>>21942
Plans are important.
For the critiques of the "Barbarossa was a preventive attack" idea one main card is the absence of direct evidence. Since the Soviet didn't attack the next best thing would be a plan.
I agree armies are tend to make all kinds of plans. But then, where is the Soviet attacking plan? There are miles written on the German ones all over, but noone speaks about the Soviet Unions'. Even Glantz, who mentioned in the Wiki article above as one of the main opposer of Suvorov's book, only mentions a defensive plan and an "answering strike" plan in his books (checked: Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia, 1941 and Barbarossa Derailed Volume 1.). If they planned for all possibilities where is the explicit attacking one? Unless they made exceptional steps to keep it hush hush there should be one.
So then no attack, no plan, only circumstantial stuff remains.
Btw, just found out that Zhukov sent a proposal to Stalin for a Soviet preventive attack, Timoshenko initialed it, but not sure Stalin saw it - found in another book of Glantz (The Soviet-German War 1941-1945, Myths and Realities), sadly the book doesn't say much on the debate.
>It isn't fair to compare USSR army of 1941 and 1943. Pre-war situation was much more different
Ofc they have the luxury of working in peace without getting shot at. All right, seriously if the time difference would be a few months then ok, they fiddled too much and had problems, but it's over 1.5 year. The Soviet could build and construct very efficiently, especially if it was about army and war.
This is similar to the officer problem. Due to the great cleansing the Red Army lacked in experienced officers. But that was 3 years before '41. Since then they went through at least a war against fortified Finland, a Blitzkrieg against Japan, and the occupation of the Baltics and part of Romania, then Poland. I don't think the Soviet officers didn't know their job by the time of Barbarossa.