Write a detailed note on "Iron Curtain"

The Iron Curtain was the ideological border separating the European states that embraced democracy and capitalism (the so-called Western Bloc, led by the United States) from the European states that applied communism as their form of government, and were led by the Soviet Union (forming the Eastern Bloc), in the Cold War.

After World War II up to the revolutions in 1989, it formed the dividing line between the market-oriented democratic states in the west and the planned, socialist dictatorships in the east. After Yugoslavia's turn away from the Soviet Union in 1948, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria isolated themselves from Yugoslavia at their borders in a similar way to that of the "capitalist" states.