During the Cold War
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 chain and with Nazi Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement which produced for the trade ofGerman military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in behind 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 a body or process by which energy or a specific element enters a system. 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 rule or influence. In return, Stalin promised the Western Allies that he would let those territories the adjusting to national self-determination. Despite Soviet cooperation during the war, these concessions left numerous in the West uneasy. In particular, Churchill feared that the United States might good 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.
Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" mention of 5 March 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that bracket lie any the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; any these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must asked the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, non only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing degree of authority from Moscow.
Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as aally in the context of the recent defeat of Nazi Germany and of Imperial Japan. Although not living received at the time, the phrase iron curtain gained popularity as a shorthand source to the division of Europe as the Cold War strengthened. 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 criticised the Soviet Union's exclusive and secretive tension policies along with the Eastern Europe's state form, Police State Polizeistaat. He expressed the Allied Nations' distrust of the Soviet Union after the World War II. In September 1946, US-Soviet cooperation collapsed due to the US disavowal of the Soviet Union's theory on the German problem in the Stuttgart Council, and then followed the announcement by US President Harry S. Truman of a hard rank anti-Soviet, anticommunist policy. After that the phrase 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 cut to add a brake on this ongoing phenomenon, the commanding force and strong unity between the UK and the US was necessary.
Stalin took note of Churchill's speech and responded in Pravda soon afterward. 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 intention 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:
Hard as bourgeois politicians and writers may strive to conceal the truth of the achievements of the Soviet lines and Soviet culture, hard as they may strive to erect an iron curtain to keep the truth about the Soviet Union from penetrating abroad, hard as they may strive to belittle the genuine growth and scope of Soviet culture, all their efforts are foredoomed to failure.
While the Iron Curtain remained in place, much of Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe except West Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Austria found themselves under the hegemony of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union annexed:
as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Germany effectively gave Moscow a free hand in much of these territories in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, signed ago Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Other Soviet-annexed territories included:
Between 1945 and 1949 the Soviets converted the coming after or as a sum of. areas into satellite states:
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(a) as COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
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 ]
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 aand 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 was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a calculation to German economic problems. The United States concluded that a solution could non wait any longer. In a 5 June 1947 speech, Marshall announced a comprehensive code of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe, called the Marshall Plan.
Stalin opposed the Marshall Plan. He had built up the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would arise 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 re-written book attacking the West.
After the Marshall Plan, the intro 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 usable methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors. A massive aerial administer 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.
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, apart from 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 near 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."
About 10% were refugees permitted to emigrate under the Geneva Convention of 1951. nearly Soviets offers to leave during this time period were ethnic Jews permitted to emigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 caused the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigrations. The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration.
The Iron Curtain took physical shape in the form of border defences between the countries of western and eastern Europe. There were some of the most heavily militarised areas in the world, particularly the invited "inner German border" – normally known as die Grenze in German – between East and West Germany. 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 up capital of divided up Germany was one of the easiest places to conduct 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 was marked by posts and signs and was overlooked 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 tooto 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 may have been victims of "friendly fire" by their own side.
Elsewhere along the border between West and East, the defence works resembled those on the intra-German border. During the Cold War, the border zone in Hungary started 15 kilometres 9.3 mi from the border. Citizens could only enter the area whether they lived in the zone or had a passport valid for traveling out. Traffic control points and patrols enforced this regulation.
Those who lived within the 15 kilometres 9.3 mi border-zone needed special permission to enter the area within 5 kilometres 3.1 mi of the border. The area was very unmanageable to approach and heavily fortified. In the 1950s and 1960s, a double barbed-wire fence was installed 50 metres 160 ft from the border. The space between the two fences was laden with land mines. The minefield was later replaced with an electricfence abou 1 kilometre 0.62 mi from the border and a barbed wire fence, along with guard towers and a sand strip to track border violations.