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On Tuesday, March 5, 1946 — 65 years ago today — Win ston Churchill delivered a speech in Fulton, Mo., that was fundamentally to alter the way that the world viewed itself.
Less than a year after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the rubble of Berlin, the West was forced — solely through the oratory and amazing foresight of one man — to consider the terrible possibility that a new clash against totalitarianism was inevitable.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill told his audience in the Westminster College gymnasium in the small American town of Fulton, “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.”
Churchill went on uncompromisingly to point out a fact that many in the West knew to be true but that few were brave enough publicly to admit: that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a brutal dictatorship, utterly determined to tyrannize its satellite states, and that it would brook no challenge from the democratic oppositions in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania.
The ruling communist parties were, Churchill said, “all embracing police governments,” ruled “either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police.” This was certainly not, he said, “the liberated Europe we fought to build up.”
For all that it was true, no one at the time wanted to hear it. The USSR had lost 20 million men fighting the Nazis in World War II, heroically resisting the Wehrmacht in such cities as Leningrad — which had been subjected to a grueling 872-day siege — Moscow and Stalingrad.
It seems hard to credit it today, but Russian dictator Joseph Stalin was tremendously popular in the West at the time, nicknamed “Uncle Joe” and revered for the way that he had personified Russia’s struggle between 1941 and 1945.
Yet Churchill spoke out fearlessly, regardless of the reaction. He also called for “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” — the very first use of that term — and warned that the new United Nations needed to be “a force for action and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” Nonetheless it was for his remarks about the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe that the Iron Curtain speech has resonated down the decades.
Although many on the left accused Churchill of starting the Cold War with this speech, in fact all he was doing was waking the democratic West up to what was already happening, just as he’d sought to warn the world about Hitler’s rise in his “Wilderness Years” before World War II. The American and British press lambasted Churchill, the Chicago Sun saying the speech contained a “poisonous doctrine.”
In Britain, The Times even went so far as to say that the West “had much to learn” from communism, especially “in the development of economic and social planning.” No fewer than 93 Labor MPs tabled a censure motion against Churchill in the House of Commons, saying the speech had been “calculated to do injury to good relations between GB, the USA and the USSR and was inimical to the cause of world peace.”
Yet to millions of ordinary people across the world, Churchill’s message got through. The phrase “iron curtain” entered the political lexicon to describe the increasingly hardening frontier between communism and capitalism.
For all that European communism was defeated, totalitarianism still scars our world. China shuts down Internet usage and imprisons even Nobel Prize-winning human-rights activists. Islamic fundamentalism is similarly a completely totalitarian concept, with apostasy punishable by death.
Churchill’s statement in the Iron Curtain speech, that “freedom of speech and thought should reign,” is anathema to the totalitarians who rule over half of the global population. With President Obama still sending no clear message to the Middle Eastern revolutions, today’s world lacks any voice as sublime as Churchill’s to remind us so sublimely of freedom’s eternal truths.
Andrew Roberts is a British his torian who lives in New York.