The iron curtain was a much used term which referred to the outer limits of the Soviet Union’s sphere of control, behind which secrecy often made it difficult for the West to obtain reliable information, from the immediate post-war years until the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. It is normally attributed to Winston Churchill, the British prime minister during the Second World War, but was in fact used as early as 1920 and, prophetically, by the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, to describe the Soviet dominance over Eastern and South-Eastern Europe which would follow a German surrender.
The concept was also partly geographic, delimiting the actual frontiers of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe, but just as much metaphorical, because other countries, with no geographical continuity, like Cuba or North Korea, came to be described as ‘behind the iron curtain’. The geographical meaning was dominant because it did describe a very real situation where extensive border fortifications were erected, the most notorious being the Berlin Wall, to keep the citizens of communist countries in, rather than to keep aliens out. The idea was extended later by references to the ‘bamboo curtain’ to describe a similar self-imposed isolation by the People’s Republic of China.
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