>>/23517/
> But not that was happened. First they got the Baltics, part of Romania, Poland, tried Finaland. Later got half of Europe. Even Yugo became communist. Then China, North Korea. The whole Cold War was about turning third world into communist.
But this wasn't World Revolution that original bolsheviks demanded. Most of these countries were occupied in power play between big countries. Only former parts of Russian Empire and neighbors got "the communism", others had just "friendly socialistic governments" that could move pretty far from traditional political line. As analogy - modern US surely pulls countries like Iraq and Afghanistan into their sphere of influence by installing local "democratic" governments, but this isn't really an export of US capitalistic system, just power grab.
> >losing territory
> That was the strategy for Russia for centuries. They weren't queasy losing masses of people, they done that in peace too, supposing they were feared to lose land (what would be recaptured anyway - overconfidence can whisper that in their ears too) isn't reasonable.
But they were. Losing land is pretty painful for oversized imperial ego of many people. Even annexation of small Crimea (that already had almost open border with Russia before) made everyone forgot about any economical and political problem.
> BT was tried at Kalkhin-Gol and it wasn't good on terrain. It was supposed to be use on paved roads, what the west didn't lack.
And Khalkhin-Gol proved that BT isn't a future, so they stopped designing wheeled tanks. Maybe it was just an interwar error? It is also not fair to say that BT was purely a road tank. It was an average light tank, and wheel-moving was an addition.
> >airplains
> These support Suvorov. All the disadvantage of the air force can be disregarded if they strike first and catch Luftwaffe on the ground.
But this can be explained just by technological inferiority. They just couldn't build good planes.
>>/23573/
Considering placement and such: Zhukov, for example, states that Soviet command expected attack on south side through Ukraine and explains concentration of forces there. There is no way to protect Ukraine without amassing forces near Romania also. And, of course, having forces grouped somewhere also works as limiting factor to the opponent - it would see that USSR is properly defended.
Of course it is easy to support both way of thought here, just because having large forces somewhere may mean that they would attack soon. But this doesn't prove that attack is planned (at least in near future). As I wrote before, USSR thought that it can crush any offense without losing land, and placing everyone far from border doesn't work when it is planned to win border fight. No one expected that Soviet army will be crushed so fast, so no one thought that USSR need to place more forces far from border. It is easy to see mistakes while having modern knowledge, but before war both sides had wrong estimations.
>>/23573/
> Observing the land in front of the units only needed for an offensive war.
But having any information is always better than having none.
Actually, Suvorov often criticized for incorrect work with sources and doing pretty wide assumptions from nothing. For example, many of military units he described weren't real units but non-mobilized forces that had people only on paper, and in reality had only command structures. For example, 9th army in Bessarabia existed in 1940 but not in 1941, and was formed again after start of the war. Suvorov wrote that this army was ready to strike into Romania.