The Soviet offensive plans controversy was a debate among historians as to whether Joseph Stalin had planned to launch an attack against Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. The controversy began with the 1988 book Icebreaker: Who started the Second World War? by former Soviet defector and UK resident Viktor Suvorov. In it, he claimed that Stalin used Nazi Germany as a proxy to attack Europe.
Suvorov's main argument, that the Soviet government was planning to launch an offensive campaign against Nazi Germany, has been widely criticized as a historical distortion. The majority of historians believe Stalin sought to avoid war in 1941 because he believed his military was not prepared to fight German forces, though historians disagree on why Stalin persisted with his appeasement strategy of Nazi Germany despite mounting evidence of an impending German invasion.
Policies of Stalin 1930-1941
The policies of Stalin contributed to the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which killed millions, including in the Holodomor in Ukraine. Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin executed hundreds of thousands of his real and perceived political opponents in the Great Purge. Under his regime, an estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system of forced labour camps, and more than six million people, including kulaks and entire ethnic groups, were deported to remote areas of the country.
The Soviets faced a threat in the east from the expansionist Japanese in the latter part of the 1930s. The Soviet–Japanese border conflicts culminated in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939. Stalin initiated a military build-up, with the Red Army more than doubling between January 1939 and June 1941. In haste many of its officers were poorly trained. Between 1940 and 1942 Stalin purged the military, leaving it with a severe shortage of trained officers.
In August 1939, the Soviet Union (Stalin) and Nazi Germany (Hitler) signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe. On 1 September, Germany started the Invasion of Poland, leading the UK and France to declare war only on Germany. On 17 September the Red Army invaded eastern Poland. On 30 November 1939, the Soviets started invading Finland, starting the Winter War. Despite numerical inferiority, the Finns kept the Red Army at bay. Embarrassed by their inability to defeat the Finns, Stalin signed an interim peace treaty (12 March 1940). In June 1940, while the German Wehrmacht defeated France (Battle of France), the Red Army occupied the Baltic states, which were forcibly merged into the Soviet Union in August. They also invaded and annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, parts of Romania. The speed of the German victory over and occupation of France in mid-1940 took Stalin by surprise. He seemingly focused on appeasement in order to delay conflict. In spring of 1941, Stalin concluded that relations with Germany had deteriorated to such an extent that he needed to become de jure head of government as well, and on 6 May, replaced Molotov as Premier of the Soviet Union.
The Stalin Line fortifications along the western border of the Soviet Union were dismantled in favour of constructing the Molotov Line further west, along the new border of the USSR (Curzon Line). The Axis invasion starting on 22 June 1941 caught the Red Army with the new line unfinished and the Stalin Line largely abandoned and in disrepair, neither was of much use.
Debate
Historians have debated whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the summer of 1941. The debate began in the late 1980s when Viktor Suvorov published a journal article and later the book Icebreaker in which he claimed that Stalin had seen the outbreak of war in Western Europe as an opportunity to spread communist revolutions throughout the continent, and that the Soviet military was being deployed for an imminent attack at the time of the German invasion. This view had also been advanced by former German generals following the war. Suvorov's thesis was fully or partially accepted by a limited number of historians, including Valeri Danilov, Joachim Hoffmann, Mikhail Meltyukhov, and Vladimir Nevezhin and attracted public attention in Germany, Israel, and Russia. It has been strongly rejected by most historians and Icebreaker is generally considered to be an "anti-Soviet tract" in Western countries. David Glantz and Gabriel Gorodetsky wrote books to rebut Suvorov's arguments. The majority of historians believe that Stalin was seeking to avoid war in 1941, as he believed that his military was not ready to fight the German forces.
According to Professor Alexander Hill, it is currently (2012) believed that whereas the war against "capitalist powers" was seen as potentially inevitable by Soviet leadership, the Soviet Union was making some preparations for war, and the Soviet pursuit for a collective security system in Europe ("Litvinov's line") was sincere in the late 1930s, the event that triggered active Soviet war preparations was the rapid collapse of the Anglo-French alliance in June 1940. British historian Evan Mawdsley wrote in his book "Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945": "Stalin and the Soviet high command were aware of the scale of the German build-up, but they believed they had matched it and that the Red Army could deal with an invasion, if it came to that. ... Stalin knew that large German forces had been deployed along the Soviet frontier. What he did not know was what Hitler intended to do with them, and he made a fatal misjudgement: he assumed that there was no plan to attack Russia in the near future. ... Stalin’s key assumption was perhaps that German policy was undecided, but that rash Soviet action could bring about an unnecessary, or at least premature, war with the Reich."
Suvorov, Icebreaker
Vladimir Rezun, a former officer of the Soviet military intelligence who had defected to the UK, writing under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov, justified the claim in his 1988 book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War First published in English as Originally published as and again in several subsequent books: M Day, The Last Republic, Cleansing, Suicide, The Shadow of Victory, I Take my words Back, The Last Republic II, The Chief Culprit, and Defeat. Day "M" () Suicide. For what reason did Hitler attack the Soviet Union? (), Moscow, ACT, 2000, The Last Republic, ACT, 1997, Cleansing (). Purification. Why did Stalin behead his army?, Moscow, 2002, Last Republic II. Why did the Soviet Union lose the Second World War? (), Sofia, Fakel Express, 2007, . Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008 (hardcover, ). Defeat. Why was the "great victory" worse than any defeat? (), Sofia, Fakel Express, 2009, He argued that Soviet ground forces were well-organized and mobilized en masse along the German–Soviet frontier for a Soviet invasion of Europe slated for Sunday, 6 July 1941 but were unprepared to defend their own territory.
One of Suvorov's pieces of evidence favoring the theory of an impending Soviet attack was his claim regarding the maps and phrasebooks issued to Soviet troops. Military topographic maps, unlike other military supplies, are strictly local and cannot be used elsewhere than in the intended operational area. Suvorov claims Soviet units were issued with maps of Germany and German-occupied territory, and phrasebooks including questions about SA offices—SA offices were found only in German territory proper. In contrast, maps of Soviet territory were scarce. Notably, after the German attack, the officer responsible for maps, Lieutenant General Mikhail Kudryavtsev, was not punished by Stalin, who was known for extreme punishments after failures to obey his orders. According to Suvorov, this demonstrates that Kudryavtsev was obeying the orders of Stalin, who simply did not expect a German attack.
Suvorov offers as another piece of evidence the extensive effort Stalin took to conceal general mobilization by manipulating the laws setting the conscription age. That allowed Stalin to provide the expansive build-up of the Red Army. Since there was no universal military draft in the Soviet Union until 1939, by enacting the universal military draft on 1 September 1939 (the date World War II had begun), and by changing the minimum age for joining the Red Army from 21 to 18, Stalin triggered a mechanism which achieved a dramatic increase in the military strength of the Red Army.
This specific law on mobilization allowed the Red Army to increase its army of 1,871,600 men in 1939 to 5,081,000 in the spring of 1941 under secrecy to avoid alarming the rest of the world.
Suvorov's main points include the following:
The Soviet Union was intrinsically unstable. It had to expand to survive. According to Suvorov's interpretation of the permanent revolution theory, the communist system had to expand and occupy the entire world to survive. Otherwise, the system would fail in a peaceful and/or military struggle with surrounding "capitalist" countries. Stalin and other Soviet leaders opposed this and high-ranking officials who supported "permanent revolution" were purged from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Stalin publicly declared that "the ultimate victory of socialism... can only be achieved on an international scale".Pravda, 14 February 1938, cited in Previously published as Originally published as Stalin escalated tensions in Europe by providing a combination of economic and military support to Weimar Germany, and later to Nazi Germany (see Germany–Soviet Union relations before 1941). After World War I, the Entente attempted to impose severe restrictions on Weimar Germany to prevent it from rearming and again becoming a significant military competitor. During "the early 1920s until 1933, the Soviet Union was engaged in secret collaboration with the German military to enable it to circumvent the provisions of the Versailles Treaty", which limited Germany's military production. Moscow allowed the Germans to produce and test their weapons on Soviet territory, while some Red Army officers attended general-staff courses in Germany. The basis for this collaboration was the Treaty of Rapallo, signed between the two nations in 1922, and subsequent diplomatic interactions. This collaboration ended when the anti-communist Nazis took power in 1933. But, according to Suvorov, in the years 1932–1933, "Stalin helped Hitler come to power by forbidding German Communists to make common cause with the Social Democrats against the Nazis in parliamentary elections". Suvorov claims that Stalin's plan and vision was that Hitler's predictability and his violent reactionary ideas made him a candidate for the role of "icebreaker" for the Communist revolution. By starting wars with European countries, Hitler would validate the USSR's entry into World War II by attacking Nazi Germany and "liberating" and Sovietising all of Europe. When concluding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, Stalin "clearly counted on the repetition of the 1914–1918 war of attrition, which would leave the "capitalist" countries so exhausted that the USSR could sweep into Europe virtually unopposed" (see also Stalin's speech of 19 August 1939).