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Iron Curtain
(redirected from The Iron Curtain)

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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.


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

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


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It came to symbolise the Iron Curtain between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc.
1989: The East German government lifted the Iron Curtain to allow free travel through the Berlin Wall.
Twenty years after hundreds of East Germans breached the Iron Curtain for the first time, Germany, Hungary and Austria marked Wednesday the historic event known as the Pan-European Picnic.
 
 
 
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