Iron Curtain: From Theater Fire Shield to the 1989 Pan-European Picnic

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Before it named a political divide, an iron curtain was a heavy fireproof barrier dropped between a theater's stage and its audience to stop a fire spreading. Queen Elisabeth of Belgium used the phrase in 1914, Russian writer Vasily Rozanov in 1918 for the end of an era after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Joseph Goebbels to warn Germans about the Red Army. Winston Churchill used it privately with Harry Truman in 1945 and made it famous at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, tracing a line from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler and defended a buffer zone after more than 20 million Soviet deaths, then rejected the Marshall Plan, backed the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia and answered the new Deutschmark with the Berlin blockade.

The curtain became a system of fences and minefields running from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea, enforced by Comecon economic ties and the threat of tanks, as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Under Gorbachev that threat lifted. In June 1989 the Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers cut the border wire in a ceremony, though shoot-to-kill orders remained, and in August East Germans rushed a gate during the Pan-European Picnic while Hungarian guards held their fire. The Berlin Wall fell in November.

• The Hungarian-Austrian border had a 15-kilometer exclusion zone that required special permission to enter.
• Guard pairs were made up of strangers so neither knew if the other was an informant.
• About 15 million people fled west in the five years after World War II, before the border was sealed.
• The former death strips are now protected wildlife habitat known as the European Green Belt.
• The Turkey-Armenia border, a southern segment of the curtain, remains closed.