Points

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 that 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".^[10] Under that theory, Soviet leaders therefore started preparations for a large-scale war of aggression. They officially declared an adherence to the theory of "Socialism in One Country" according to which socialism can win in a single country, without being immediately overthrown by hostile capitalist neighbors. The leading country would then help revolutionary movements in other countries. Either way, the Soviet prewar doctrine was based on the Marxism-Leninism theory that capitalism will be overthrown through communist revolution.
• The Soviet Union made extensive preparations for a future war of aggression in the 1920s and the 1930s. Suvorov provides an extensive analysis of Stalin's preparations for war. According to Suvorov, there were supposed to be three Five-Year Plan phases to prepare the Soviet Union for war. The first focused on collectivization, the second on industrialisation, and the third on the militarization of the country.
• 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 threat. 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.^[11] Moscow allowed the Germans to produce and test their weapons on Soviet territory, and some Red Army officers attended general-staff courses in Germany.^[11] The basis for that collaboration was the Treaty of Rapallo, signed between the two nations in 1922 and subsequent diplomatic interactions. The collaboration ended when the anticommunist Nazis took power in 1933. However, in 1932 and 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".^[11] 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 Soviet entry into World War II by attacking Nazi Germany and "liberating" and Sovietizing all of Europe. When he concluded 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"^[11] (see also Stalin's speech on August 19, 1939).
• According to Suvorov and others, Stalin always planned to exploit military conflict between the capitalist countries to his advantage. He said as early as 1925, "Struggles, conflicts and wars among our enemies are... our great ally... and the greatest supporter of our government and our revolution" and "If a war does break out, we will not sit with folded arms – we will have to take the field, but we will be last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive load on the scale".^[11]
• World War II was initiated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which became co-belligerents after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The essence of the pact was in the secret protocols, which divided Europe into spheres of influence and removed the Polish buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some countries that fell into the Soviet sphere of influence, Estonia and Latvia, were occupied. The difference between the smaller nations, occupied and annexed by the Soviets, and Poland, which was initially attacked by Germany, was that Poland had military assistance guarantees from the United Kingdom and France.
• Stalin planned to attack Nazi Germany from the rear in July 1941, only a few weeks after the date on which the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union took place. According to Suvorov, the Red Army had already redeployed from a defensive to an offensive stance. Suvorov also states that Stalin had made no major defensive preparations.
• Hitler's intelligence identified the Soviet preparations to attack Germany. Therefore, the Wehrmacht had drafted a pre-emptive war plan based on Hitler's orders as early as mid-1940, soon after the Soviet annexations of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. On June 22, 1941, the Axis began an assault on the Soviet Union.

The book is based on an analysis of Soviet military investments, diplomatic maneuvers, Politburo speeches and other circumstantial evidences.^[5]

"Suvorov debates"

The Suvorov thesis about the preemptive strike by Hitler has been strongly criticised by many scholars,^{[6] [15][16]} and the book was called "anti-Soviet"^[17] Most 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.^[18] Many historians have written in response to Suvorov's views; Gabriel Gorodetsky and David Glantz authored books debunking his claims.^[19][20][21] Suvorov received some support from Valeri Danilov, Joachim Hoffmann, Mikhail Meltyukhov and Vladimir Nevezhin.^[22][6]

Glantz argues that the Soviet Union simply was not ready for the war in the summer of 1941^[23] Robin Edmonds said that "the Red Army planning staff would not have been doing its job if it had not devoted some time between 1939 and 1941 to the possibility, at some future date, of a pre-emptive strike against Wehrmacht".^[24] David Brandenberger said that recently-published pre-1941 German analysis of Soviet military readiness came to conclusion that Soviet preparations were assessed to be "defensive" by German intelligence.^[25]

Public reception

The book was enthusiastically accepted by a fraction of a German society that hoped to reintroduce Hitler as a legitimate part of the patriotic historical discourse.^[26] In post-Soviet Russia, whose collapse of communist ideology coincided with the wave of criticism of Stalin's rule, the Icebreaker thesis about Stalin's responsibility for World War II outbreak and about Soviet plans for world conquest found a considerable support in many of society who wanted to disassociate themselves with the uncomfortable past.^[26]