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Swedish book "Behind Russia's iron curtain" from 1923In the 19th century, iron safety curtains were installed on theater stages to slow the spread of fire.. Perhaps the first recorded application of the term "iron curtain" to Soviet Russia was in Vasily Rozanov's 1918 polemic The Apocalypse of Our Time.
The fall of the Berlin Wall (German: Mauerfall, pronounced [ˈmaʊ̯ɐˌfal] ⓘ) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, marked the beginning of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain, as East Berlin transit restrictions were overwhelmed and discarded.
Part of the former "iron curtain" in Devínska Nová Ves, Bratislava. After the Second World War the original borders of Czechoslovakia were restored and special police units were established to protect the borders together with the army. At this time the main goal of the border protection force was to ensure that the expelled German civil ...
Unlike the Iron Curtain installations, most of the installations were unmanned and unarmed and were to be manned only in the case of war, by the regular army, although some of the light pillboxes could be used also by Border guard. Only the large fortresses were permanently crewed, by a specially trained heavy fortification company.
A 2009 poll conducted by Russia's VTsIOM, found that more than half of all Russians do not know who built the Berlin Wall. Ten percent of people surveyed thought Berlin residents built it themselves. Six percent said Western powers built it and four percent thought it was a "bilateral initiative" of the Soviet Union and the West. Fifty-eight ...
By the end of the Cold War, as many as 300 United States citizens were thought to have defected across the Iron Curtain for a variety of reasons [24] – whether to escape criminal charges, for political reasons, or because (as the St. Petersburg Times put it) "girl-hungry GIs [were tempted] with seductive sirens, who usually desert the love ...
Little remains of the inner German border's fortifications. Its route has been declared part of a European Green Belt linking national parks and nature reserves along the course of the old Iron Curtain from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. Museums and memorials along the old border commemorate the division and reunification of Germany and ...
Arriving in Berlin on Friday, June 12, 1987, Reagan and his wife were taken to the Reichstag where they viewed the wall from a balcony. [14] Reagan then gave his speech at the Brandenburg Gate at 2:00 p.m., in front of two panes of bulletproof glass shielding him from East Berlin. [15]