David Glantz, one of the foremost experts on the Red Army during World War II, reviewed Vladimir Rezun's (Suvorov is a pseudonym) book Icebreaker and concluded:

The records of Soviet fronts, armies, corps, and divisions in the days immediately preceding and following the outbreak of war fail to provide any evidence to support Suvorov's claims, and instead substantiate the reverse conclusion. German records also contradict Suvorov's arguments. They, too, point to the appalling state of readiness of the Red Army, although the Germans woefully underestimated the mobilization potential of their foe and eventually paid the price. The well-documented dismal performance of the Red Army before 1941 in Finland and Poland, and during 1941, renders Suvorov's arguments even less credible. In short, all available sources indicate that the condition of the Red Army was not suited to the conduct of large-scale offensive opera- tions in 1941.

Suvorov examines sources (mostly memoirs) on the Red Army highly uncritically and in service of his preemptive war thesis. Undergirding this thesis is that Stalin was an "evil genius," which falls in line with other anticommunist historiography which stresses the fundamentally predatory and untrustworthy nature of the Soviet state. Like any good conspiracy theory, the absence of evidence within the archives (something that researchers like Glantz have extensively mined) is taken as evidence of perfidy. But as Glantz succinctly notes, the lack of any evidence within the formerly declassified archives indicates that a preemptive war would be one with a minimal amount of strategic planning, and "Stalin may have been an unscrupulous tyrant, but he was not a lunatic."

Taken as a whole, Suvorov should used only with caution, if at all.

Sources

Glantz, David M. "Icebreaker (Book Review)." Journal Of Military History 55, (April 1991): 263-264.

_. Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. University Press of Kansas, 1998.