Raymond J. de Souza: Churchill’s warning about the Russian threat still resonates, 80 years later

DEVÍN, Slovakia — The name lasted much longer than the reality. Which is perhaps not surprising given who did the naming.

It was 80 years ago that Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Mo. — formally titled, “The Sinews of Peace.” The Iron Curtain itself would be torn down 43 years later. While the Berlin Wall was its archetypal symbol, there were other points of maximum opportunity — and mortal danger.

Devín, in western Slovakia, draws visitors today due to the impressive ruins of Devín Castle, which tower above the town. (Napoleon’s retreating armies tore it down in 1809.) During the Cold War, some came here for other reasons — to make a break for freedom, or to break those who desired to be free.

Some of the more important folds of the Iron Curtain fell here, at the confluence of the Morava River and the Danube. Cross either river from what was then Czechoslovakia and there was freedom in Austria. The border was thus heavily fortified, complete with communist police and their barbed wire and their dogs.

The Morava is perhaps 15 metres wide here, a short but perilous crossing. There is a monument now to the 400 people shot dead who tried to cross. It records that Queen Elizabeth II visited in 2008, honouring their memory.

Churchill was not yet Her Late Majesty’s first prime minister when he travelled to Missouri to speak in 1946. Indeed, he was not even Sir Winston. U.S. President Harry Truman made the trip from Washington, D.C., to his home state to fete Churchill, less than a year after Churchill lost the July 1945 election. Still leader of the Opposition, Churchill was nevertheless in valedictory mode, albeit prematurely.

“The president has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times,” Churchill began. “I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom, and feel the more right to do so because any private ambitions I may have cherished in my younger days have been satisfied beyond my wildest dreams.”

The old man still had dreams, in fact. He returned to the premiership in 1951, and the knighthood would follow in 1953. But he spoke in 1946 with remarkable clarity about threats to peace, permitting himself to observe that had those in power paid heed to his warnings about Nazi Germany in the 1930s, war might have been avoided altogether.

Less than a year before the Iron Curtain speech, Britain, Canada and the United States were allies of the Soviet Union in war.

“I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” Churchill allowed, speaking of the need to “welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world.”

Nevertheless, Churchill felt obliged to “place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.”

Communist tyranny was the new threat, and thus the lapidary phrase:

“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. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

Here in Devín, it is the inclusion of Vienna that resonates. Until 1955, when Austria was granted independence, Vienna was similar to Berlin, administered by the four allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In 1946, a Berlin-like future was a possibility, with perhaps a wall in Vienna, the city of the waltz.

The free world instead faced the enslaved nations along the Czechoslovakian-Austrian border, along the Morava and the Danube. From the heights of Devín Castle, it is possible to see both Bratislava, and the outskirts of Vienna in the distance. A scenic, tranquil, 45-minute catamaran ride separates them today; during the Cold War the waters were rife with suspicion and terror.

It ought to be possible to see with greater clarity here, from the heights, as clearly as Churchill did, “the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people: war and tyranny.”

Yet in Slovakia, the government prefers not to see the reality of the Russian threat, immediately to the peace and security of Ukraine, and more broadly to the peace and security of Europe.

Churchill warned in 1946 about the threat of aggressive Russian imperialism. It had survived the fall of the tsar and rise of the Bolsheviks. It has survived anew the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a gangster state.

The line no longer runs between Austria and Slovakia, and Ukrainian courage these last years likely means that the line will remain far to the east. That courage is rooted in strategic wisdom and moral clarity. At the confluence of the Morava and Danube both were required for many years, and both prevailed in part because the warnings of Churchill, who had been ignored in the ’30s, were heeded in 1946.

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