Iron Curtain
The closed border that divided communist Eastern Europe from the West during the Cold War.
Origin
Coined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.' It defined Cold War geography for forty years, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Modern usage
Used for any hard ideological or informational divide. 'A digital iron curtain' often describes the Great Firewall of China or other state-imposed splits in the internet.
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