Winston Churchill
Iron Curtain Speech

In early March, 1946, Winston Churchill was traveling in the United States with President Harry S. Truman. Churchill had been British Prime Minister during the recent world war (1939-1945) during the closing years of which conflict Britain had been involved in a broad alliance with the United States and Russia.

After the end of the war some western statesmen had become concerned at the ways in which Soviet Russian influence was being imposed in many areas of eastern Europe. A speech delivered by Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5 1946 has been seen by many as being a defining event in the process by which the former alliance now adjusted away from memories of war time co-operation and towards a period of ideological and political - Cold War.

A key section of this speech as delivered by Winston Churchill reads:-

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 many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

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