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The Iron Curtain was the symbolic, ideological, and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. At both sides of the Iron Curtain, the states developed their own international economic and military alliances: the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact on the east side with the Soviet Union as most important member, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Community on the west with the United States.
The Iron Curtain took the shape of border defences between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe, most notably the Berlin Wall, which served as a longtime symbol of the Curtain altogether.
The Iron curtain started to be demolished in Hungary during the summer of 1989 (see Paneuropean picnic of August 19, opening of August 23), when thousands of Eastern Germans started (September 11) to emigrate to West Germany via Hungary, causing consequently the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Earlier in Poland was first free elections on 4th of June 1989. In this elections won Solidarnosc and Poland in that time was first, in Eastern Europe, eased republic from Soviet Authority.
Warsaw Pact countries to the east of the Iron Curtain are shaded red. NATO members to the west of it are shaded blue. Militarily neutral countries are shaded grey. Yugoslavia (shaded green), although communist-run, was independent of the Eastern Bloc. Similarly, communist Albania broke with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, aligning itself with the People's Republic of China after the Sino-Soviet split.