To the 75th anniversary of the Fulton speech

In March 1946, exactly 75 years ago, Winston Churchill read his famous Fulton speech, which he himself came up with the name - "The Muscles of the World."

This speech was not an impromptu speech, Churchill worked on it for a long time, honing every word.

And he spoke in all seriousness - he read from a piece of paper.

The result was a programmatic political document, which today, when we know how the history of mankind developed in the second half of the twentieth century, is perceived as a fundamental challenge of the collective West not to Stalin or even the USSR.

This is a challenge to historical Russia.

This document is rightly called the Cold War manifesto.

At the same time, the term "iron curtain", which he used in his speech, and the very idea that Eastern Europe, having fallen under the influence of the USSR, was cut off, fenced off from the "civilized world", belong not to him, but to the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels.

On February 23, in the newspaper Das Reich, he wrote: "After its victory, the USSR will fence off Europe with an iron curtain."

Churchill came to the United States not just as a private person: even after his resignation from the post of prime minister, he continued to be a major politician.

He came at the invitation of US President Truman.

That is why there are so many glorifications in his speech addressed to the United States as the hope of the entire "free world", as a bulwark of freedom and democracy.

So, to some extent, Churchill's speech gave a new impetus to the spread of ideas of American exceptionalism.

The events that we have been witnessing in America itself in recent years - a social crisis, a lack of unity in defining the future - and the reactions of Trump and Biden to these processes indicate that the great American myth, American messianism, is still alive in the minds of the American elite.

Despite the fact that the world has changed a long time ago. 

The opposition between the Soviet Union and the "free world" began, of course, before Churchill's speech at Fulton.

Let me remind you that in February the Military Historian Library of the RVIO was replenished with a unique document - the original of George Kennan's Long Telegram, which spoke of the need to take a tough stance towards the Soviet government.

The telegram, which was sent to all the main departments of the United States almost a month before Churchill's speech, contained practically all the theses that the British politician, with his inherent literary gift, voiced.  

The West methodically imposed the Cold War on the USSR.

However, what then, what today, to speak with our country the language of power is a completely hopeless occupation.

Thanks to the growing combat capability 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 leaders a la Churchill is designed mainly for themselves, for their own ordinary voters.