Icebreaker

Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (Russian title: Ледокол) is a military history book by the Russian non-fiction author Viktor Suvorov, published in 1989. Suvorov argued that Joseph Stalin planned a conquest of Europe for many years, and was preparing to launch a surprise attack on Nazi Germany at the end of summer of 1941 to begin that plan. He says that Operation Barbarossa was a pre-emptive strike by Adolf Hitler, a claim which the Nazi leader himself had made at the time. Since the 1990s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this theory has received some support among historians in some post-Soviet and Central European states, but some Western scholars have criticized his conclusions for lack of evidence and documentation.