Hi there,
I just finished reading Icebreaker by Viktor Suvorov and upon searching online for discussion I was very surprised to find that western historians consider the book entirely discredited and a "revisionist fabrication". What's even more surprising is that these discussions almost always devolve into ad hominem attacks on the author not being a proper historian and cherry-picking his facts.
After reading the book I find his arguments extremely compelling; here's a short list of the circumstantial evidence off the top of my head which I can't explain in any other way than supporting the Icebreaker thesis:
I'm just very confused right now because I read 300-odd pages of completely reasonable and logical assertions based on a hundred sources and whenever I googled claims (like how many tanks did that factory produce or whether the Stalin line really was taken down before the Molotov line was built) and everything I searched for checked out. Then I go onto discussion boards and all I read is how this book has been thoroughly debunked and zero factual sentences discrediting what I just read. This is honestly a surreal feeling; I've always laughed at conspiracy theories about the flat Earth and 9/11, and yet here I am fully agreeing with a book the internet & historians claim is a conspiracy novel.
There was a previous meta-review of this book at "How do academics regard the thesis that Stalin was gearing up for an invasion of Europe before being thwarted by the Nazi attack on the USSR?" by /u/Jan_van_Bergen .
This is not to discourage discussion. More questions, data, and debate are welcome.
One evaluation can be found in Teddy J. Uldricks, "The Icebreaker Controversy: Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler?", Slavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 626-643. Uldricks points out: "It should be noted that the icebreaker thesis actually binds together two distinct propositions: first, that in 1941 Stalin was preparing to launch a war of aggression on central and western Europe in order to spread communism, and second, that Operation Barbarossa was nothing more than a defensive, preemptive response to that threat once the Germans perceived it."
The second point has drawn the heaviest criticism, supporting those seeking to justify Germany's actions, and is most obviously spurious, e.g. Jonathan Haslam, "Soviet-German Relations and the Origins of the Second World War: The Jury Is Still Out", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 69, No. 4 (December 1997), pp. 785-797:
"We are told—an assertion that will surprise most historians of international relations—that “Germany was most disadvantageously placed in the diplomatic war of the 1930’s” (p. 302). We are assured that “Hitler frustrated Stalin’s war” (p. 325). We are advised that only “pro-Soviet historians” read June 22, 1941, as a German invasion that broke peace with the Soviet Union (p. 277). All of this would be comical were it not taken so seriously."
The first point, though, that the Soviet Union was preparing to launch an attack, to which your points relate, is more difficult to evaluate. Uldrick notes that Suvorov "propounds what he thinks would have been the only proper defensive strategy for the USSR in 1941, and when he finds evidence that Soviet forces did not closely follow his prescription, he judges that the Red Army's preparations cannot possibly have been defensive, that they must betray an offensive intent. He also treats the analytical categories "defensive" and "offensive" as if they were mutually exclusive"; paratroops and fast tanks, for example, would be consistent with military plans to delay an attacking army, slow its advance, then make powerful counterattacks so are not, in themselves, evidence of plans to go on the offensive.
Focusing on this aspect is Evan Mawdsley, "Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940-1941", The International History Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 818-865. Mawdsley opens with a summary of the "traditionalist" (the Soviet Union acting on the defensive) and "revisionist" (the Soviet Union planning for the offensive) positions and adherents of each, noting that even in the latter case few "accept all Rezun-Suvorov's arguments and evidence". Of the former he mentions Glantz and Gorodetsky as foremost authorities in the West; "The Israeli historian Gorodetsky published Mif 'Ledokola' [The 'Icebreaker' Myth] in 1995. His magisterial Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia followed three years later and had a broader scope and an outstanding archival basis, but it also has its roots in the 'Icebreaker' controversy".
Mawdsley dismisses Barbarossa as a defensive action ("The argument of the present article is certainly not that the German action was a preventative attack. Hitler and his high command were remarkably ignorant of Soviet preparations, and their plans for aggressive war against Russia, dating back to July 1940, are well documented.") and looks deeply into Soviet war plans; to grossly simplify the article by picking out the key points of his conclusions: "Did the Red Army in 1940-1 have war plans based on offensive operations? It certainly did (...) Did Timoshenko and Zhukov in May 1941 propose using this offensive war plan in a pre-emptive way, without waiting for the enemy to strike? They did (...) Could such an attack plausibly have been mounted as early as June-July 1941, as revisionists like Bobylev, Mel'tiukhov, Rezun-Suvorov, and others suggest? Almost certainly not (...) Did Stalin, Molotov, and the other political leaders actually intend to put this offensive war plan into effect, stage by stage, in 1941? (...) the answer to the question, based on information currently available, would seem to be no".
It's not my primary area but Mawdsley's conclusions seem reasonable, though still open to argument; in a broad sense the Soviet Union was preparing for an offensive war, but not the one portrayed by Suvorov.
Suvorov talks about the intense production of BT tanks (a single factory in Kharkiv producing more of these tanks in six months than Germany used in its assault) which could only be used on good roads and were unusable on the vast majority of Soviet territory (i.e. can't be used for defense);
I'd like to ask a follow-up questions on that: how can Suvorov make this argument, when, AFAIK, the BT tanks were used without major problems during the battles of lake Khasan and Khalkin Gol, that are not really regions with a well-developed road network?