1946-3-5 Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech

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Железный занавес - Zheleznyy zanaves - Iron Curtain:

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he said: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent, allowing police governments to rule Eastern Europe.”

On 5th March 1946 Winston Churchill described the post-war division of Europe as an ‘Iron Curtain’ in his ‘Sinews of Peace’ address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

Churchill, as the British Prime Minister, had led Britain to victory in the Second World War but suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in the General Election of July 1945. Despite being in opposition he continued to be highly respected abroad and visited the United States in 1946. During this trip he was invited to deliver a speech to an audience of 40,000 people at Westminster College in the 7,000-person town of Fulton.

Churchill was introduced at Fulton by President Harry Truman, and opened his speech by complimenting the United States as standing ‘at the pinnacle of world power’. As the speech progressed, he became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union’s policies in Eastern Europe.

Churchill was not the first to use the term ‘Iron Curtain’ as a metaphor for a strong divide and versions of it had been in use for many centuries. Nor was the ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech the first time that he himself had used the term. However, his use of the term in a speech with such a large audience thrust it into wider circulation and associated it directly with the post-war situation.

Often interpreted as a key event in the origin of the Cold War, Churchill’s speech played a significant role in changing western perceptions of their former Soviet ally. Meanwhile, Stalin accused Churchill of warmongering, and defended the USSR’s relationship with Eastern Europe as a necessary barrier to future attacks.

Железный занавес - Iron Curtain ..