Icebreaker (non-fiction book)

Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (ISBN 0241126223; Viking Press/Hamish Hamilton; 1990) - by Viktor Suvorov (Russian title: Ledokol, Ледокол) is a documentary book, which alleges that the World War II started as a result of Joseph Stalin's ploy to "liberate" the working class of Europe and eventually the whole world.

Suvorov's Thesis

According to Suvorov, the widely-accepted view that Hitler and the Nazi regime bear the responsibility for the outbreak of WW2 in Europe is faulty. Instead, Suvorov argues that Nazi Germany fought a preemptive war against a USSR that was poised to invade Germany in 1941. This is essentially the main line of Nazi propaganda in June 1941; Suvorov is thus endorsing this view.

In this thesis, Stalin must share a large part of the responsibility for WW2. To the extent that Stalin successfully manipulated Hitler into attacking other nations, he may in fact bear primary responsibility for WW2 in Europe, not merely the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Suvorov further argues that Stalin's goal was the export of the communist revolution to other countries, and that to further this goal, an 'icebreaker' war was required. Once Hitler 'broke the ice', Soviet victory in the large-scale war that followed would enable the USSR to impose Stalinist regimes in additional areas of Europe. In this theory, Nazi military aggression would ironically form the icebreaker for communist revolution.

Critique

Suvorov's book is deeply flawed on a number of levels and has not found wide acceptance in the historical community, with the partial exception of Germany.

Marxist Theory

In traditional Marxist theory, militarism is normally seen as a form of social control and a component of imperialism, delaying the emergence of a class-conscious international working class or proletariat. The activities of the Communist International in the period preceeding the First World War show clearly that Communist parties and the political Left in general were opponents of militarism. Once the first communist regime took political power in the Russian revolution and survivied the Russian Civil war, a major line of debate in the USSR during the 1920s was how the world's first socialist state should relate to other nations.

The view of Trotsky was that a communist revolution could succeed only by continuous revolutionary activity in other nation-states. The notion of socialism surviving in a single nation-state was considered ridiculous and self-contradictory. The remaining capitalist powers would swiftly move to crush the USSR (the experience of western intervention on behalf of the Whites in the civil war was not forgotten). Since the bourgeois nations would be more powerful, they would probably succeed in destroying socialism. However, if the working classes of these countries could understand that a war of conquest in support of capitalism was not in their class interests, they would not support such a war and socialism would survive through the process of revolution abroad.

Stalin, on the other hand, argued that 'socialism in one country' was feasible if properly managed. His subsequent program of militarizing the whole Soviet economy was simultaneously a means of maintaining his totalitarian power and ensuring the survival of the Soviet state without regard to the internal politics of other nations.

It is important to note that Stalin's approach flew in the face of most Marxist thought up till that point, but that neither the Trotskyist view nor the Stalinist view can be reconciled with Suvorov's thesis. Neither approach envisioned the use of conventional armed forces to wage aggressive war.

Soviet Diplomacy Under Stalin

Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy in the late 1920s through at least 1939 was essentially defensive and very cautious. The USSR sought alliances with western powers, in particular seeking to re-establish the traditional anti-German alliance with France. For a multitude of reasons, these efforts failed. One of the main reasons was that the USSR was considered a pariah state prior to June 22, 1941, and the other European powers were reluctant to enter into any serious negotiation with the Stalin regime. Also, one effect of the Great Purge was that western militaries came to regard the Red Army as a worthless ally. They were thus not eager to reinstate the traditional east-west coalition against Germany.

Prior to the rise of the Nazis, joint military training facilities existed in the USSR, in which German and Soviet soldiers developed nascent versions of the tactics and weapons that would come to prominence in the Second World War. However, these joint endevors occurred during a period when Germany was weak, under the Weimar Republic, and were shut down once the Nazis came to power.

The Soviet view was that as efforts to 'surround' Hitler failed, and as the western powers seemed to allow Nazi expansion in Central Europe (as long as it was not aimed westward), some accomodation had to be reached with Germany in order to buy time. Stalin knew the USSR was not ready to fight Germany, but the massive rearmament and reorganization programs begun in 1939 might begin to bear fruit by 1942. The goal of the Nazi-Soviet nonagression pact was primarily to buy time and space which the USSR could use to prepare for the German invasion they feared was inevitable. The rights of the populations of Central Europe were trampled as a result. This was not, of course, fundamentally different from the Franco-British approach up until Munich.

There is thus nothing in the basically opportunistic diplomatic record to support Suvorov's thesis, and much to contradict it.

The Historical Record

Suvorov's view that a Soviet invasion of Germany was imminent in 1941 is not shared by the historian community.

An excellent refutation of his thesis is contained in COL David Glantz's work Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. Glantz views Suvorov's argument as "incredible" on a variety of fronts: 1. Suvorov rejects without examination classified ex-Soviet archival material, and makes highly selective picks from memoirs. There are thus basic methodological problems. 2. Suvorov's thesis is strongly contradicted both by ex-Soviet and German archival material. The facts simply do not bear out any argument that the Red Army was prepared to invade Germany; on the contrary, the appalling lack of readiness, poor training level, and abysmal state of deployments show that the Red Army was unprepared for static defense, much less large-scale offensive operations. Needless to say, the events of June 22, 1941 through December 1941 bear this out.

Glantz's conclusion is that "Stalin may well have been an unscrupulous tyrant, but he was not a lunatic".

Any serious study of the operational performance of the German Wehrmacht and the Red Army and Air Force in the initial period of Operation Barbarossa reveals that the Soviet forces were obviously unprepared for basic military operations and were in a peacetime state.

Although Suvorov claims that an attack date of July 8, 1941 had been selected, this is contradicted by the overwhelming mass of evidence. There were no stockpiles of the fuel, ammunition, and other stores held in forward areas as would have been needed if an invasion was about to be mounted. Major ground units were dispersed into small garrisons rather than being concentrated at railheads, as they would have been had they been preparing an invasion. Units were not co-located with their own transportation assets, leaving, for example, major artillery units immobile. Air Force aircraft were parked in neat, tightly-packed rows along their airfields rather than dispersed. Over 50% of all Soviet tanks required major maintenance on June 22, 1941. If an invasion were being planned, these maintenance tasks would have been completed. Most Soviet armor units were in the process of re-organizing into new Tank Corps; the German invasion caught these units in the midst of this reorganization. Such a large-scale reorganization is inconsistent with an impending invasion.

The origin of Suvorov's thesis may lie in the fact that Marshal Zhukov did suggest a pre-emptive striek at the Germans early in 1941. Stalin rejected the idea, and that is as far as the idea progressed.

In short there is little reason to take "Icebreaker" seriously. It is entertainment rather than historical scholarship.

External link

• Online books of Viktor Suvorov (mostly in Russian)