Seminar Content | Eastern Europe in Modern European History, an NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers at NYU Made possible by the Seminar Content During the Cold War the division of Europe into two component halves, Western Europe and Eastern Europe, seemed so stark, so self-evident, and so likely to persist that it profoundly influenced the way that the continent was perceived and understood. This was notably true from the American perspective, since America was so closely associated with Western Europe during the Cold War, in military, economic, political, and cultural alliance against the Soviet bloc that constituted Eastern Europe. The image of the Iron Curtain from Churchill’s famous Fulton, Missouri, speech of 1946 provided the mental architecture for an entire postwar generation thinking about the nature of Europe divided, and led to a mental mapping in which Western Europe was presumed to be the better half (and of course it was “our” half in the Cold War) and Eastern Europe was understood to be lesser, less interesting, less welcoming, more alien, and more backward— the other and secondary component of the continent.

At the same time the countries of Eastern Europe, with their dramatically different national traditions, were presumed to be homogenously all alike— colored communist grey on Western mental maps of Europe during the Cold War. It was Western Europe that was much more likely to be visited by Americans as vacation air travel became part of middle class life in the 1950s and 1960s, and the glorious sights of London, Paris, and Rome were much more likely to be part of an American’s actual touristic experience of Europe. One of the consequences of this world political ordering, which lasted for almost half a century from the end of World War II until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, was a subtly partisan revision of the history of Europe, as it appeared especially in the synthetic textbooks of the second half of the twentieth century. Often focused on the “History of the West” or the “History of Western Civilization,” these synthetic histories did not synthesize evenly but with a strong western bias. The Italian Renaissance, the German Reformation, the French Revolution, the British Industrial Revolution: these all came clearly into focus. The Russian path was singled out for special contrasting attention.

But a whole huge swath of Europe almost disappeared from the narrative of European history, with merely general references to issues of social and political backwardness. In high schools this was even more likely to be true than in colleges, in colleges than in graduate schools, but at every level Eastern Europe was neglected in general histories of the continent, while specialized studies, when they occurred, were grouped together under the general Cold War rubric of “Eastern Europe” and often framed and supported with reference to the exigencies of Cold War national security. Of course, the division of Europe into two geopolitical camps during the Cold War was real and meaningful, but it distorted perspectives on European history in two basic ways: first, by suggesting that Eastern Europe and Western Europe had entirely divergent histories even before the Cold War, and, second, by suggesting that all the lands and peoples of Eastern Europe were related by resemblance to one another in their past histories.

This summer seminar will address these distortions head on, attempting to analyze the problems inherent in the historical categories “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe,” considering different historical frameworks for rethinking the way that different parts of Europe have been related to each other in past centuries, and also exploring alternative political frameworks for rethinking what Europe looks like today in the post-Cold War twenty-first century. For school teachers, these issues come up whenever European history is taught and discussed at every grade level. In fact, they also come up as an issue of American history when the subject of immigration is taught and discussed with reference to the diversity of national groups who have entered American society from Europe. The cultures of Eastern Europe have too often been represented as “exotic” and “folkloric”— emphasizing costumes and dances— without any real attempt to think through the extremely complex diversity of national histories that have shaped the emigrant communities arriving in the United States. The most recent historical, political, and cultural writing about Eastern Europe has seriously attempted to challenge, analyze, revise, and reconstruct assumptions about Eastern Europe that were taken for granted during the Cold War period, and we hope to make these scholarly issues intellectually meaningful and pedagogically useful for school teachers.

Pedagogically we will consider especially negotiating the historical gap that separates teachers who grew up during the Cold War from students who have no memory of the Cold War. While there will be some lecturing both from the director and the visiting faculty speakers, the substance of the seminar will involve participant discussion concerning the central issues of the seminar. Each participant will be encouraged to choose some particular subject to focus on for individual research, and will use that subject, over the course of the three weeks, as a basis for thinking about how East and West might be integrated into one historical European experience. The final product of the seminar will be either the presentation of a short piece of academic research on some aspect of Eastern Europe or the presentation of a pedagogical proposal for studying some aspect of the subject in school. Participants will have the opportunity to report regularly on the progress that they are making with their subjects. The director will be present for all seminar sessions and available to participants just after the formal sessions for informal research guidance. He will hold formal meetings with each of the participants during the course of the session and will schedule blocks of office hours. The three weeks of the seminar will be divided into two parts, according to the two basic perspectives, West looking East, and then East looking West.

The first part will focus on how Western Europe has historically regarded Eastern Europe, dating from what may be called the “invention” of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. The introductory session will explore how the word “civilization,” coined as a neologism in the eighteenth century, became associated with a westerly direction so as to produce, eventually, the concept of “Western civilization.” It will consider further how Eastern Europe could appear as a kind of Oriental, or demi-Oriental, space of exoticism and backwardness, when seen from the perspective of “Western civilization.” Furthermore, both of those concepts—exoticism and backwardness— will be critically examined for their role in defining the relation between different parts of the globe. Both eyewitness travel literature about Eastern Europe and purely imaginative literature will be considered, dating from the Enlightenment, and we’ll study how such writers as Voltaire and Rousseau, who never set foot in Eastern Europe, nevertheless played powerful roles in imagining and defining its character and its relation to Western Europe.

Participants will sample short readings, for instance, from Voltaire’s letters to Catherine the Great and from Rousseau’s “Considerations Concerning the Government of Poland,” and think about the basic assumptions that informed the perspectives of Western intellectuals concerning Eastern Europe. What did Westerners see when they looked to the east in Europe? The subsequent sessions will pursue these themes into the nineteenth century, the age of nationalism, and will consider the kind of patronage that Eastern Europe received from Western political and cultural figures, from Lord Byron in Albania to Bram Stoker’s creation of Dracula in Transylvania. This will be followed by the study of Woodrow Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference and the complete redrawing of the map of Eastern Europe, considering what it meant for western statesmen to make themselves the arbiters of eastern borders, and how the twentieth-century map of Eastern Europe emerged from the Baltic states to Bulgaria and Albania. Most important will be the theme of nationalism in Eastern Europe and how it was alternatively encouraged and stigmatized, checked and patronized, ignored and publicized in the West.

We will place these issues in the context of the political settlements of the nineteenth century at which Western statesmen redefined Eastern borders, from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Finally, the first half of the seminar will conclude, in the middle of the second week, by addressing the Cold War and the post-Cold War world of the twenty-first century, bringing the seminar right up to the present moment through the recent decades of NATO expansion and EU enlargement that completely overturned conventional understandings about the division of Europe into East and West. This will be particularly important material for the seminar, inasmuch as the Cold War so powerfully shaped the perspective which most of us still have regarding Eastern Europe. While before 1945 we can speak of culturally constructed continental division, more a matter of mental mapping than geopolitical fact, after 1945 the geopolitics of continental division were undeniable, with communism creating a “bloc” out of the lands and peoples of Eastern Europe, while NATO and the European Common Market effectively created an alternative “bloc” out of the lands and peoples of Western Europe.

It will be important both to acknowledge the powerful impact of economic and political division during the Cold War, while also recognizing that the Iron Curtain was mapped onto an earlier idea of the continent envisioned as the conjunction of a backward East and a civilized West. The seamlessness with which the Cold War mentality built upon the foundation of this earlier stigmatic distinction concerning Eastern Europe offers some explanation for why the Cold War perspective has persisted into the post-communist era, and why Eastern Europe is still sometimes stigmatized in relation to Western Europe. Why did the Cold War leave a particularly powerful mark on the way we all think about Europe today? Important readings for this first half of the course will include chapters from Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe as well as Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania. We will look at some of the work of our late NYU colleague Tony Judt on French intellectuals and Eastern Europe, and some of the essays of Timothy Garton Ash who reported on the revolutions of 1989.

Judt’s classic study of French intellectuals and communism, Past Imperfect, suggests some of the ways that intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir replicated in the twentieth century the perspective of intellectuals like Voltaire and Diderot in the eighteenth century, placing an enormous value on the Russian experience while neglecting the oppressive impact of Russian power on the rest of Eastern Europe. We will read such classic Western accounts, documents, and fantasies as excerpts from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (about interwar Yugoslavia), Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech, and even King Ottokar’s Scepter, the story of Tintin’s adventures in the invented East European country of Syldavia. While Rebecca West’s writings, for instance, reflect the importance of elite intellectual perspectives on Eastern Europe in the 1930s, the Tintin comics, originating also in the 1930s but continuing with huge success into the postwar period, offer the opportunity for a discussion of the popular culture of the Cold War; they suggest the kind of widespread imagery that gave ordinary people, indeed children, their most basic impressions of Eastern Europe as both a comical and sinister space in the twentieth century.

The second part of the seminar will reverse the perspective and consider Eastern perspectives on Western Europe and Eastern Europe’s place in European history as a whole. We will begin by looking at some fundamental moments for thinking in an integral way about European history: Bohemian Hussitism and German Protestantism building to the Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War; the European-Ottoman encounter in Southeastern Europe culminating in the siege of Vienna in 1683; the drama of Polish Romanticism in Paris in the nineteenth century with the fervent nationalist expressions in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz and the music of Frederic Chopin; the nationalities question within the Habsburg monarchy leading to the outbreak of World War I with the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914. All of these topics, beginning with the heretical proto-Protestantism of Jan Hus in Bohemia, a full century before Luther in Germany, and concluding with the Bosnian political crisis that brought all of Europe into World War I, consider historical moments when the interlocking aspects of history in Eastern Europe and Western Europe point toward a broader way of considering the continental whole.

We will address these subjects both from the point of view of current academic research and also from the point of view of pedagogical opportunities for teaching European history. How would it be possible to teach a better-integrated history of Europe? The larger part of the second half of the seminar will be focused on the twentieth century, with particular attention to the terrible experience of Eastern Europe during World War II such that one historian has recently characterized the whole region as the “Bloodlands,” caught between Hitler and Stalin; the coming of communism to Eastern Europe after the war with the formation of the Soviet Bloc; the ways in which the image of a “bloc” failed to do justice to the complex diversity of experience within the region under communist governments; and the revolutions of 1989 which appeared to many East Europeans as a rejoining of Europe from which they had been violently separated for half a century. We will talk about how certain crisis moments in the history of Eastern Europe were understood by their protagonists as part of a broader European history, social movements and political uprisings in the East carried out in the name of European values and with the expectation of European solidarity.

Such crisis moments would include the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet communism in 1956, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Polish Solidarity trade union movement in 1980-1981, culminating in the political upheavals that brought down communist governments across Eastern Europe in 1989. How did the extreme experiences of Nazi occupation and Soviet-style communism transform the region in the twentieth century?

Important readings for the second half of the seminar will include excerpts from the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic poet Mickiewicz and the great twentieth-century poets Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, the letters of Jan Hus and the speeches of Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel’s famous essay on “The Power of the Powerless” and Milan Kundera’s landmark essay on “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” the brilliant Croatian essays of Slavenka Drakulić (collected as “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed”) and Dubravka Ugrešić (collected as “The Culture of Lies”), and accounts from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Among secondary sources we will discuss selections from Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, Tony Judt’s Postwar, and Timothy Garton Ash’s The Magic Lantern.

Kundera’s essay is particularly relevant for our concerns as he completely transformed discussion of the region by insisting that it was not Eastern Europe at all, but “Central Europe” that had been “kidnapped” by the Soviets coming from the East, and forcibly made over into “Eastern Europe.” As “Central Europe” such lands as Poland, Hungary, and Kundera’s native Czechoslovakia demanded the attention of the West and claimed the right to return to the European whole from which they had been violently detached after World War II. This became a particularly potent way of reframing the geopolitical circumstances of the 1980s, during the last decade of communism in Europe, and in the 1990s the idea of Central Europe formed part of the ideological basis for advocating a European Union expansion to include the formerly communist countries. What Was the Iron Curtain? (with pictures) What Was the Iron Curtain? Last Modified Date: 19 December 2016 Copyright Protected: Can you see through these real-life optical illusions?

"Iron Curtain" is a term used to describe the boundary that separated the Warsaw Pact countries from the NATO countries from about 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The Iron Curtain was both a physical and an ideological division that represented the way Europe was viewed after World War II. To the east of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the former Soviet Union. This included part of Germany (East Germany), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania (until 1960 when it aligned with China). While Yugoslavia was Communist politically it was not considered to be a part of the Eastern Bloc or behind the Iron Curtain. Josip Broz Tito, the president of Yugoslavia at the time, was able to maintain access with the west while leading a communist country. The other countries to the west of the Iron Curtain had democratic governments. Ad Although the term "Iron Curtain" was used in literature and politics earlier, it was made popular by Winston Churchill , who used it publicly in a speech in March of 1946.

The term was first used to refer to the actual metal barrier that cut the continent in two, but it soon became a reference to the ideological barrier also. When Churchill first referred to the barrier he wasn't trying to emulate the words of others. In a telegram directed to US President Harry S. Truman, Churchill spoke about the European situation and said "An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind." This was his first official mention of the term Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain fence stretched for thousands of kilometers to separate Eastern and Western countries, and it was especially strong in Germany, where the Berlin Wall became an unmistakable symbol of the Iron Curtain division. In certain regions, the Iron Curtain was nothing more than a plain chain link fence, when in other places it was a highly guarded area which only people carrying special government permissions could approach. There are Iron Curtain monuments that stand as a reminder of a long-gone era. One is located in the Czech Republic and includes an original guard tower with signs explaining the origins and reasons for the Iron Curtain. The second monument, a simple tribute, is located in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Ad The Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall The mounting tensions between the Allies and Soviets culminated in the Berlin Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall During the early years of the Cold War, West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. It was thrown up overnight, on 13 August 1961. For the next three decades, the city became the hot end of the Cold War as the world's nuclear superpowers faced off across the Wall. Half a century later, we look back on the Wall and its impact through a BBC archive collection. Photo: West Berliners gather at the Wall whilst an East German soldier patrols the other side, in August 1961. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) More information about: The Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.

Constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall completely cut off (by land) West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until government officials opened it in November 1989. Its demolition officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1992. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the "death strip") that contained anti-vehicle trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the Wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that had marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period. The Berlin Wall was officially referred to as the "Anti-Fascist Protective Wall" (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) by GDR authorities, implying that the NATO countries and West Germany in particular were considered equal to "fascists" by GDR propaganda.

The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the "Wall of Shame"—a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt—while condemning the Wall's restriction on freedom of movement. Along with the separate and much longer Inner German border (IGB), which demarcated the border between East and West Germany, it came to symbolize a physical marker of the "Iron Curtain" that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin; from which they could then travel to West Germany and other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the Wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the Wall, with an estimated death toll ranging from 136 to more than 200 in and around Berlin.

In 1989, a series of radical political changes occurred in the Eastern Bloc, associated with the liberalization of the Eastern Bloc's authoritarian systems and the erosion of political power in the pro-Soviet governments in nearby Poland and Hungary. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed onto the Wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, euphoric people and souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the Wall; the governments later used industrial equipment to remove most of what was left. Contrary to popular belief the Wall's actual demolition did not begin until the summer of 1990 and was not completed until 1992. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

Teaching the Cold War Through Maps and Images - CA Geographic Alliance CA Geographic Alliance Search for: Teaching the Cold War Through Maps and Images The CGA is happy to present a set of resources designed to help educators and students engage in inquiries into the effect of the Cold War on perceptions and representations of the world as well as the use of maps and geographic information as rhetorical weapons in the execution of the Cold War. This information was assembled to support the Midway Summer Teacher Institute. Dr. Tim Barney was a featured speaker at the institute in 2015 and 2016, and a video of his lecture — in which he presents a detailed analysis of one particular map’s purpose, production, and use in various contexts — is available here: “The Rhetorical Lives of Cold War Maps” (will open in new window). Please also access our Cold War Map Gallery here (will open in new window). ___________________________________________________________________________ An Intro to Cold War Maps and Images Visualizing Global Geopolitics and The San Diego State University Geography Department This introduction and overview was developed to accompany an assortment of 9 large maps displayed during the Midway Summer Teacher Institute.

It presents a collection of small images reflecting the politically and tactically informed perspectives on, and representations of, the world prevalent during the Cold War. The Cold War period called for careful re-mapping of the world in a nuclear age. Maps also created powerful imagery that informed the public about the realities of how the struggle between superpowers and ideologies was organizing space around the globe. All images were obtained online, and source information is provided. The Geography of Power Sir Halford Mackinder, The Natural Seats of Power, 1904 In 1904 Mackinder gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society entitled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, which was illustrated with this world map. Mackinder believed that central Asia, or what he called ‘Eurasia’, represented the pivotal area of the world’s politics, and that whoever controlled this vast, landlocked region and its resources would effectively rule the globe. The map influenced generations of thinkers and politicians, from George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 to the US foreign policy promoted by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Previously viewed as a chokepoint in naval warfare, the narrow gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK became the main “highway” used by Soviet bombers and maritime reconnaissance aircraft flying to Cuba, monitoring NATO maritime activities or simply probing local air defenses. Azimuthal projections became popular because their conservation of true distance was usefulness in showing the range of aircraft and missiles. The polar azimuthal projection seen here also emphasizes the proximity between the US and USSR. The Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe This cartoon by the British cartoonist Illingworth was published in June 1947 Accessed at: 1946 map of the “Iron Curtain” reflecting the assertions made in a Winston Churchill speech. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [European] Continent.” On March 5, 1946, a train with two World War II statesmen left Washington D.C. and steamed across the United States to the gateway to the west, Missouri.

In the town of Fulton, population 7,000, at Westminster University, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with President Harry Truman by his side, delivered a prophetic speech to an audience of 40,000 students. Titled “The Sinews of Peace” the oratory soon became known as “The Iron Curtain Speech”, referring to the figurative curtain that had fallen, separating democratic western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe. Image and text from Containment of the Communist Threat in Asia and Latin America This was a piece of election propaganda distributed by the Liberal Party during the Federal election on 26 November 1966. The graphic shows the encroaching “red menace” coming southwards from China through South-east Asia towards Australia. The United States became increasingly vigilant against the potential for communism’s spread into the Western Hemisphere. The maps above and below from the JFK Presidential Library are declassified CIA maps updated by hand to provide information on key locations related to the Cuban Missile Crisis The Iron Curtain The Iron Curtain A British cartoon depicting the Iron Curtain In early 1945 most Nazi forces in Europe were in retreat, pursued by the Americans and British from the West and Soviet forces from the east.

Large areas of Europe which had been under Nazi control since 1940 or 1941 now found themselves liberated. In the case of the nations of eastern Europe – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – the Soviets replaced the Nazis as occupiers. Russian forces remained longer than expected and certainly longer than necessary. But they had work to do, as agents of the USSR worked behind the scenes to ‘sovietise’ these countries – in other words, to give each of them a puppet government that would serve as an extension of the Kremlin. These governments had the appearance of democratic representatives but in reality they were neither. Local communists were gathered into a coalition party then handed power, usually after coups or rigged elections. Soviet agents were appointed as ‘advisors’ but were in fact monitors, informers and enforcers. Other parties were dissolved and resisters were eliminated. Much of eastern Europe was cloaked behind what soon became known as the Iron Curtain.

Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 By the start of 1946, the process of ‘sovietisation’ was well underway in these countries, which collectively became known as the Eastern Bloc or Soviet Bloc. Access to the Eastern Bloc was tightly restricted (there were no foreign journalists permitted and diplomatic access was minimal) – however the West did have some information about what was transpiring there. The tensions between the USSR and the West began to acquire a public voice. In a February 1946 speech Stalin stressed the superiority of communism over capitalism, warning Russians to stay on their guard against the West. Meanwhile Winston Churchill, no longer British prime minister after an election defeat in July 1945, accused Stalin of breaking promises made at Yalta. In March 1946 Churchill visited the US and spoke at Fulton, Missouri about his concerns: A shadow has fallen upon the scenes [recently] lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia …intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive tendencies. It is my duty to place before you certain facts about the present situation in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe – Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities are subject to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow… This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. License to plunder Meanwhile, behind this ‘Iron Curtain’, the Soviets were helping themselves to the raw materials and industrial resources of occupied nations. Grain, food, machinery, steel, coal and other items were seized and transported east to the Soviet Union. Romania and Hungary, which had allied themselves with Nazi Germany during the war, suffered worst. As defeated enemy states, both were required to sign humiliating armistice documents with the Soviet leadership, agreeing to pay reparations to the Russian people. These documents were little more than a license to plunder, as reported by Kertesz: The armistice agreement compelled Hungary to furnish goods, facilities and services for the occupying army.

The Soviet Union took the old principle of “la guerre doit nourrir la guerre” [‘the war must feed the war’] seriously, and the Red Army lived off the land. Besides carrying the legal burden of the armistice obligations, Hungary suffered through illegal seizure and large scale looting. The notion of “war booty” was interpreted most extensively. Valuable machines, and in numerous instances whole plants, were dismantled and removed to the Soviet Union. Grains and other victuals were seized in huge quantities. Almost one-half of the livestock was taken out of the country. Safe deposit boxes were forced open and their contents removed. Whether the property was private or public did not make any difference. Private homes, public warehouses, stores, government agencies and banks all received the same treatment. [The properties] of neutral powers, such as Switzerland, Sweden or Turkey were not spared. The announcement of the Marshall Plan by the Americans in mid-1947 revealed the extent that these nations were under Stalin’s control. All six members of the Eastern Bloc refused invitations to the Paris negotiation conference, despite Poland and Czechoslovakia having earlier expressed some interest in accepting US aid.

Moscow’s control of Eastern Bloc governments became less covert after this. In September 1947 the USSR established Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau) which linked the communist governments of eastern Europe and ensured they adopted policies approved by Moscow. Several Czechoslovak, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian communists who failed to toe the line were reported by Cominform, arrested, given Stalinist ‘show trials’ then executed. Each Eastern Bloc government formed its own secret police based on the Soviet NKVD, including the Stasi (East Germany) Securitate (Romania) the StB (Czechoslovakia) the Sigurnost (Bulgaria) and the AVH (Hungary). Any pretense that these countries were independent or discrete from the USSR had faded away by the early 1950s. Tightened border controls “The Fulton address was a brilliant exercise in political prophecy. Like some master architect, Churchill laid out, in a necessarily general but easily reocgnisable form, much of the future shape of the Cold War. He anticipated the formation of an anti-Soviet Western security system, based on the Anglo-American nucleus.

He outlined the role that Britain would play as a junior partner… He envisioned the rise of a democratic West Germany tied to the West. He clearly foresaw the course of the arms race in atomic weapons and urged further American development to maintain the lead. He set forward many of the philosophic, geopolitical and strategic foundations of both ‘containment’ and ‘confrontation-liberation’, the two leading American national security doctrines of the early Cold War.” Fraser J. Harbutt, historian Red Army troops in Hungary, a country pillaged by the Soviets, in late 1945 For those living in Soviet bloc nations it became gradually more difficult to relocate or travel to other countries. Borders once relatively open became guarded and tightly controlled. Europe’s border controls, once relatively relaxed, became the strictest in its peacetime history. This division was keenly felt in Germany, which was split asunder by Soviet and Allied occupation zones. The twin towns of Sonnerberg and Neustadt found themselves in the Soviet and Allied zones respectively and separated by the Iron Curtain.

In July 1949 the two towns participated in a soccer game, played on a pitch with a boundary-line formed by the east-west border (allowing those on both sides to watch the match without passes). More than 25,000 spectators attended, some holding up placards demanding the two towns – and indeed the entire German nation – be reunified. After the match, Soviet officials opened the border for the afternoon, allowing thousands of Sonnerberg residents to visit family and friends and shop at Neustadt’s well-stocked businesses. Optimistic events like east-west football matches and border openings provided some hope that the borders would one day be relaxed or dissolved. But as pro-Moscow governments settled into power in the east, they began to strengthen border controls – to lock out anti-communist infiltrators and demonstrators, as well as preventing an exodus of their own people to the West. In 1951 East Germany began a building program to fortify vulnerable parts of its border, erecting barbed wire, towers, gates and guard posts. Some heavily populated areas fringing the border were cleared of people. Roads, railways and tunnels crossing borders were destroyed, dug up or diverted.

Ground near the border was cleared and, in some cases, packed with landmines. In 1949, it had been possible to cross the border into Allied-occupied Germany, if one was determined enough. Within four years, the border was sealed, government-authorised crossings were strictly controlled and unauthorised crossings were dangerous. The Iron Curtain was not only a political and philosophical concept; it was a real and tangible one. 1. The Iron Curtain was a name, coined by Winston Churchill in 1946, for the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. 2. From 1947 to 1951, billions of dollars of US loans were advanced to European nations for post-war rebuilding. 3. These loans came with strict conditions, such as the adoption of liberal, democratic and capitalist policies. 4. This aid enabled the reconstruction of Europe, while advancing American commercial and foreign policy interests. 5. In the context of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan helped weak and war-ravaged governments and economies to recover, without falling prey to communist infiltration and thus being swallowed by the Soviet bloc. © Alpha History. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission.

For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation: J. Llewellyn et al, “The Iron Curtain”, Alpha History, accessed [today’s date], What did the Iron Curtain separate? | Reference.com What did the Iron Curtain separate? A: Quick Answer According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Iron Curtain separated the Soviet Union and its eastern and central European allies from the West. The phrase "iron curtain" had been used since the 19th century as a metaphor, which gained widespread significance when used in a 1946 Winston Churchill speech. Full Answer The Iron Curtain was, unlike the Berlin Wall, not as much a physical barrier as an ideological, military and political barrier. The Soviet Union erected the barrier after World War II in order to prevent open contact with Western, non-communist influences. The communists abandoned one-party rule in Eastern Europe in 1989-90, dramatically reducing, if not entirely erasing, the significance of the Iron Curtain.

Iron Curtain - Cold War Cold War WHO: soviet union created it WHAT: Iron curtain was a boundary that separated the Warsaw pact countries from NATO countries about 1945 until the end of the cold war in 1991 WHERE: - was a barrier in Europe WHY: so it can separate Europe into 2 areas after world war two The iron curtain The political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the soviet union after world war two to seal of itself and its dependent eastern European allies from open contact from the west and other non-communist areas. The term iron curtain has been used as a metaphor in the 19th century but it came to prominence only after the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a speech Churchill gave the speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, after receiving an honorary degree and was introduced by Missourian, President Harry Truman. on march 5, 1946 , when he said of the communist states he said From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

- Less than a year after the end of the World War II, the great wartime leader of Britain, Winston Churchill, delivered this speech coining the term "iron curtain" to describe the line in Europe between self-governing nations of the West and those in Eastern Europe under Soviet Communist control. - The restrictions of the iron curtain were reduced after the death of Stalin in 1953. Although the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961 restored them the iron curtain largely ceased to exist in 1989 to 1990 with the communist abandonment of one party rule in Eastern Europe. - Churchill gave his now famous iron Curtain speech to a crowd of 40,000. In addition to accepting an honorary degree from the college, Churchill made one of his most famous post-war speeches. - It was Churchill's speech, which he titled "The Sinews of Peace," that changed the way the democratic West viewed the Communist East. Many people consider Churchill's "iron curtain speech" the beginning of the cold war - The Iron Curtain.

World War II was a global military conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945 which involved most of the world's nations , including all of the great powers , organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis . It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million military personnel were mobilized. The war ended when the Axis powers Japan, Germany, surrendered. This was the background to which the iron curtain was developed. The Iron Curtain was a speech by Winston Churchill on March 5, 1946. He made the speech at west Minister College in Fulton Missouri. The Iron curtain represents the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal of itself and its dependent eastern European allies from open contact from the west and other non-communist areas. While he was saying the speech this quote was made From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. The Iron Curtain was divided into two parts capitalism and communism. In capitalism all industries and business were privately owned by people neither the government nor the state.

One other thing is that people were allowed to start their own industry, and who ever made a profit through their business kept his reward. They had a democracy, which was a free economy with an average standard of living other than under communism but widespread between rich and poor. Where as in communist countries people were not allowed to benefit form their own profit that they made. All the profits they made through work went to the government or the state and everyone profited. They also had very low average standards of living with a controlled economy. They only had one part of government, with fairness and equality for all. Also everything in their economy was owned by the state and should be run by the government on behalf of the people. And lastly they had a classless society achieved by overthrowing capitalism by revolution. There were many countries involved with the iron curtain like the United States of America, and the USSR. It was Churchill's speech, which he titled The Sinews of Peace, that changed the way the democratic West viewed the Communist East. Many people consider Churchill's iron curtain speech the beginning of the cold war. His speech was given to a crowd of forty thousand people.

In addition to accepting an honorary degree from the college, Churchill made one of his most famous post-war speeches. In conclusion the Iron curtain affected a lot of countries, a lot of countries wished to be on the capitalism side while others were having a nightmare on the communism side. Capitalism gave people so much freedom while on communism everything was owned by the state and the government. So people were unlucky to be on the communism side. This all took affect after Stalin died. And that’s when the nightmare started. Links for Citations:

Question: What figurative "curtain" separated Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War?
Answer: Iron Curtain