About This Location
The Iron Curtain was a term used to describe the division of Europe during the Cold War (1945–1991). There were two opposing sides: the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the Western Bloc, led by the United States. The split between the two sides was due to ideological, political, and physical reasons. Barriers like the Berlin Wall contributed to limiting movement and communication.
The fall of the Iron Curtain began in the late 1980s when countries in Eastern Europe, due to pro-democracy movements and economic hardship, started to reject communism. The toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the division. The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the Iron Curtain's final fall.
The Lenin statue in Fremont became a relic of history after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Sculpted over a decade by Emil Venkov, under commission from the Soviet government, the 16-foot-tall, 7-ton bronze statue was originally displayed in the town of Poprad, in present-day Slovakia. Unlike typical portrayals of Lenin holding a book or waving his hat, this statue uniquely (and deliberately) depicts him surrounded by guns and flames. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the statue was toppled and placed into storage. It was ultimately left face-down in a scrapyard.
In the early 1990s, Lewis Carpenter, an American teacher and entrepreneur from Issaquah, Washington, spotted the statue in the scrapyard. Envisioning it as a bold statement piece for an Eastern European restaurant he dreamed of opening, Carpenter purchased the statue for around $13,000 and arranged for its shipment to the United States. He tragically passed away in an accident before he could make his dream a reality. In 1995, his family had the statue placed in the Fremont neighborhood. Locals often decorate it for holidays, special events, or protests, making it an evolving and interactive art piece.
The Berlin Wall was a major symbol of the Iron Curtain and represented the divide between East and West Germany. It was brought down by citizens on November 9, 1989. This was one in a series of events that started the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and German reunification. The wall was later dismantled and pieces were distributed worldwide.
Fremont's section of the wall arrived in 2001 to commemorate the role of Seattle and Boeing in the Berlin Airlift. The airlift was a vital operation in which American, British, and French forces air-dropped food and other items to the residents of West Berlin that had been cut off by the Soviet blockade from June 26, 1948, to September 30, 1949.
Together, these symbols of the Iron Curtain, and its ultimate fall, add a bit of history to the Fremont neighborhood.