Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain was a term made famous by former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Cold War. It was used to describe both the ideological and physical boundaries between the Soviet Union and the West in Europe. The Iron Curtain represented the divide in economic, military and social policies of communist and non-communist European areas, and in a physical sense, referred to the controlled borders between countries, in particular the Berlin Wall. The dissolution of the Iron Curtain started with social revolts in Poland which spread to other eastern European nations and has come to be symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.