Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech

Context

As a seasoned politician in the Liberal Party and the British coalition government in 1917 and 1918, Winston Churchill had definite opinions on the rise of Communism in Russia—he wanted it ended. The distinguishing characteristic of Bolshevik Communism as a utopian vision, in his opinion, was its reliance on violence in order to achieve its ends, and this violence had to be curtailed. As Allied troops were sent to the northern Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk to support the forces in opposition to the Bolshevik Red Army, Churchill insisted that they have a clear purpose: to destroy the Bolsheviks before their ideology and power could spread. Yet Europeans and Americans seemed opposed to the idea, and politicians in the British coalition government dismissed Churchill's concerns. Partly this was because of earlier failures in military strategy perpetuated by Churchill during World War I, which had lessened his reputation for levelheaded decision making; partly it was the result of Churchill's bombastic denunciations of the Bolshevik regime, which seemed hysterical. Arthur Balfour, the British coalition government's foreign secretary, once remarked to Churchill sarcastically, “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth” (MacMillan, p. 67).

Eventually, Allied troops were withdrawn, and the Red Army overran the Russian Empire's former territories to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. Because of war, famine, disease, and political executions, some ten million people had died in the five years since the Bolshevik revolution began. The late 1920s and 1930s brought the First Five-Year Plan, which saw the “liquidation”—murder—of millions of successful peasants, particularly in the Ukraine. When Churchill asked the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin for his own approximation of how many had died, Stalin estimated another ten million. Finally, in the late 1930s, Stalin launched purges of the Communist Party and the army, which likely led to the death of yet another one and a half million.

In other words, Churchill had been right about the Bolsheviks, yet by the 1930s virtually no one in British politics much cared. His rhetoric in speeches had made the Soviets appear to be a deadly menace, but he had applied the same language of vituperation to the rise of the Labour Party in Britain and to other political events, especially the Indian independence movement led by Mohandas Gandhi. Basically, Churchill had little sense of political or rhetorical moderation; everything he opposed took on the aura of imminent danger and evil in his speeches. His long-standing reputation for impulsiveness and poor judgment was only fortified by the literate and forceful orations he made in defense of his opinions.

Thus, when another menace to parliamentary democracy and freedom arose in the form of Nazism in Germany, most British politicians ignored Churchill's warnings against the British government's policies of military disarmament and appeasement of the German chancellor Adolf Hitler as an aggressor. Churchill outlined his rigid political opposition to Nazi expansion in a magnificent speech at the time of the Munich agreement in October 1938, which permitted Germany to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland; as usual, his words were met mostly with hostility. Then Hitler's armies invaded the whole of Czechoslovakia, and opinion began to turn in Churchill's direction. By September 1939, Britain was at war with Germany for the second time in twenty-five years, and suddenly Churchill seemed like a prophet as opposed to a pariah.

Churchill became prime minister in May 1940; the man had finally met his hour. As the American journalist Edward R. Murrow put it, Churchill “mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle” (Churchill, 1989, p. 11); for once, no matter how strident his claims about the nation's enemies, they were all true. As director of the British government and the war effort, Churchill proved more pragmatic than he had been in past political situations. Most critically, when Nazi armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Churchill offered an immediate alliance to Stalin's government.

As the war continued and Churchill met with Stalin, he found that they had much in common. Being a nineteenth-century imperialist himself, he understood Stalin's desire to reacquire old territories in Eastern Europe and to secure for himself a buffer against further German aggression in the future. In Moscow in October 1944, he sat down with Stalin at a dinner table and, on a cocktail napkin, drew up a list of names of European countries with percentages listed next to them that were linked to the names “Britain” and “Russia.” In essence, he divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence so successfully that Stalin took out a blue pencil and placed a large check mark on it to signify his approval. Thus was the rough draft of the fate of Eastern Europe determined as a Communist bloc.

At the end of the war, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union created a formal division of Europe along geographic lines, based mostly on where their armies had met on the battlefield. The Soviets controlled Eastern Europe, as Churchill had projected; the United States and Britain controlled Western Europe. Germany was divided into four zones (including a French-occupied zone), and the capital, Berlin, sitting in the Soviet zone, was split four ways as well. According to agreements made at the wartime Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, free elections were to be held in every European country, and Germany would be reunited under a single government. In 1946 this still seemed like a reasonable expectation as Europe rebuilt itself and was confronted with the details of the Holocaust, confirming all of Churchill's rhetoric about the Nazis.

Churchill himself was turned out of office in July 1945 by the British electorate, to the shock of the rest of the world. Perhaps he had been a great wartime leader, but in the effort to rebuild Britain from the ashes of the war, most British voters saw him as entirely unsuitable; his election loss was the second-largest parliamentary turnaround of the twentieth century. His long-term career as a politician had not been forgotten by the British people—but neither had his wartime heroism, and that had gained him an even larger and deserved status as the visionary who had foreseen victory over evil. To that end, he was invited to deliver the seventh John Findley Green lecture at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. In it, he would surprise his audience by returning briefly to discussion of an old menace, Communism, which many Americans did not truly consider a threat in 1946. They would find soon after that Churchill's rhetoric had once again described an enemy whose dangers could not be exaggerated.