Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Soviet offensive plans controversy is a historical debate over whether Joseph Stalin planned to attack Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. It began with Viktor Suvorov's 1988 book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, which argued Stalin intended to launch an offensive on the 6th of July 1941, just weeks before Germany's own invasion on the 22nd of June.
Viktor Suvorov is the pseudonym of Vladimir Rezun, a former officer of Soviet military intelligence who defected to the United Kingdom. In his 1988 book Icebreaker, he argued that Stalin was preparing a preemptive invasion of German-held Europe and had deliberately used Hitler as an "icebreaker" to exhaust capitalist powers before Soviet intervention.
Supporters of the thesis pointed to a plan dated the 15th of May 1941 drafted by Georgy Zhukov calling for a Soviet strike against Germany, the existence of five versions of offensive war plans in Russian archives dating from August 1940, the Red Army's growth from 1,871,600 men in 1939 to 5,081,000 by spring 1941, and Soviet troops receiving maps of German territory while lacking maps of Soviet territory.
Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky and American military historian David Glantz each published books rebutting Suvorov's arguments. Scholars including Teddy J. Uldricks, Antony Beevor, and Cynthia A. Roberts criticized Suvorov for relying on circumstantial evidence and failing to reveal his sources; Roberts concluded his writings had "virtually no evidentiary base."
The document dated the 15th of May 1941, signed by Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Nikolai Vatutin and attributed to Zhukov, proposed that the Soviet Union not cede the operational initiative to Germany and instead attack the German army while it was still deploying. No documentary evidence has been found showing Stalin ever accepted or approved this proposal.
According to figures compiled by Russian military historian Mikhail Meltyukhov, on the 22nd of June 1941 the Soviet Union had 174 divisions against Germany's 128, held a 1:4.2 advantage in tanks and a 1:3.1 advantage in aircraft, while Germany held a slight edge in personnel of roughly 1.1:1.