The physical and political Iron Curtain that divided Europe during the Cold War ceased to exist between 1989 and 1991, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While the original border no longer exists, some commentators refer to a "new" geopolitical, economic, and cultural barrier between Russia and the West.
The Iron Curtain collapsed through the Revolutions of 1989, beginning in Poland and spreading throughout Eastern Europe. This revolutionary wave culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
The Iron Curtain was a barrier that divided capitalist and communist nations. This barrier was not physical but instead economic and political. On one side of the curtain, most countries were communist, and on the other side, most were capitalist.
Events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with the Fall of communism in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Due to the decreased human activity around the physical border during the Cold War, natural biotopes were formed, now the European Green Belt.
What was the first country to break the Iron Curtain?
The first breach of the Iron Curtain which divided Communist Central and Eastern Europe from the West for over decades took place 20 years ago today. Just outside the Hungarian town of Sopron, Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock joined his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn in cutting the fence on 27 June 1989.
In the night of 23-24 August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact., known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The countries agreed that they would not attack each other and secretly divided the countries that lay between them. Germany claimed Western Poland and part of Lithuania.
The GDR ceased to exist when its five states ("Länder") joined the Federal Republic of Germany under Article 23 of the Basic Law, and its capital East Berlin united with West Berlin on 3 October 1990.
Overview. The Iron Curtain formed the imaginary boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
To reach the West in those times by crossing the Iron Curtain was known to be a near-impossible task, although not for lack of trying. Many an attempt was made: crawl under the Curtain by digging a tunnel, fly above the Curtain in a balloon, or crash through it with a lorry or a sturdy car.
The East Side Gallery is the longest remaining section of the Wall at 1.3km long (just short of 1 mile), and is the most popular place to see the Berlin Wall today. You can find the East Side Gallery between Berlin Ostbahnhof train station and Warschauer Strasse train station.
Presently, there are five states which are officially communist in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. In accordance with Marx's theory of the state, communists believe all state formations are under the control of a ruling class.
At 1.3 kilometres, the longest remaining section of the Wall is located on the Spree. The eastern side of the wall was painted by 118 artists from 21 countries, hence the name of the longest open-air gallery in the world.
The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
The term “iron curtain” had been employed as a metaphor since the 19th century, but Churchill used it to refer specifically to the political, military, and ideological barrier created by the U.S.S.R.
In some post-Soviet states which adopted decommunization laws banning Communist symbolism, publicly performing the Soviet anthem is illegal. For example, since 2015, offenders in Ukraine face up to five years in prison with the exception of Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine.
I'm not sure there was anything for Americans specifically (both америкос and пиндос seem modern), but there were general words for Westerners (which often meant Americans). The main one was "буржуй" (bourgeois): the term was so overused in propaganda that it started to get used for anything foreign.
In total, the Allies took about $413 million worth of reparations (both in money and in goods) from their occupation zones. In 1952, the London Agreement on German External Debts assessed the final reparation figure at $3 billion. Germany has yet to pay off its debts for World War II.
In the aftermath of World War II, Berlin was in ruins. Its population had been reduced by half, and nearly two-thirds of the city's 2.3 million citizens were women. Many of these German women -- known as Trummerfrauen, or "women of the rubble" -- worked hard to clean up and reclaim the city.
Yes, scientists have successfully analyzed Adolf Hitler's DNA from a blood-stained piece of fabric taken from the sofa where he died in 1945, allowing for the first identification and sequencing of his genome, which revealed genetic predispositions for certain conditions and debunked myths about his ancestry, as detailed in the 2025 documentary Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator.
Though he esteemed Jesus as an Aryan fighter against Jewish materialism who was martyred for his anti-Jewish stance, he did not ascribe to Jesus's death any significance in human salvation. Indeed, he did not believe in salvation at all in the Christian sense of the term, because he denied a personal afterlife.
Hitler had several close allies, but Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, and Martin Bormann, his powerful private secretary, were arguably the most consistently loyal and influential, with Goebbels a fervent ideological partner and Bormann gaining immense power over Hitler's inner circle and decisions; early on, Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, was also a very close friend until his elimination in 1934.
