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Originally Posted by Raptor1
There is a considerable debate whether the Soviets were actually planning to invade Germany.
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From what I've understood, Viktor Suvorov is the main proponent of this theory, whereas the majority of historians are content with the answer that the historians so often have to be content with: "We don't know one way or another."
What
is known is that Stalin was afraid of an invasion from the foreign countries. It wasn't only Germany: in fact, for a long time Stalin considered France to be Soviet Union's most dangerous enemy. Japan was another. This was used in rhetorics. For example, a direct quote from David MacKenzie's and Michael Curran''s book "A History of Russia and the Soviet Union" (1982, page 519) states the following:
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Stalin stated in February 1931: "We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this or they will crush us."
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Not paying attention to the fact that ten years later Germany did indeed invade, this was his mentality and thus also affected the mentality of the whole country a lot (of course Soviet Union isn't Stalin alone). Also, after the war, Stalin wanted the satellite states that became the Eastern block in Cold War precisely because he wanted a barrier to soak any further attacks.
So with all that being said, I guess a pre-emptive strike kind of thinking was possible, at least to create the barrier but history never showed us that variant of the events, so we can't say. It could be argued that the Soviet Union already had a barrier by having annexed Eastern Poland and the Baltic countries, but who can say they wouldn't have wanted to expand it. Some could also make the ideological argument, with the idea of world revolution and all that, but personally I don't see Stalin starting wars for ideological purposes (rhetorics, of course, could have still used it to justify the war).
But all in all I agree with Steed and Raptor1. There is no hard evidence supporting the intentions and in history even a phenomenon like Soviet Union is still innocent until proven guilty.