Iron Curtain Speech
On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill, then out of office as British prime minister, told an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." The speech, formally titled "The Sinews of Peace," did not start the Cold War, but it gave the emerging division of Europe a vivid name and helped shape how Western publics understood it. Although the speech was delivered in the United States, it concerned the Soviet Union and the countries under its influence, which is why it is often placed in a Russian and Eastern European context.
The background was the end of the Second World War. Soviet forces had occupied much of Central and Eastern Europe while defeating Germany, and the wartime alliance among Britain, the United States and the USSR was fraying. Disputes over Poland's future government, Soviet pressure on Iran and Turkey, and the Soviet-backed installation of communist-led governments in several countries had raised alarm in London and Washington. Churchill had lost the July 1945 general election, but he remained an influential voice, and President Harry Truman sat on the platform with him at Fulton.
In his address, Churchill argued that a line stretching "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic" divided the continent, with the ancient capitals of Central and Eastern Europe lying on the Soviet side, subject to Soviet influence and, in his words, increasing control from Moscow. He called for a "special relationship" between Britain and the United States and urged Western unity, arguing that strength, not weakness, would be the surest way to preserve peace. He did not coin the phrase from nothing; the image of an iron curtain had been used before, including by Nazi propagandists and by Churchill himself in a 1945 telegram to Truman, but the Fulton speech made it famous.
Reaction was mixed. Some American commentators and politicians distrusted what sounded like a call for an Anglo-American alliance, and Truman distanced himself somewhat from the speech's message. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin responded sharply in the newspaper Pravda, accusing Churchill of warmongering and comparing him to Hitler.
Within a couple of years, events appeared to bear out Churchill's picture. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Berlin Blockade, and the founding of NATO in 1949 hardened the divide. "Iron curtain" became standard shorthand for the border between East and West, and it remained so until the upheavals of 1989. Historians still debate how far the speech shaped policy rather than simply reflecting a hardening mood, but it remains one of the most quoted political speeches of the twentieth century.