The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain

--Hannah Aquino

After WWII, the Soviet Union created the iron curtain as a political and military barrier that isolated it from the rest of the world. The term "iron curtain" was coined by Winston Churchill in his "Sinews of Peace" speech in 1945. The blockade separated eastern Europe (including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union) from western Europe and all of its allies, or any non-communist countries. Any and all countries east of the curtain was strong influenced by the communist Soviet Union. This fence stretched for thousands of kilometers, even past the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain fell in the late 1980s, which also symbolized the end of WWII.