Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s

3. The Western Wall: The Iron Curtain Recast in Midsummer 1951

3 THE WESTERN WALL The Iron Curtain Recast in Midsummer  Nick Rutter In August , the world seemed to be turning red. The Korean peninsula had suffered three invasions in five months, the last by the world’s largest and most recently communized country. For the newly established Union française—France’s postwar euphemism for its prewar empire—the candle was alight at both ends. In Indochina, arms shipments from the anticolonial United States were effective but indecisive against the Viet Minh. In France, the Communist Party won over  percent of the National Assembly vote in June . And across central Europe the debate over whether an “Iron Curtain” in fact existed—and if it did, to which side the curtain belonged—was in full bloom. The debate began on March , , when former prime minister Winston Churchill borrowed a theater term to describe the barrier which had “descended across the Continent,” “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” A few days later Joseph Stalin responded nonplussed, asking Pravda readers: If “the Soviet Union has lost in men several times more than Britain and the United States together . . . [w]hat can be surprising in the fact that the Soviet Union, in a desire to ensure its security for the future,” assists governments “loyal” to it? To Stalin’s subordinates, the argument was familiar. Shortly after the Yalta Conference of February , Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, annoyed at Western meddling in Polish politics, jotted on an internal report: “How governments The author thanks the editors for outstanding suggestions as well as the Fox International Fellowship and Smith Richardson Foundation for enabling me to visit a variety of institutional archives. western wall 79 are being organized in Belgium, France, Greece, etc. we do not know”; nor “[have we] interfered, because it is the Anglo-American zone of military action.” That April, Stalin reportedly told Yugoslav allies Josip Tito and Milovan Djilas: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” To communists, Churchill’s objection to Soviet-modeled governments in the Soviet “sphere of influence” was not only impractical ; it was hypocritical. Had Britain not banned India’s Communist Party (CPI) for two full decades (from  to ), relenting only when CPI leaders pledged to support the war? Had Churchill’s and Harry Truman’s democracy-builders not favored “loyal” parties along their own “iron curtain ,” from Kiel in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic? To communist ears, Churchill’s roar against “police government” was late capitalism’s cry of desperation. Considering the backlash that Churchill’s address triggered in the world communist press, it is reasonable to assume that Soviet propagandists disliked his metaphor. In fact, Soviet editors added “zheleznyi zanaves ” (iron curtain) to their political lexicon and did little to change its meaning. A widely publicized September  speech by Soviet Minister of Culture Andrei Zhdanov promised that “[h]owever much bourgeois politicians and literary figures . . . try to erect an iron curtain through which the truth about the Soviet Union cannot reach abroad,” and “however much they try to belittle the real growth and sweep of Soviet culture —all such attempts are doomed to failure.” Zhdanov did not repress or redefine Churchill’s term; instead, he recast it. In the East as in the West, the curtain was a barrier built to shield police-state citizens from democracy. The dispute was over which side was which. Five years later, in midsummer , the curtain followed a slightly different route (east of Yugoslavia), and the debate, though still hot, spoke more simply. Whereas Churchill had associated the curtain with political philosophy, and Zhdanov with “the truth,” propaganda now showed pictures of barbed wire, mines, and watchtowers. What had been a border between rival modes of government had become a breach of Article  of the United Nations’  Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the “right to leave any country, including [one’s] own, and to return.” In summer , the New Yorker’s Joseph Wechsberg recounted how in order to get to Bucharest he first had to go to Vienna’s Romanian embassy (visa applications available Wednesdays and Saturdays, noon to two); next to the 80 rutter Hungarian embassy (visa required for passage to the Romanian border); and finally to the headquarters of the Soviet Occupation Zone (a travel...