The Iron Curtain was an imaginary boundary dividing Europe between the forces of capitalism in Western Europe and the forces of communism in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1991 during the Cold War. The Iron Curtain stretched from Szeczin in the Baltics to Trieste in the Adriatic Sea, and the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc was divided by the wall for decades following the end of World War II; the Iron Curtain was created when the Soviet Army and the US Army met up along the Elbe River in Germany in May 1945. The "Curtain" would dissolve in 1989 after several revolutions across Eastern Europe, and the fall of the USSR led to the end of the Cold War in 1991.