Iron Curtain (redirected from Eiserner Vorhang)

Iron Curtain

Political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. Winston Churchill employed the term in a speech in Fulton, Mo., U.S., about the division of Europe in 1946. The restrictions and the rigidity of the Iron Curtain eased slightly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, though the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 restored them. The Iron Curtain largely ceased to exist in 1989–90 with the communists' abandonment of one-party rule in eastern Europe.

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Iron Curtain

a. (formerly) the guarded border between the countries of the Soviet bloc and the rest of Europe

b. (as modifier): Iron Curtain countries

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Iron Curtain

political and ideological barrier of secrecy concealing Eastern bloc. [Eur. Hist.: Brewer Dictionary, 490]

See : Isolation