Iron Curtain, the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. The term Iron Curtain had been in occasional and varied use as a metaphor since the 19th century, but it came to prominence only after it was used by former British prime minister Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, U.S., on March 5, 1946, when he said of the communist states, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

The Iron Curtain Speech

On 5 March 1946, the by-now former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, condemned the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe in his famous Iron Curtain speech. In that speech he famously noted that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. In a nutshell, what Churchill meant by this was that the Allies had spent six years fighting for the freedom from Fascism in Europe, only to have half the continent now under Soviet dictatorship.