The Cold War in five headlines

1946

Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill — by then out of office — told his audience that an iron curtain had descended across the continent. The phrase was not new, but this was the speech that fixed it in the language, and it is usually taken as the moment the Cold War acquired its vocabulary.

1959

Fulgencio Batista left Havana in the early hours of New Year's Day and Fidel Castro's forces took the capital within days. An island ninety miles from Florida changed sides, and the consequences ran through the next three decades — the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, and a trade embargo that outlasted the Soviet Union itself.

1968

Alexander Dubček’s attempt at "socialism with a human face" lasted eight months. On the night of 20 August, Warsaw Pact troops crossed the border and the Prague Spring was over. The invasion cost Moscow a great deal of sympathy among Western communists, many of whom never came back.

1989

The border opened on the evening of 9 November, after an East German spokesman was asked when new travel rules would take effect and answered, apparently from confusion, that they applied immediately. Crowds gathered at the checkpoints, the guards had no orders, and the barriers went up.

1991

Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on 25 December and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin that evening, replaced by the Russian tricolour. The state that had defined half a century of world politics stopped existing the following day, forty-five years and nine months after Churchill's speech in Fulton.