THE IRON CURTAIN DESCENDS...
On March 5th, 1946, on the heels of World War II, Winston Churchill, England’s Prime Minister, gave a speech that marked the beginning of what would come to be known as The Cold War. He firmly stated, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” The strong curtain Churchill spoke of was the ideological divide between Western capitalism and Russian Communism that was spreading across the globe.
Prime Minister of England Winston Churchill. 1942. Library of Congress Print and Photographs.
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THE IRON CURTAIN DESCENDS...
In 1848, the German philosopher Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. Russia, then ruled by a monarchy, was rife with restless peasants and discontented industrial workers, making the environment ripe for Marx’s theories of equality. Communism is a political ideology that has informed a type of government where the state owns all major resources, such as property, education, manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation. Simply put, the core idea of communism is that everyone shares the benefits of labor equally in a society so that, in theory, the class system is eliminated. As Marx predicted, worker discontent grew in Russia with the government squashing uprisings across the countryside in response to unfair and punitive government actions. Marx’s Manifesto, combined with very poor living conditions in Russia, sparked a revolution. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party led the October Revolution, in which the monarchy was overthrown and a provisional government was established. In 1924, dictator Joseph Stalin took power and formed the Soviet Union, guiding the country through
