"Under the Sign of Scorpion" by Juri - Gnostic Liberation Front

about this and a counterattack plan, Barbarossa, was worked out. The plan
was put into action, after certain delays, on the 22nd of June 1941, thus
anticipating Stalin's planned attack by only two weeks. Stalin was
surprised, in spite of the reports of his own spies. He could not understand
Hitler's foolhardiness in maintaining two fronts simultaneously. He had
not expected this — he even had difficulty believing the announcement of
war. He saw it as a provocation. Neither had he believed the stories of a
coming attack from German deserters on the previous day. It was only
later in the evening that he gave the order to resist.
Stalin had declared before the Central Committee already in 1925: "If a
great war breaks out in Europe, we shall not just watch. We shall take part,
but among the last - to decide the fate of the war. And naturally, therefore,
to pick the fruits of the war..."
In 1941, no one wanted to believe Adolf Hitler's explanations that he
wished to anticipate Stalin's planned attack. Suvorov has managed to
prove, with documents from German archives and open Soviet sources,
that Hitler's information was correct.
The High Command of the Red Army had already, on the 21st of June
(the day before Hitler's attack), received orders to attack Romania on the
6th of July 1941. The commander of this operation was to have been
Marshal Semyon Timoshenko. He was supposed to have travelled to
Minsk on the 22nd of June to prepare the attack, in which 4.4 million men
were to have been used. But the Germans attacked first. The so-called
Black Divisions were formed from Russian camp prisoners, who were
trained very thoroughly in Sochi and sent to fight the Germans in July-
August 1941. Stalin had more paratroops for attack purposes than any
other nation. Stalin had promised by Lenin's bier that he would expand the
borders of the Soviet Union {Pravda, 30th of January 1924). He also had
special A-tanks (Avtostradnye tanki) which could travel on German
motorways.
Stalin had a total of 15 000 tanks, three times more than Hitler. Suvorov
quotes Marshals Georgi Zhukov, Alexander Vasilevsky, Vasily Soko-
lovsky, Nikolai Vatutin, Ivan Bagramyan and others, who all confirmed
that Stalin was preparing an attack and not defence as was later claimed.
This was the reason why Moscow's losses became so enormous - 600 000
men in the first three weeks, 7615 tanks, 6233 fighter planes (of which
1200 were lost on the first day) and 4423 artillery pieces.
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