Iron Curtain and Containment
In February 1946, Joseph Stalin made a speech in which he declared that communism would ultimately defeat capitalism. But Stalin did not want to get his devastated country involved in another war, especially with the United States. He turned to the Communist Party to spread chaos and trouble in the political vacuum that was postwar Europe.
Stalin’s words and actions concerned Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister. Churchill urged the United States to resist the Soviets’ efforts to dominate Europe. He feared the development of an “Iron Curtain” of Communist control, isolating Eastern Europe (the Communist-controlled countries) from Western Europe and the rest of the world. Thus, the Cold War broke out between the free nations of the West and Communist-dominated nations of the East. This struggle between the two camps existed until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
