People referred to the border that separated the Soviet Union and the communist countries of Eastern Europe from the Western European countries as the Iron Curtain. the Iron Curtain the name that was used for the border between the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe. Political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. Winston Churchill employed the term in a speech in Fulton, Mo., U.S., about the division of Europe in 1946. The restrictions and the rigidity of the Iron Curtain eased slightly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, though the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 restored them. The Iron Curtain largely ceased to exist in 1989-90 with the communists' abandonment of one-party rule in eastern Europe