FOR THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SINEWS OF PEACE SPEECH

Vladimir Medinsky, Aide to the President of the Russian Federation, Chairman of Russian Military Historical Society

In March 1946, exactly 75 years ago, Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech, that he himself called "The Muscles for Peace". It wasn’t an impromptu speech, Churchill worked on it for a long time, honing each word. He spoke in all seriousness - read it off a sheet of paper.

In the end we had a programmatic political document which today, when we know how human history developed in the second half of the XXth century, is perceived as a fundamental challenge to the collective West, not to Stalin and not even to the USSR. But as a challenge to historical Russia.
This document is rightly called the Cold War manifesto.

However, the term "The Iron Curtain" that he used in his speech and the very idea that Eastern Europe, having fallen under the influence of the USSR, will be cut off from the "civilized world" belong not to him, but to Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich. On February 23 he wrote in the newspaper “Das Reich”, "After its victory the USSR will fence off Europe with an iron curtain.

Churchill didn’t come to the United States simply as a private actor: even after resigning as prime minister, he continued to be a major politician. He came at the invitation of US President Truman. This is why in his speech he referred to the USA as the hope of the whole "free world", as a bastion of freedom and democracy. So to some extent Churchill's speech gave new impetus to the spread of ideas of American exceptionalism.

The events we’ve seen in recent years in America - the social crisis, the lack of unity in defining the future, and the reactions to those processes by both Trump and Biden show that the great American myth, American Messianism, is still alive in the minds of the American elite. Despite the fact that the world has long changed since then.

The opposition between the Soviet Union and the "free world" began long before Churchill's Fulton speech. Let me remind you that in February the RMHS Military Historian's Library was enriched by a unique document - the authentic "Long Telegram" by George Kennan, which told about the need to take a tough stance on the Soviet government. The telegram, which almost a month before Churchill's speech was sent to all major U.S. departments, contained practically all the statements which the British politician recited.

The West methodically imposed the Cold War on the USSR. However, it’s pointless to talk to our country in the language of force. It was pointless back then and it’s still pointless today. Thanks to the growing combat efficiency of the Russian army, the growing influence of the Russian state in the world, the spread of ideas of traditional values, partnership and integrity, today any rhetoric of Western figures a la Churchill is mainly aimed at themselves, at their own voters.