Why was the iron curtain named like that?

Answer 1

The basis behind the "Iron Curtain" can actually be pinned on a speech by Winston Churchill. Considered a jarring and startling speech at the time, the Iron Curtain was a two-fold metaphor. The Soviet Union, a Communist state, had outright occupied an enormous section of the whole of Europe; virtually everything east of Berlin, down to around Turkey and Greece, and the borders of Mongolia and China, were occupied by a regime whose iron handed Dictatorship had as much notoriety as the man the Allies just fought to depose: Adolf Hitler.

The "Iron Curtain" was named for Stalin's iron handed strategy [Stalin's namesake comes from the Georgian word for steel, or rather the prepositional phrase 'of-steel']. It also was named so for its foreboding aspect, as the Soviet Union's swath across the whole of Europe was with armored columns. The Soviet Union had immense industrial power, and the Soviet's pride in its civilian "army" of industrial workers, made the Iron Curtain analogy appropriate.

The "Iron Curtain" in whole, was an analogy by Winston Churchill, which stuck with the West and the civic populace, as it identified their opponent in terms they comprehended well: stark, overbearing, and tyrannical people who sought to depose 'their' freedom: an iron curtain. It made a great label and thus the name was kept.