Just like many other great speeches, Churchill’s Sinews of Peace address delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri was reduced to a few soundbites that everyone recognizes but can’t necessarily put in a context. In this case there is probably not a person alive who haven’t heard about the Iron Curtain, a Cold War reference to the division between the Soviet- and Western-influenced zones in Europe. For almost half a century, the Iron Curtain dominated the international relations, as well as lives of hundreds of millions of people. Today, its legacy is still haunting the world and, on a smaller scale, provides inspiration to a large section of this blog.

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 and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

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