The term "iron curtain" was used to describe the division of Europe during the Cold War. It referred to the boundary that separated the communist nations of Eastern Europe, which were under the influence of the Soviet Union, from the democratic nations of Western Europe. The term was first used by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a speech he gave in 1946, in which he warned of the growing threat of Soviet expansionism and the need for Western democracies to stand together to resist it. The Iron Curtain became a symbol of the Cold War and the ideological divide between the East and the West.