Let me chime in and paraphrase. The Soviets had no such plans...that were found in the archives until today.
The documents confirming the Soviet offensive plans of 1941 were not published until 2010-2012.
Interesting, what were the 2010/12 publications? Much earlier there was icebreaker by Suvorov, the man who gave Stalin a million man parachute army, a pen name for an ex KGB officer who published a series of books on what the USSR was up to. When the archives opened it was clear most of his books were more fiction than fact.
In the 1930's Red Army leadership and doctrine was purged. The new socialist man, fortified by his belief in socialist justice, lead by such living gods as Stalin, would easily repel the capitalist lackeys, so lacking in morale that they needed machines like tanks to fight. In any case as the oppressed workers that made up the conscripted invading army saw the worker's paradise they would rebel and join the glorious revolution. There is a reason the Red Army performed badly in 1941 despite recalling officers from Gulags and reforms based on experience in Finland and reports of the fighting in western Europe. The Soviet doctrine called for immediate counter attacks against an invader. The Soviet command assumed a much higher level of ability on the part of the Red Army, so that it would not be shattered, but seal off the initial penetrations.
Gosplan was the Soviet economic planning agency, it was purged along with the army during the great terror. The third 5 year plan was up until 1942, it was approved in March 1939, after the terror. The worst case plans for the defence of the USSR, the ones about defence in depth, were abandoned at this time as being "defeatist".
In his speech of May 5, 1941, Stalin explained to graduate officers of military academies, "Permit me to make a correction. A peace policy keeps our nation at peace. A peace policy is a good thing. At one time or another we have followed a line based on defence. Up until now we have not re-equipped our army nor supplied it with modern weapons.
But now that our army is undergoing reconstruction and we have become strong, it is necessary to shift from defence to offence.
In providing the defence of our country, we must act in an offencist [nastupatel'nym] way. Our military policy must change from defence to waging offensive actions. We must endow our indoctrination, our propaganda and agitation, and our press with an offencist spirit. [nastupatel'naya armiya]"
A N Yakovlev (editor) 1941, god. Dokumenntry (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniy Fond "Demokratiya", 1998) page 162. This is used as proof Stalin was ready to attack.
There are no OKW/OKH documents concerned about an attack by the USSR and any such build up would be spotted by the Luftwaffe aircraft continually overflying the USSR. You would think as a minimum the USSR would insist on keeping the Luftwaffe out if it was planning an attack, as well as sending the Red Air Force to spy on the Germans.
The plans for Barbarossa began being formed in mid 1940, as "Otto", it became Barbarossa with the detailed plans set out in directive 21 of 18 December 1940. The Soviets kept supplying goods even though the Germans fell behind in both payment and co-operation.
In mid 1941 the Red Army was building fortifications, cannibalising the old border defences to set up the new border defences, keeping its aircraft on the Soviet side of the border and the USSR was promptly sending resources to Germany. On the German side the Heer was preparing for an attack, the Luftwaffe was violating Soviet airspace and the Nazis were stalling on shipments to the USSR.
From Niall Ferguson - Sunday Telegraph, London
"In Grand Delusion, Gabriel Gorodetsky has performed an invaluable service to scholarship by destroying once and for all Suvorov's theory (the evidence for which always seemed to me exceedingly thin). Not only that, but he has taken our understanding of the Russian misreading of German policy beyond Churchill's - by intrepid research in an impressive range of hitherto inaccessible or unused Russian and Balkan sources. This really is a classic of the new, post-Cold War history." Book published in 1999.
Form the new republic, The Evils by John Lukacs
"Ten years later a spate of more reputable German historians turned to a more subtle attempt at the rehabilitation of Hitler, advancing two arguments: first, that Communism was as bad as Nazism, and so the Holocaust was in many ways a response to the Gulag; and second, that Stalin was about to attack Germany anyhow.
The latter argument was taken up by Gunther Gillessen, in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and then by the Austrian Ernst Topitsch (who claimed that World War II "was essentially a Soviet attack on the Western democracies, in which Germany ... served only as a military surrogate"), and the German military historian Joachim Hoffmann, and Werner Maser (one of Hitler's biographers), and even by an American, R.C. Raack. These writers got substantial support from Suvarov, a Soviet defector; by the very dubious former secret policeman Pavel Sudoplatov, and by the Russian historian V.A. Nevezhin. The purpose of this denigration of Stalin (and there is plenty to denigrate there) has been, alas, an ingenious mitigation of Hitler--again, that the latter's invasion of Russia was but a reaction to Stalin's plan to attack him.
The main merit of Gorodetsky's book is his documentation that such an attribution of Stalin's motives is thoroughly false. The evidence in this book fleshes out a picture of Stalin in which he is not merely deluded by others, but also suffers from an extraordinary measure of self-deceit. The wish is the father of the thought; and, in this instance, it was Stalin's wish to trust Hitler. The psychic dimension of the Hitler-Stalin relationship is a gruesomely fascinating story. They respected--if not admired --each other throughout the war. "
People like David Glantz have looked at the Red Army in 1941 and it was clearly not ready for an offensive. See When Titans Clashed, The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front, or John Erickson in Road to Stalingrad
The figures say only 3,800 out of 14,200 tanks with the Red Army troops were serviceable. Some 29% of the tank park in army hands needed major overhaul and 44% needed "medium repair". The total Soviet inventory in June 1941 is put at 22,600 of which 21,200 were classified as light. Few radios, lots of mechanical problems, ergonomics issues, basically the Soviet park consisted of nearly every tank built in the previous 10 years. Total German inventory in June 1941 is put at 5,154, 877 mark I, 1,074 mark II, 350 mark III 37 mm gun, 1,090 with a 50mm gun, 517 mark IV, 746 38t, 170 35t and 330 command tanks.
So 4.4 to 1 comparing like totals with like totals. The odds drop when the axis allied tanks strengths are added, but not by much. Now take away all the Soviet tanks, the majority, that were not working. That makes a big difference. Additional problems like Soviet tank corps without ammunition, artillery without prime movers as examples.
The entire Soviet military as of June 1941 came to 5,370,000 personnel. The German forces had 7,200,000 personnel, plus of course the axis allied forces. One was at war and mobilised, one was still at peace. In June 1940 it was Soviet 4,200,000, Germany 5,600,000.
When it comes to the forces on the border then,
The Figures from Great Battles on the Eastern Front by T.N. Dupuy and Paul Martell give the USSR forces as Northwest 25 divisions (4 tank), Western 44 divisions (12 tank) (the Dupuy figures include reserves located at Vitebsk), Southwest 59 divisions (16 tank) and South 22 divisions (4 tank), again these figures include reserves deployed well away from the borders.
All in all the Dupuy and Martell figures give the Germans as having 149.5 divisions plus Hungarian, Romanian and Finnish divisions from North Cape to Black sea, versus 170 Soviet divisions, 19 Panzer divisions versus 36 tank divisions. They conclude the Germans slightly outnumbered the Soviet troops on the borders, outnumbered the Soviets in operational tanks by around 2 to 1 but were outnumbered nearly 5 to 1 by Soviet artillery. The same reference gives the combat strength of the Soviet forces in the far east as 703,714 men, there were 32 divisions (8 tank) there.
Slightly different figures, starting from Brest Litovsk, which is almost due south of Bialystok, on the border, you have the West front, of 38 divisions, including 6 back at Minsk, then guarding the rest of the Prussian border you have the North West Front, with 24 divisions. The two fronts almost exactly match the German Army groups when it comes to borders, Army Group North had 26 divisions, Army Group Centre had 51. There were another 72 Red Army divisions on the border south of the Pripet marshes, that is against Hungary and Romania, not Germany. So something like 62 north of the Pripets, counting the 6 at Minsk versus 72 south. More than half of the Soviet forces on the western border were south of the Pripets. Explains why the southern front held quite well, along with the leadership of Kirponos, while the northern front was soon shattered.
It appears there were major coal mines around Moscow that were lost or shut down by operation Typhoon in 1941 and they became a high priority rebuild in December 1941 as soon as the Red Army had pushed the German's back. In 1942 the Mosbass coal fields produced 8.5 million tons of coal versus 10 million tons in 1940. In January 1942 coal reserves in some parts of the country were down to 1 days consumption, iron and steel works 3 to 4 days, wood and other fuels were substituted for coal wherever possible. The USSR appears to have had a regular winter coal crisis most of the war years, in many ways like England, but worse.
