Building antagonism ,
Bratislava (Slovakia) and electric security fence are visible. The antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West that came to be described as the "iron curtain" had various origins. During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations both with a British-French group and with
Nazi Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the
German–Soviet Commercial Agreement (which provided for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials) and the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (signed in late August 1939), 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 occupied Eastern Poland (September 1939),
Latvia (June 1940),
Lithuania (1940), northern Romania (
Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina, late June 1940),
Estonia (1940) and eastern Finland (March 1940). From August 1939, relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany engaged in an extensive
economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other materials in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology. Nazi–Soviet trade ended in June 1941 when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in
Operation Barbarossa. In the course of World War II, Stalin determined to acquire a buffer area against Germany, with pro-Soviet states on its border in an
Eastern bloc. Stalin's aims led to strained relations at the
Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the subsequent
Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945). People in the West expressed 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. Nonetheless, at the
Potsdam Conference, the Allies assigned parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Soviet control or influence. In return, Stalin promised the Western Allies that he would allow those territories the right to
National Self-Determination. Despite Soviet cooperation during the war, these concessions left many in the West uneasy. In particular, Churchill feared 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 withdraw from Europe within two years.)
Churchill speech Winston Churchill's
"Sinews of Peace" address of 5 March 1946, at
Westminster College in
Fulton, Missouri, attended by President
Harry Truman, publicly used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe: . Much of the
Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a close ally in the context of the 1945 defeat of
Nazi Germany and of
Imperial Japan. Although not well received at the time, the phrase
iron curtain gained popularity as a shorthand reference to the division of Europe as the Cold War progressed. The Iron Curtain served to keep people in, and information out. People throughout the West eventually came to accept and use the metaphor. Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address strongly criticized the Soviet Union's exclusive and secretive tension policies along with the Eastern Europe's state form, the
Police Government (). He expressed the western Allied nations' distrust of the Soviet Union after the World War II. In September 1946, US-Soviet cooperation would collapse due to the US disavowal of the Soviet Union's opinion on the German problem in the
Stuttgart Council, and then followed the announcement by US President
Harry S. Truman of a hard line anti-Soviet, anticommunist policy. After that the phrase
iron curtain became more widely used as an anti-Soviet term in the West. Additionally, Churchill mentioned in his speech that regions under the Soviet Union's control were expanding their leverage and power without any restriction. He asserted that in order to put a brake on this ongoing phenomenon, the commanding force of and strong unity between the UK and the US was necessary. Stalin took note of Churchill's speech and responded in
Pravda in mid-March 1946. He accused Churchill of warmongering, and defended Soviet "friendship" with eastern-European states as a necessary safeguard against another invasion. Stalin further accused Churchill of hoping to install right-wing governments in eastern Europe with the goal of agitating those states against the Soviet Union.
Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief propagandist, used the term against the West in an August 1946 speech:
Political, economic, and military realities Eastern Bloc While the Iron Curtain remained in place, much of Eastern Europe and many parts of Central Europe – except
West Germany,
Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and most of Austria (all of Austria after the withdrawal of occupying Allied forces and the
declaration of Austria's neutrality that resulted from the
Austrian State Treaty in 1955) – found themselves under the hegemony of the Soviet Union which had annexed
Estonia, and
Lithuania • Part of eastern Finland (became part of the
Karelo-Finnish SSR) • Northern Romania (part of which became the
Moldavian SSR). •
Kaliningrad Oblast, the northern half of
East Prussia, taken in 1945. • Part of eastern Czechoslovakia (
Carpathian Ruthenia, incorporated into the
Ukrainian SSR). Between 1945 and 1949 the Soviets converted the following areas into
satellite states: • The
German Democratic Republic • The
People's Republic of Bulgaria • The
People's Republic of Poland • The
Hungarian People's Republic • The
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic • The
People's Republic of Romania • The
People's Republic of Albania (which re-aligned itself in the 1950s and early 1960s
away from the Soviet Union towards the
People's Republic of China (PRC) and split from the PRC
towards a strongly isolationist worldview in the late 1970s) Soviet-installed governments ruled the Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which changed its orientation
away from the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to a progressively
independent worldview. The majority of European states to the east of the Iron Curtain developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as
Comecon and the
Warsaw Pact.
West of the Iron Curtain -
Heiligenstadt) 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 (until
1975) and
Portugal (until
1974) and a
military dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974),
democratic governments ruled these countries. Most of the states of Europe to the west of the Iron Curtain — with the exception of neutral Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Sweden, Finland,
Malta and
Ireland — allied themselves with Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States within NATO. Spain was a unique anomaly in that it stayed neutral and non-aligned until 1982, when, following democracy's return, it joined NATO. Economically, the
European Community (EC) and the
European Free Trade Association represented Western counterparts to
COMECON. Most of 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,
Harry 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." 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, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. After five and a half weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned. 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. 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. 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, the
1939 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 rewritten 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 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 One of the conclusions of the
Yalta Conference was that the western Allies would
return all Soviet citizens who found themselves in their zones to the Soviet Union. This affected the liberated Soviet prisoners of war (branded as traitors), forced laborers, anti-Soviet collaborators with the Germans, and anti-communist refugees. Migration from east to west of the Iron Curtain, except under limited circumstances, was effectively halted after 1950. Before 1950, over 15 million people (mainly ethnic Germans) 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." The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration. The term "Iron Curtain" was only used for the fortified borders in Europe; it was not used for similar borders in Asia between socialist 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 militarisation, but it has never conventionally been considered part of any Iron Curtain.
Soviet Union Land border to Finland and Norway s at the border area in 1967 line The Soviet Union built a fence along the entire border towards Norway and Finland. It is located one or a few kilometres from the border, and has automatic alarms detecting if someone climbs over it. Historian Juha Pohjonen stated in a 2005 study that people who fled the USSR to Finland were sent back, based on a policy that was implemented
unilaterally by
Urho Kekkonen when he took office in 1956.
Sea border of the Baltics The Soviets initially attempted to apply
mare clausum to the Baltic Sea, stopping any ships that were not of countries immediately around the sea. This was never accepted in international law, and was constantly opposed by Western Powers. By 1946, “all islands in the Baltic Sea belonging to the Soviet Union” and 36 village soviets along Estonia's northern and northwestern coast were defined as belonging to the "border belt," a naval boundary surrounding the Baltic
SSRs.
Poland The People's Republic of Poland was a member of the
Warsaw Pact and
Comecon. It bordered no western countries, but it had many ports to the Baltic Sea. These were heavily guarded by mines and the
Border Guard. The port cities were very open, as Poland was a major trading hub with other nations.
German Democratic Republic and West Germany called the "Little Berlin Wall" at
Mödlareuth 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 installation of the Wall in 1961 brought an end to a decade during which the divided capital of divided Germany was one of the easiest places to move west across the Iron Curtain. The barrier was always a short distance inside East German territory to avoid any intrusion into Western territory. The actual borderline, marked by posts and signs, was overseen 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. Several villages, many historic, were destroyed as they lay too close to the border, for example
Erlebach. Shooting incidents were not uncommon, and several hundred civilians and 28 East German border guards were killed between 1948 and 1981, some of which may have been incidents of "
friendly fire". The
Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing (), named
Grenzübergangsstelle Marienborn (GÜSt) by the
German Democratic Republic (GDR), was the largest and most important border crossing on the inner German border during the
division of Germany. Due to its geographical location, allowing for the shortest land route between
West Germany and
West Berlin, most transit traffic to and from West Berlin used the Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing. Most travel routes from West Germany to
East Germany and Poland also used this crossing. The border crossing existed from 1945 to 1990 and was situated near the East German village of
Marienborn at the edge of the
Lappwald. The crossing interrupted the
Bundesautobahn 2 (A 2) between the junctions
Helmstedt-Ost and
Ostingersleben. File:Grensovergang-helmstedt-marienborn-paspoortcontrole-personenautos-04.JPG File:Grensovergang-helmstedt-marienborn-paspoortcontrole-vrachtautos.JPG File:Grensovergang-helmstedt-marienborn-lichtmast-commandotoren-brug.JPG File:Grensovergang-helmstedt-marienborn-lichtmast-02.JPG
Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 to stop the flow of
East German workers into
West Berlin, an
exclave of the
Federal Republic of Germany. It largely succeeded in this instance, but led to the deaths of 140 people attempting to cross into West Berlin. It was officially described as an "anti-fascist protection rampart" (German:
Antifaschistischer Schutzwall), to serve the purpose of protecting
East Berlin and the GDR from "fascist powers" in the West.
Czechoslovakia 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.
Hungary The Hungarian outer fence became the first part of the Iron Curtain to be dismantled. After the border fortifications were dismantled, a section was rebuilt for a formal ceremony. On 27 June 1989, the
foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary,
Alois Mock and
Gyula Horn, ceremonially cut through the border defences separating their countries.
Romania The number of victims that died at the Romanian border far exceeded the number of victims at the Berlin Wall.
Bulgaria The Yugoslav-Bulgarian border became closed in 1948 after the
Tito–Stalin split. The area around the border was restructured, with land ownership on both sides no longer legal. Loudspeakers were installed for spreading propaganda and insults. The installations were not as impressive as the one on for example the inner-German border, but they resembled the same system. In the GDR, there was a long time rumor that the border of Bulgaria was easier to cross than the inner German border for escaping the East Bloc. In Greece, a highly militarized area called the "Επιτηρούμενη Ζώνη" ("Surveillance Area") was created by the Greek Army along the Greek-Bulgarian border, subject to significant security-related regulations and restrictions. Inhabitants within this wide strip of land were forbidden to drive cars, own land bigger than , and had to travel within the area with a special passport issued by Greek military authorities. Additionally, the Greek state used this area to encapsulate and monitor a non-Greek ethnic minority, the
Pomaks, a Muslim and Bulgarian-speaking minority which was regarded as hostile to the interests of the Greek state during the Cold War because of its familiarity with their fellow
Pomaks living on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The border was dismantled at the end of the 1990s. ==Fall==