Daily Times

The Iron Curtain was at first an ideological and then a physical separation of communist Eastern Europe from the West from the 1940s after World War II.

The name

The term “iron curtain” was popularised after it was used by former British prime minister Winston Churchill in a landmark speech at Westminster College in Fulton, the United States, in March 1946.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” declared Churchill, then leader of the opposition Conservatives.

His comments were seen as an opening salvo in the Cold War, which opposed the Soviet Union and the West for more than four decades.

The term had been coined earlier. Russian writer Vasily Rozanov, in his 1918 book “The Apocalypse of Our Time”, wrote “an iron curtain is being lowered, creaking and squeaking, at the end of Russian history.”

A physical frontier

The ideological barrier between Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and the West gradually became a physical one spanning thousands of kilometres (miles).

To stop their citizens from fleeing to the West, the Soviet-dominated Eastern countries began erecting various forms of barriers using barbed wire, ditches and concrete walls.

The separations were controlled through alarms, watchtowers, mines and soldiers.

Socialist Hungary put up the first section in 1949, building a 260-kilometre (160-mile) barbed wire fence along its border with Austria.

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was the most famous section of the Iron Curtain and became its symbol.

In 1952 Soviet-satellite East Germany constructed a 10-metre-wide (39-feet) barbed wire buffer along the entire length of its border with West Germany.

However people were still able to cross over in the divided city of Berlin, with about three million fleeing the East via this route between 1952 and 1961.

To stop this important loss of manpower, East Germany in 1961 began constructing a wall within the city.

Made of reinforced concrete and wire mesh, the Berlin Wall stretched for 155 kilometres. It had a heavily controlled no-man’s land on the eastern side.