by Ron Unz via Unz Review
Excerpt
The Suvorov Hypothesis of Stalin’s Invasion Plans
Once we recognize that for eighty-five years virtually all our World War II history books have totally excluded a fully-documented story of such enormous importance as the massive 1940 attack the Allies had planned against the USSR, we realize that their silence on other important matters can hardly be trusted.
Furthermore, the sole major exception to that generations-long historiographical embargo against the facts of Operation Pike came from McMeekin, a highly-regarded and fully mainstream historian who has specialized in the Russian and Soviet history of the first half of the twentieth century. This is particularly significant because his same 800 page volume on the Soviet side of the Second World War also confirmed the reality of another very important aspect of that conflict almost totally ignored for decades by nearly all of our mainstream English-language historians.
It is widely understood that the Eastern Front of World War II was the decisive theater of operations, and the crucial turning point of the global conflict was Hitler’s June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, the largest military invasion in human history. But nearly a half-century after that campaign began, a remarkable book appeared that sought to completely overturn our long-settled understanding of the circumstances of that colossal attack. In 1990, the still magisterial Times of London devoted nearly the whole of its books section to a highly-favorable discussion of Icebreaker, a newly published book whose potentially seminal importance was fully recognized and emphasized by the reviewer:
[Suvorov] is arguing with every book, every article, every film, every NATO directive, every Downing Street assumption, every Pentagon clerk, every academic, every Communist and anti-Communist, every neoconservative intellectual, every Soviet song, poem, novel and piece of music ever heard, written, made, sung, issued, produced, or born during the last 50 years. For this reason, Icebreaker is the most original work of history it has been my privilege to read.
Writing under the pen-name Viktor Suvorov, the author was a veteran Soviet military intelligence officer who had defected to the West in 1978 and subsequently published a number of well-regarded volumes on the Soviet military and intelligence services. But in his new book he advanced a far more radical thesis.
His “Suvorov Hypothesis” claimed that during the summer of 1941 Stalin was on the very verge of mounting a massive invasion and conquest of Europe when Hitler’s sudden attack on June 22nd of that year anticipated that looming blow.
Since 1990, Suvorov’s works have been translated into at least 18 languages and an international storm of scholarly controversy has swirled around the Suvorov Hypothesis in Russia, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. Numerous other authors have published books in support or more often in strong opposition, and international academic conferences have even been held to debate the theory. But for decades our own English-language media has almost entirely blacklisted and ignored this major ongoing international debate, hiding those facts to such an extent that the name of the most widely-read military historian who ever lived had remained totally unknown to me.
Finally in 2008, the prestigious Naval Academy Press of Annapolis decided to break this eighteen year intellectual embargo and published an updated English edition of Suvorov’s work. But once again, our media outlets almost entirely averted their eyes, and only a single review appeared in an obscure ideological publication, where I chanced to encounter it. This conclusively demonstrated that throughout most of the twentieth century a united front of English-language publishers and media organs could easily maintain a boycott of any important topic, ensuring that almost no one in America or the rest of the Anglosphere would ever hear of it. Only with the recent rise of the Internet has this disheartening situation begun to change.
The Eastern Front was the decisive theater of World War II, involving military forces vastly larger than those deployed in the West or the Pacific, and the standard narrative has always emphasized the ineptitude and weakness of the Soviets. On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a sudden, massive surprise attack on the USSR, which caught the Red Army completely unaware. Stalin has been regularly ridiculed for his total lack of preparedness, with Hitler often described as the only man the paranoid dictator had ever fully trusted. Although the defending Soviet forces were enormous in size, they were poorly led, with their officer corps still not recovered from the crippling purges of the late 1930s, while their obsolete equipment and poor tactics were absolutely no match for the modern panzer divisions of Germany’s hitherto undefeated Wehrmacht. The Russians initially suffered gigantic losses, and only the onset of winter and the vast spaces of their territory saved them from a quick defeat. After that, the war seesawed back-and-forth for four more years, until superior numbers and improved tactics finally carried the Soviets to the streets of a destroyed Berlin in 1945.
Such is the traditional understanding of the titanic Russo-German struggle that we see endlessly echoed in every newspaper, book, television documentary, and film around us.
But according to Suvorov’s remarkable research, the reality was entirely different.
First, although there has been a widespread belief in the superiority of Germany’s military technology, including its tanks and its planes, this was almost entirely mythological. In actual fact, Soviet tanks were far superior in main armament, armor, and maneuverability to their German counterparts, so much so that the overwhelming majority of the panzers of 1941 were almost obsolescent by comparison. And the Soviet superiority in numbers was even more extreme, with Stalin deploying many times more tanks than the combined total of those held by Germany and every other nation in the world, around 27,000 against just 4,000 in Hitler’s forces. Even during peacetime, a single Soviet factory in Kharkov produced more tanks in every six month period than the entire Third Reich had built prior to 1940. The Soviets held a similar superiority, though somewhat less extreme, in their ground-attack bombers. The totally closed nature of the USSR meant that such vast military forces had remained entirely concealed from outside observers.
There was also little evidence that the quality of Soviet officers or military doctrine fell short. Indeed, we often forget that history’s first successful example of a “blitzkrieg” in modern warfare had been the crushing August 1939 defeat that Stalin inflicted upon the Japanese 6th Army in Outer Mongolia, relying upon a massive, coordinated surprise attack of tanks, bombers, and mobile infantry.
Certainly, many aspects of the Soviet military machine were primitive, but exactly the same was true of their Nazi opponents. Perhaps the most surprising detail about the technology of the invading Wehrmacht in 1941 was that its transportation system was still almost entirely pre-modern, relying upon wagons and carts drawn by 750,000 horses to maintain the vital flow of ammunition and replacements to its advancing armies.
During Spring 1941 the Soviets had assembled a gigantic armored force on Germany’s border, one that even contained enormous numbers of specialized tanks whose unusual characteristics clearly demonstrated Stalin’s purely offensive aims. For example, the Soviet juggernaut included 6,500 high-speed autobahn tanks, almost useless within Soviet territory but ideally suited for deployment on Germany’s network of highways, as well as 4,000 amphibious tanks, able to navigate the English Channel and conquer Britain.
The Soviets also fielded many thousands of heavy tanks, intended to engage and defeat enemy armor, while the Germans had none at all. In direct combat, a Soviet KV-1 or KV-2 could easily destroy four or five of the best German tanks, while remaining almost invulnerable to enemy shells. Suvorov recounts the example of a single KV which took 43 direct hits before finally becoming incapacitated, surrounded by the hulks of the ten German tanks it had first managed to destroy.
Suvorov’s reconstruction of the weeks immediately preceding the outbreak of combat in 1941 is a fascinating one, emphasizing the mirror-image actions taken by both the Soviet and German armies. Each side moved its best striking units, airfields, and ammunition dumps close to the border, ideal for an attack but very vulnerable in defense. Each side carefully deactivated any residual minefields and ripped out any barbed wire obstacles, lest these hinder the forthcoming attack. Each side did its best to camouflage such preparations, talking loudly about peace while preparing for imminent war. The Soviet deployment had begun much earlier, but since their forces were so much larger and had far greater distances to cross, they were not yet quite ready for their attack when the Germans struck, and thereby shattered Stalin’s planned conquest of Europe.
All of the above examples of Soviet weapons systems and strategic decisions seem very difficult to explain under the conventional defensive narrative, but make perfect sense if Stalin’s orientation from 1939 onward had always been an offensive one, and he had decided that summer 1941 was the time to strike and enlarge his Soviet Union to incorporate all the European states, just as Lenin had originally intended. And Suvorov provides many dozens of additional examples, building brick by brick a very compelling case for his theory.
Given the long years of trench warfare on the Western front during the First World War, almost all outside observers expected the new round of the conflict to follow a very similar static pattern, gradually exhausting all sides, and the world was shocked when Germany’s innovative tactics allowed it to achieve a lightning defeat of the allied armies in France during 1940. At that point, Hitler regarded the war as essentially over, and was confident that the extremely generous peace terms he quickly offered the British would soon lead to a settlement. As a consequence, he returned Germany to a regular peacetime economy, choosing butter over guns in order to maintain his high domestic popularity.
Stalin, however, was under no such political constraints, and from the moment he had signed his long-term peace agreement with Hitler in 1939 and divided Poland, he ramped up his total-war economy to an even higher notch. Embarking upon an unprecedented military buildup, he focused his production almost entirely upon purely offensive weapons systems, while even discontinuing those armaments better suited for defense and dismantling his previous lines of fortifications. By 1941, his production cycle was complete, and he made his plans accordingly.
And so, just as in our traditional narrative, we see that in the weeks and months leading up to Barbarossa, the most powerful offensive military force in the history of the world was quietly assembled in secret along the German-Russian border, preparing for the order that would unleash its surprise attack. The enemy’s unprepared airforce was to be destroyed on the ground in the first days of the battle, and enormous tank columns would begin deep penetration thrusts, surrounding and trapping the opposing forces, achieving a classic blitzkrieg victory, and ensuring the rapid occupation of vast territories. But the forces preparing this unprecedented war of conquest were Stalin’s, and his military juggernaut would surely have seized all of Europe, probably soon followed by the remainder of the Eurasian landmass.
Then at almost the last moment, Hitler suddenly launched his own attack, ordering his heavily outnumbered and outgunned troops into a surprise assault of their own on the assembling Soviets, fortuitously catching them at the very point at which their own final preparations for sudden attack had left them most vulnerable, and thereby snatching a major initial victory from the jaws of certain defeat. Huge stockpiles of Soviet ammunition and weaponry had been positioned close to the border to supply the army of invasion into Germany, and these quickly fell into German hands, providing an important addition to their own woefully inadequate resources.
Although I would urge reading the very detailed contents of Suvorov’s books, for those who prefer to absorb the information in a different format, his October 2009 public lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy is available on YouTube:
