross it, and what finally pulled it down are the questions that follow. So is a stranger one: what grew in the empty land where no human dared to walk.

• 2. Borrowed Words

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  Queen Elisabeth of Belgium used the phrase first, in 1914, when she described an iron curtain descending between her people and Germany. The image had a literal source. Iron safety curtains were installed on theater stages to slow the spread of fire, a barrier dropped when the show was over. Vasily Rozanov reached for that exact scene in his 1918 polemic The Apocalypse of Our Time, writing that with clanging, creaking, and squeaking, an iron curtain is lowering over Russian history. The performance is over, he wrote. The audience got up, looked around, but the fur coats and homes were missing. Ethel Snowden applied the term to the Soviet border in her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia. By the time Churchill spoke in Fulton, the words had passed through unexpected hands. A May 1943 article in the German propaganda periodical Signal warned of the iron curtain separating the world from the Soviet Union. Joseph Goebbels wrote in Das Reich on the 25th of February 1945 that an iron curtain would fall over Soviet-controlled territory. The Nazi propagandist William Joyce used it in his final broadcast on the 30th of April 1945. Churchill's own first recorded use came in a the 12th of May 1945 telegram to Truman: an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.

• 3. The Pact That Drew The Line

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  During the summer of 1939, the Soviet Union negotiated with a British-French group and with Nazi Germany at the same time. The talks with Germany produced two agreements. The German-Soviet Commercial Agreement traded German military and civilian equipment for Soviet raw materials. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in late August 1939 and named for the foreign secretaries Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, carried a secret protocol to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states. The Soviets then occupied Eastern Poland in September 1939, Latvia in June 1940, Lithuania in 1940, northern Romania in late June 1940, Estonia in 1940, and eastern Finland in March 1940. Oil, rubber, and manganese flowed west to Germany in exchange for weapons, machinery, and technology. That trade ended in June 1941, when Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The secret protocol did not stay buried. In January 1948 the U.S. State Department published Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941, drawn from recovered German Foreign Office files, exposing the division of Eastern Europe and discussions of the Soviet Union becoming a fourth Axis power. One month later the Soviets answered with Falsifiers of History, a book edited and partly rewritten by Stalin to attack the West.

• 4. Hardening Of The Blocs

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  Stalin determined to acquire a buffer area against Germany, with pro-Soviet states ringing its border. That aim strained the Yalta Conference of February 1945 and the Potsdam Conference of July and August 1945. At Potsdam the Allies assigned parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Soviet control or influence, and in return Stalin promised to allow those territories the right to national self-determination. Churchill feared the United States might return to its prewar isolationism. Roosevelt had announced at Yalta that U.S. forces would withdraw from Europe within two years of Germany's defeat. Between 1945 and 1949 the Soviets converted occupied lands into satellite states: the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Albania. Yugoslavia turned away from Moscow in the late 1940s toward an independent path, and Albania later drifted toward China before isolating itself entirely. To the east, nations built the economic and military alliances Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. To the west, market economies took hold, and most states joined the United States and Canada in NATO. Neutral exceptions included Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Malta, and Ireland. Spain stayed non-aligned until 1982, joining NATO only after democracy returned. The metaphor took practical shape in September 1946, when U.S.-Soviet cooperation collapsed over the German question at the Stuttgart Council.

• 5. Speeches And Counter-Speeches

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  Stalin took note of Churchill's Fulton address and answered in Pravda in mid-March 1946. He accused Churchill of warmongering and defended Soviet friendship with eastern-European states as a safeguard against another invasion. Stalin further charged that Churchill hoped to install right-wing governments to agitate against the Soviet Union. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief propagandist, turned the phrase back on the West in an August 1946 speech, claiming bourgeois politicians strove to erect an iron curtain to keep the truth about the Soviet Union from penetrating abroad. The Marshall Plan deepened the split. In a the 5th of June 1947 speech, George Marshall, whom Truman had appointed Secretary of State that January, announced American assistance to all European countries willing to participate, the Soviet Union included. Stalin opposed it and forbade the Eastern Bloc nations of the newly formed Cominform from accepting the aid. In Czechoslovakia that required a Soviet-backed coup d'etat in 1948, whose brutality shocked Western powers more than any earlier event. Reagan would later stand at the Berlin Wall on the 12th of June 1987 and challenge Mikhail Gorbachev directly: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

• 6. Life Behind The Line

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  Migration from east to west was effectively halted after 1950. Before then, over 15 million people, mainly ethnic Germans, had moved west from Soviet-occupied countries in the five years after the war. Between 1950 and 1990 only 13.3 million migrated westward, and more than 75% of those did so under bilateral agreements for ethnic migration. About 10% were refugees permitted to leave under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Most Soviets allowed to go were ethnic Jews who could emigrate to Israel, a narrow door the Soviets opened after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970. The blockades came earlier and harder. In June 1948, after a new currency replaced the debased Reichsmark in Western Germany, the Soviet Union cut off surface road access to Berlin. The Berlin Blockade severed food, water, and supplies to the non-Soviet sectors of a city that sat inside the Soviet-occupied zone. Three limited air corridors remained. The United States, Britain, France, and others mounted a massive aerial supply campaign, and its success forced the Soviets to lift the blockade in May 1949. One Yalta conclusion bound the West too: it agreed to return all Soviet citizens in its zones, including liberated prisoners of war branded as traitors, forced laborers, and anti-communist refugees.

• 7. Wire, Walls, And Watchtowers

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  The inner German border, known in German as die Grenze, ranked among the most heavily militarised areas in the world. In rural stretches double fences of sharp-edged steel mesh marked it; near cities a high concrete barrier resembling the Berlin Wall went up. The Berlin Wall itself was constructed in 1961 to stop East German workers from reaching West Berlin, an exclave of the Federal Republic. It largely worked, but 140 people died trying to cross. The regime called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, an anti-fascist protection rampart. Along the inner German border, several hundred civilians and 28 East German guards were killed between 1948 and 1981, some by friendly fire, and villages too close to the line, such as Erlebach, were destroyed. The Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing was the largest on that border, carrying most transit traffic to and from West Berlin and interrupting the Bundesautobahn 2. In Hungary the border zone began 15 km out, with a tighter 5 km zone requiring special permission. A double barbed-wire fence stood 50 m from the line, the gap laden with land mines, later replaced by an electric signal fence, guard towers, and a sand strip to track footprints. Dog patrols watched 24 hours a day, authorised to shoot. The number of victims who died at the Romanian border far exceeded those at the Berlin Wall. After the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border closed in 1948 following the Tito-Stalin split, loudspeakers blared propaganda and insults across the divide.

• 8. Pulling Down The Curtain

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  Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary from 1985, loosened the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had obligated socialist states to intervene wherever socialism was threatened, replacing it with what was nicknamed the Sinatra Doctrine. His policies of glasnost and perestroika opened space for change, and a wave of revolutions swept the Eastern Bloc in 1989. In February that year the Hungarian politburo recommended dismantling the iron curtain, and on the 3rd of March Gorbachev gave informal clearance, telling Miklos Nemeth there will not be a new 1956. Hungary rebuilt 200 m of fence for a ceremony, and on the 27th of June 1989 foreign ministers Gyula Horn of Hungary and Alois Mock of Austria cut through the defences together. The decisive break came at the Pan-European Picnic on the 19th of August 1989, near Sopron, an idea Otto von Habsburg had brought to Nemeth. More than 600 East Germans broke through and fled into Austria as Hungarian guards, who had threatened to shoot, chose not to intervene. It was the largest escape movement since the Wall went up in 1961. In April 1989 Poland legalised Solidarity, which won 99% of available parliamentary seats in June. In November tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded the Wall's checkpoints. Todor Zhivkov fell in Bulgaria the day after, the Velvet Revolution followed in Czechoslovakia, and on the 22nd of December 1989 the Romanian military turned on Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed after a brief trial three days later. East Germany reunited with West Germany on the 3rd of October 1990, the USSR dissolved in December 1991, and Czechoslovakia split in 1992. Where the guards once walked, the empty no-man's land had quietly become a wildlife corridor, now the European Green Belt, traced today by a 6800 km cycling route running from Finland to Greece.