Thursday 30 June 2022 01:27 AM Johnson boost for Nato's new Iron Curtain in £1bn weapons blitz as West shows ... trends now

The Iron Curtain was the name given to the political, ideological and later military barrier that separated western from eastern Europe between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Winston Churchill is credited with coining the term in a 1946 speech, when he said of Communist states: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.'

He delivered the address at a time when the UK, US and Soviets were dividing Europe into 'spheres of influence' as they planned for a post-war peace that they hoped would avoid mistakes made after the end of the First World War, creating conditions for the Second.

Begun in good faith, the talks gradually fell apart as Stalin worked to create a buffer zone of allied eastern European states to shield Russia from attacks from central Europe, sparking fears among Western allies that the Soviets could become powerful enough to dominate the whole continent.

That led to the creation of NATO in 1949 as an alliance of Western states to counter-balance Soviet power, and the rival Warsaw Pact of Soviet states in 1955.

Trade, migration, cultural exchanges and communication between the two blocs was heavily restricted, as the two sides fought proxy wars against one-another, engaged in a nuclear arms race, and bid to beat each other in economic and technological advancement - such as the Space Race. 

Though the East-West boundary was largely ideological, it did include a number of physical borders - most notably the Berlin Wall that separated West Berlin from Eastern Germany from 1961 until it fell in 1989.

The Iron Curtain began to fall in 1989 when Poland dissolved its Communist government and reestablished itself as a democracy, before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought it crumbling down.