On 5 March 1947, during his stay in Fulton, Missouri in the United States, Winston Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speech: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow." These words changed the way the democratic West viewed the Communist East and are often considered as the symbolic beginning of the Cold War.