Soviet offensive plans controversy

The Soviet offensive plans controversy refers to the debate among historians on the question of whether Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was planning to attack Axis forces in Eastern Europe prior to Operation Barbarossa.

While most agree that Stalin made extensive preparations for an eventual war and exploited the military conflict in Europe to his advantage, the assertions that he planned to attack Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941, and that Barbarossa was a preemptive strike by Adolf Hitler, are generally discounted according to David M. Glantz. However most historians agree that war between the Soviet Union and the Axis was inevitable due to their vast ideological differences.

Immediately after the Axis invasion of the USSR during World War II, Adolf Hitler asserted that the Soviet Red Army had made extensive preparations for an offensive war in Europe, thus justifying the German invasion as a preemptive strike. After the Second World War, this view was supported by some Wehrmacht leaders, like Wilhelm Keitel.

In the 1980s Vladimir Rezun, a former officer of the Soviet military intelligence and a defector to the UK, reiterated and explored this claim in his 1987 book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War (written using the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov), and in several subsequent books. He argued that Soviet ground-forces were extremely well organized, and were mobilizing en masse along the German-Soviet frontier for a Soviet invasion of Europe slated for Sunday, July 6, 1941, but they were totally unprepared for defensive operations on their own territory.

...
Wikipedia