Did the Soviet Union have plans to invade the United States

by Mofojoho

A while ago I saw this tweet: https://twitter.com/ayyy_vuh/status/1288844374705688576

Just wondering if there's any truth to the claim that the Soviet Union had no serious plans to invade the United States?

Jon_Beveryman

I am hesitant to comment on this, because the account in question is clearly engaging in the use of history as fodder for contemporary political aims, but they’re not wrong. The Soviets, contrary to the imagery of Red Dawn, did not have any serious plans for invading and conquering the United States. Pre-WW2 they were well aware of their vulnerability and weakness relative to the other European powers, and certainly knew that an invasion of the American continent was simply impossible. The Soviet leadership did have more concrete aims toward fomenting and exporting revolution “in their back yard” - the 1920 invasion of Poland is one quite clear example. Soviet assistance towards German Communist movements, coupled with statements by Lenin and others regarding the prospects of revolution in Germany and elsewhere, are also indicators of a more local expansionism on the part of the prewar USSR. Post-WW2, although they did solidify their hold over territory annexed during the war or similarly pulled into the Soviet sphere of influence, they adopted a much more conservative and indeed paranoid outlook. I am in firm agreement with David Glantz, Jacob Kipp, Michael Kofman and others that the defining characteristic of postwar Soviet strategic thought is the fear of vnezapnost, or strategic surprise, leading to an attack that threatened the sovereignty of the Soviet state. This fear, of course, was a direct response to the surprise of the Barbarossa invasion. This paranoid led them to perceive American/NATO actions as more aggressive than they were intended to be (for instance, the Able Archer 83 war scare, where a NATO exercise was misinterpreted to almost disastrous results as the leadup to a nuclear first strike), and it led them to generally be paranoid about provoking the US by mistake. The idea of launching a Hollywood-style invasion of the US is not something for which I have ever seen evidence of serious planning by the Soviet General Staff. However, this tweet is being deeply disingenuous by posing this lack of invasion planning as implied evidence that the US was under no threat or aggression from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets were not the passive victims of bullying by NATO; each side acted in ways that were sometimes quite aggressive to pursue their ideological and geopolitical goals, via means across the entire spectrum of competition and conflict below the threshold of war including proxy wars, the pursuit of nuclear deterrence and compellence, and covert intelligence actions.