User blog comment:Master Sima Yi/Assassins vs. Templars: Cold War./@comment-1902784-20110328025814/@comment-1902784-20110329135146
Lenin didn't really turn against Stalin until he was on his deathbed and with Stalin rapidly filling the power vaccuum left behind, he managed to do an excellent job of making sure Lenin's pleas fell on deaf ears.
As for the Cold War, the most significant and powerful impact of it was that it completely and utterly turned the populace against capitalism. The threat of a future World War and the risk of the "evil security state" created by Stalin spreading was enough to make people fight virulantly to resist it. In America McCarthy began a purging of all Communists in the state that was compared to the Salem witch hunts, in Australia the government attempted to ban the Communist Party and countless countries joined in the Vietnam War to stop the 'Domino Theory', which stated that if Vietnam willfully CHOSE to become Communist then countless other Asian countries would as well. In Cuba, America launched COUNTLESS assassination attempts against Castro, while they also deployed the military into various regions of Latin America to coerce them into rejecting communism. Countless dictators were set up by America because despite their inherent evil they were still fierce opponents of communism.
As such I strongly believe that in the context of Assassin's Creed that the Cold War was a faux war, much in the same vein of WWII. Whilst WWII served to distract the populace and put Templars in control of all major governments, the Cold War served to blunt the eventual Assassin counter-attack in which they supported the spread of communism. I hope this helps.
Actually I feel I should add another aspect, this time on the Communist side. After Stalin took power the policies he made were followed by the Communist bloc to the letter, and the various "satellite states" were more like puppet states. East Germany, one of the major focal points for the Cold War in particular was heavily influenced by Russia and much like them created a secret police the likes of which the world has never seen (the assembled records of the Stasi can actually wrap around the whole world 3 times I believe). Stalin not only would have managed to poison the public perception against communism to prevent its spread, he also riddled the Communist factions in all the pre-existing countries with Templars or Templar puppets to ensure the downfall of those countries which had already sprung into existence.