Snapshots in History: March 5: Remembering Winston Churchill and the Iron Curtain Speech
On March 5 and beyond, take a moment to remember an important footnote in post-World War Two history: Winston Churchill’s famous speech entitled “The Sinews of Peace” which he gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, U.S.A., on March 5, 1946. The speech is best known for its reference to an “iron curtain” that became a defining point in the Cold War between the western capitalist bloc of countries led by the United States and the eastern bloc of communist countries headed by the Soviet Union: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe…” In the speech, Winston Churchill also spoke of the special relationship between Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom and added that it would have been “…wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain, and Canada now share, to the world organization [i.e. United Nations Organization], while it is still in its infancy…”
Only some six months before on September 5, 1945, Soviet cypher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with proof of Soviet espionage activity in Canada, although the Canadian government only granted Gouzenko and his family political asylum on September 7, 1945 following an abortive attempt by Soviet officials to recapture him. As a follow-up to the Gouzenko Affair, the Canadian government arrested thirteen (13) suspects under the auspices of the War Measures Act on February 15, 1946. Following Winston Churchill’s March 5th speech, within the context of the Cold War, twenty-six (26) individuals were arrested in Canada on March 14, 1946 on spying charges, including Fred Rose, Canada’s only elected Member of Parliament for the Labour Progressive Party (i.e. Communist Party of Canada).
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