Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech After World War II

The aftermath of World War II had left Europe devastated. After the end of the war in 1945 USSR, USA, France and Britain, had decided to occupy and rebuild land in Europe. Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and the eastern half of Germany were occupied by the Soviet troops, while the Americans, British, and France occupied the other half. The two superpowers, USA and USSR, had very different plans of how they wanted Europe to be rebuilt. The United States wanted Europe to be rebuilt with a Democratic – Capitalist ideology, however the Soviet Union wanted the exact opposite. The Soviet Union aspired to rebuild Europe as a communist state along Marxist lines. The Soviets had moved fast to establish a communist puppet in all occupied states to make sure that the USA wouldn’t try to enforce any Democratic laws in their occupied lands.

Stalin desired huge reparations from the
Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, called Churchill’s statement a “declaration of war”.

In March of 1946, when Churchill gave the speech, the Cold War was not yet in full swing. The USSR and US were suspicious of one another but not yet to the point of public and open conflict. However, Churchill’s speech did just that by comparing the threat of communism to the threat that Hitler had imposed in World War II.

Churchill’s speech encouraged the US to take a hard line against communism by stating in his speech that by appeasing the Soviets it would have the same effect on the world as appeasing Hitler did. By saying this it clearly would make the Soviets have less trust for the West by comparing them to the common enemy that they had faced less than a year ago. Moreover, Churchill is also reassuring the Soviets that the West were against them and their communist regime.
In this way, Churchill’s speech gave each side more of a reason to mistrust the