Did Stalin plan to steamroll Europe in 1941?

[Oleander Ardens]

Well I will try to do so, although the book lives mostly from the sheer number of details...

- the training of a huge number of paratroopers, vastly more than all other countries togheter
- the destruction of defenselines and the construction of roads through them
- the development of a tank able to throw of it's chains -> very unpractible on russian territory, but perfect for the western roadsystem
- the use of standard motors instead of diesel ones, even if the latter were superior -> all fuelstations in western Europe were only prepared for the first type of fuel
- the dissolution of "partisan"-units, trained for the guerillia warfare
- the construction of frontlines and artillery positions very similar to the german ones
- the concentration of the troops directly near the frontline -> only suited for offensive warfare
- the construction of light attack bombers similar to the Stuka
- the preperation of a russian-german booklet very similar to the one used by the germans in Russia, containing many question for german civilists

and so on...

I've read it some time ago, and was highly sceptical. But even I hated to do so I had to admit that it all seemingly makes sense. In any case here seems to be a more or less sensible article about it. I have also read the sole answer to it and it couldn't dismiss the points per se IMHO
You understand why this thesis is dangerous when you see how many neo-nazi sites rejoice, I really hurts one to even think that the book might be right...

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl..._18342993/pg_1


Passages like the following are quite stunning:

"First of all, we report the results of an important recent article by another Soviet military-historical writer, V. I. Semidetko. He came to a conclusion about Soviet military behavior in early summer 1941 that he appears hardly to have expected when he began his research on "Results of the Battle in White Russia."

Semidetko was in all likelihood wholly unaware of Suvorov's work when he wrote. Yet he concluded, writing in the Soviet magazine Military-Historical Journal (Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal), in 1989, after research on the early months of the Soviet-German war in newly opened Soviet military archives, that the reason the German army had so easily sliced eastward through the Red army on the central, White Russian front in June 1941 (where both armies, attack and defense, were of approximately equal strength) was that the latter was in an attack position.(14) This is, of course, the very discovery central to the argument Suvorov made several years earlier to explain that same military debacle. The Red army, Suvorov then said, was positioning itself to attack west, hence wholly out of its defensive positions. Because of the Kremlin's longstanding doctrinal emphasis on assault, those positions had, in any event, long been neglected. The Red army was, therefore, totally vulnerable before the onrushing Germans who, anticipating Stalin's attack, attacked first."

@Appleton: The Fins, polish and baltic people surly don't remember Stalin as a peaceful dictator and neither do the millions of his own people who died thanks to him, like the ones in the great famin in the Ukraine when they Stalin exported their crops for foreign money...

This however doesn't shed a good light on the author of the "Icebreaker":

http://www.tau.ac.il/taunews/96winter/russia.html

Cheers
OA